The experts claim not to know simply to shield themselves from the judgment that justly falls on their dishonesty, recklessness and criminal incompetence (cf. Currently, we breathe the poison of anxiety and refuse to face ourselves by pretending that we do not understand what is going on in the commercial meltdown. Our 20th century makeshift culture, hastily chucked together and stuck up on the horizon of the accumulated debris of two world wars, three or four minor wars, five major genocides, and a commercial community of make believe and criminal fraud, this world is coming to an end. (I feel no cultural shift from Paris, to Palo Alto, to Honk Kong, to mention only my experiences of the current three month period. We see national and cultural boundaries fading and beginning to disappear. Presently, a world era (saeculum) is coming to an end we see the collapse of a world of commerce built on trust before the waves of distrust, which are themselves rational reactions to the dishonesty of the players in the game of exchange. The Chinese seem to be better at being Western than we are). The displays of Western expertise and culture at the Beijing games, especially the closing ceremonies, where the favorite Chinese singer was indistinguishable from Paula Abdul, and the music straight from some Hard Rock café. Jesus prophesied the end of his world, and it followed promptly and gradually, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 ad, and a new civilization was born that is even now triumphing over all the world (cf. In trying to understand these phenomena of the end times better we should be careful to maintain the distinction between the end of the world and the end of our world. Is end is the one I have just described, Christ’s final coming to us, and our perpetual going to him. He was, in fact, a prophet of the end, but not a calculator of the calendar. Earliest Christianity was in some quarters such a millenarian cult, and good scholars argue that Jesus himself was such a prophet of the end. Up to now history has made fools of them all. There are many examples in history of groups and their prophets who anticipate the end of the world imminently and live on the cusp of an urgent expectation. Linearly speaking this kind of expectation is bizarre and unhealthy. This is our hope as Christians, and it is not rational, linear or common sense. So we get ready for Christ’s coming to us and our own going to him. The individual can experience heaven at any time, the world as a whole must wait the pleasure of God who created it and restores it on-goingly in Jesus and climactically one day soon. To put your faith in Christ is to enter heaven. Coming to faith in Christ is coming to the ultimate reality and entering the realm than which there is no greater. There is a final end for the world and there is a different final end for us as individuals. Now there is in the NT, especially in John’s Gospel, the idea that when we finally commit ourselves in faith to follow Christ we experience the final judgment, already and in the midst of time, before the end. As in Advent we place ourselves in the realm of time before the first coming of Christ so also we place ourselves in the mood of the expectation of his final coming to heal, to save and to judge. His very name, Jeshua (Jesus), means “God Saves” so salvation is primary, but there cannot be salvation without judgment, or healing without hurting, as we deal with the negative things that imprison us and sicken us in the first place. Judgment is clearly not the only element of Advent before condemnation we expect salvation.
Therefore, we take the four weeks of the advent season to prepare to face our final judge. I don’t know if these customs are still in place, but they are still a good example of the point I am trying to make, Advent is like the PSAT’s. As our children left High School to go on to university they took tests called the Scholarly Aptitude Tests (SAT), but before they took those they took preliminary tests, (PSAT), to limber up, as it were. In our liturgical imagination we place ourselves in the time just before the coming of Christ, and since he is the one who in the end will judge the world, we imagine his coming as, amongst other things, a preliminary judgment. Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning again of the Christian year. “Let both grow together until the harvest….” - Matthew 13:30 Scripture: 1 Corinthians 1:3-9 Matthew 13: 24-34