“There will be signs in the sun, moon, and stars. On the earth, there will be dismay among nations in their confusion over the roaring of the sea and surging waves. The planets and other heavenly bodies will be shaken, causing people to faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world. Then they will see the Human One[a] coming on a cloud with power and great splendor. Now when these things begin to happen, stand up straight and raise your heads, because your redemption is near.”

Jesus told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees. When they sprout leaves, you can see for yourselves and know that summer is near. In the same way, when you see these things happening, you know that God’s kingdom is near. I assure you that this generation won’t pass away until everything has happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will certainly not pass away.

“Take care that your hearts aren’t dulled by drinking parties, drunkenness, and the anxieties of day-to-day life. Don’t let that day fall upon you unexpectedly, like a trap. It will come upon everyone who lives on the face of the whole earth. Stay alert at all times, praying that you are strong enough to escape everything that is about to happen and to stand before the Human One.”[b]

So, there are some of us who can remember the 1970’s, some as adults, some as children, me being one of the latter, but I’ve always been fascinated with that era, that great time of transition between the radicalism of the 1960’s to the law and order, conformist, economically ambitious 1980’s. I came into my own during the 1980’s but it was one of the books of that earlier era that had a huge impact on my life during the early eighties, though it was published in 1970, and was a publishing phenomenon, and a sure sign that many felt the 1960’s, with its social changes, was not a good time. Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth had already sold millions of copies when I first picked it up, though most of the people I knew in my newly embraced Christian evangelical world had already read it. Hal Lindsey had made him reputation – and a whole lot of money – by making the case that there were signs that Jesus’s Second Coming was right around the corner, signs one could see being literally manifested in world events and, most concretely, the founding of Israel as a nation state after World War Two. Hal Lindsey weaved together passages in the books of Revelation, the book of Daniel, and texts like the ones we have before us today to state his case that everything was pointing to Jesus’ imminent return to Earth. He said that the rise of the Soviet Union and China as world powers were predicted in the Bible, and he even believed the European Union had some role in the rise of a literal Anti-Christ. Lindsey was notorious for making predictions about the actual date of Jesus would come; first it was in the 1970’s, and then later he predicted it would be sometime in 1988, the year I graduated high school, and then even later he said Jesus would likely return in 2007 For those of us who grew in that evangelical culture of constant expectation of Christ’s imminent arrival, I think we approached such bold predictions with both excitement and dread – sure, I wanted to Jesus to come back in 1988, but, well, you know, I wanted to go to college and live a little before the whole “Jesus comes back and transforms everything” happens. For those who in that subculture were obsessed with the rapture, which was this evangelical belief in the unexpected taking of faithful souls to heaven in a blink of an eye, you had this great fear that you wouldn’t be raptured with the rest of your friends and family. You have all these 1970’s and 1980’s stories of young kids coming home and finding their houses unexpectedly empty, and this fear sinking in that they their parents and siblings had been raptured to heaven, and somehow they had missed it. It was a crazy time for this kind of stuff, but the world seemed ripe for the second coming of Jesus – there were signs and wonders, as Jesus said, that couldn’t be dismissed, so said the evangelical subculture that multiple generations of believers have found themselves steeped within.

But the problem has always been something I suspect you already know instinctively and that is that in almost every generation of Christians there have always been people who believed that surely, surely, this would be last generation, that all the signs and wonders of their present age was pointing to the end of history, which for us Christians is wrapped up in the Christ actually doing that wrapping up of all history, in that great Second Coming. Even the believers a few decades removed from Jesus’ time here on earth believed that they were surely in the last generation, that Jesus was surely coming, because of all that had happened in their own time, sure signs that the end was nigh – one of my friends whose mother spent the last half of her life steeped in Pentecostalism that expected Jesus’ imminent appearance would tell her constantly that “Jesus is nigh unto the door.” What likely prompted these early believers, the people who were around when the Gospel of Luke was likely written, was the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, the same one that Jesus worshipped and taught within. As punishment for a Jewish rebellion in 70 AD that was eventually brutally quashed, the Romans destroyed the Temple, this center of Jewish life and identity. This caused a crisis within Judaism itself, one would that would eventually shift Jewish identity and worship from being centered in Jerusalem to a synagogue based faith now scattered throughout the world. But it wasn’t just a Jewish crisis – the destruction of the Temple was also a Christian crisis because we Christians, wrongly, to be sure, saw ourselves as the natural heir of the Jewish identity and religion – after all, Jesus was a Jewish Messiah, who came to the Jews first, and then the rest of the world, secondly. The destruction of the Temple was surely a sign that Jesus would return – perhaps it wasn’t a natural disaster that Jesus speaks of here in our text today, but it was a spiritual disaster that both Judaism, and to lesser degree, this new Christian faith, had to find ways of dealing with.

And so the text today was likely written after the great fall of the Temple in Jerusalem, and these words believed to be said by Jesus were fresh to those early Christian believers in a way that few of us can now imagine. Seemingly the greatest of disasters had fallen upon them only a few years earlier, and here Jesus is telling his earliest listeners that there will signs and wonders, natural disaster after natural disaster, and unexplained events in the sky that have rarely been seen before. Actually, in the larger 21st chapter of Luke not included in our pericope today, Jesus gives us three signs that signal the end: the appearance of false messiahs, wars and international conflicts, and what we see in our text today – natural disasters. But the reality is that false messiahs and wars on a world wide scale have come and gone – think of World War Two, where it is believed that 70 million people lost their lives – and natural disasters, well, they happen all the time. Some always say, surely, this particular disaster we are experiencing right now is a sign that Jesus was speaking of – surely it can’t get worse than this disaster, which is probably what people must have said during the time of the Black Plague in the early Middle Ages, when 30% of Europe’s population was wiped out over a few decades. Almost always we humans think that the false messiahs of our generation, the wars of our generation, the natural disasters of our generation are the worse the world has even seen, and thus they are surely a sign that Jesus is indeed “nigh upon the door.” We almost always interpret Jesus’ parable of the fig tree as speaking to our generation, because, of course, our generation is experiencing the worst of everything. I can’t tell you how many times people have told me that surely we were in the last days, because of how bad things had gotten, and I try, in my best moments, to remind them that there have been far worse natural disasters, far worse wars, far worse false messiahs, than we are experiencing now. In fact, in many ways, humanity has never had it better than right now in terms of health and longevity and the absence of major wars killing millions at a clip. God knows life is not perfect for any of us, especially the poor and oppressed, far from it, but the world has been a far crueler and meaner place than it is right now. I try to remember that in my best moments, when I am decrying what is happening in this country and in the larger world. It doesn’t mean it can’t get worse, but it’s important to stay in the moment, and to take Jesus seriously here – to look at the fig tree, the signs, and to interpret them in the larger context of history, of what has been and what could be.

But what then are we to do with this text, on this first Sunday of Advent, if the end of all things is not probably nigh, that Jesus is not literally “nigh unto the door?” And what are we to do with these particular words: “this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.” The reality, of course, is that first century generation did pass away without the ending happening, despite the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. We don’t know for sure whether Jesus literally meant that particular generation, but it’s obviously true that every generation thinks it is at the end of the historical rope, so to speak, and this current one is no different. The truth of the matter is that we are ALWAYS living in times of turmoil or change, and the world is in fact always ending, ending the world as we know it, because it is always changing, and what was is no more, and what will be is just coming to be, and this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place, until another tumultuous change happens, as it does for every generation, as it will for us, surely. And the world is always beginning again, starting over, because what was before is now ending—and on and on we go. And, yes, I am probably getting the early church and Jesus out of a tight rhetorical spot by interpreting these particular words in this manner, but I really do think that what Jesus is saying here is profoundly true—the world is always ending, and it is always beginning, and what is new contains within it what has been—and what will be. There will be signs and wonders today, natural disasters today, within in our bodies today, within our lives today, within our politics today, within the very ground we walk on today, and some of us will indeed faint from fear today because of the cruelty of it all. Most us, however, will wake up again, and the world will be new again, though not always in ways we want or expect, but it will be new again. One of the interesting things about growing up in that evangelical subculture was one of the things they didn’t try to teach us with all their apocalyptic obsession with how the world was might end: what they didn’t teach us was that the end of all things, the arrival of this Jesus, would be the beginning of something new. The book of Revelation right at the very end of the Bible spends its last few chapters telling us that when Christ comes, the world itself will be transformed and made new again, that there will be a new heaven and a new earth. As I just said, within every ending is the seed for the new beginning. God doesn’t end the story by destroying it all – but renews what God first created, the heavens and earth, into something new, a new beginning, a new life, a new way of understanding the world as it really is.

So, you see, even when Jesus speaks of the end, there is always the new beginning that comes with it, because when all things end, all things begin again, in some new way. One of the interesting things about what scholars like to call apocalyptic literature in the Bible, texts like this one before us today, or the book of Revelation, or even the book of Daniel, is that this kind of writing is meant to reveal, to unveil, or uncover the world, to unmask the false powers that supposedly rule the world, and maybe even our lives. I was speaking with someone recently about both a devastating ending, and the possible birth of something new, something unwanted at first, but now, well, fully embraced as a new start, a new beginning. Sometimes the ending reveal what we didn’t know we needed, and the beginning of some new thing we didn’t know we wanted, until it was before us, until it was presented to us by circumstances. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression that all our endings have a happy new beginning – I don’t believe that because it isn’t true. Some endings are as cataclysmic as they actually feel in the moment. But I don’t want us to forget that sometimes, maybe most of the time, when something ends, a sense of safety, a life we thought we wanted, sometimes that ending is a catalyst to a new heaven and a new earth in our lives. Jesus says to us in this text: Now when these things begin to happen, stand up straight and raise your heads, because your redemption is near.” The Temple is destroyed, life collapses, really bad things happen, and they really are bad things – and then from the ashes of ruin some new thing begins, unexpected, and maybe unwanted, but life begins again, as it does on Christmas Day, with the birth of this child, a yearly, constant reminder that life begins again, the great human cycle of beginning, ending, and resurrection, a new thing, a new beginning. Hope arrives after utter hopelessness.

In all honesty, I am kind of nostalgic for the excitement of my Hal Lindsey days, with the constant anticipation of just when Jesus would come again, literally, and to be clear, I do still believe that in the literal Second Coming. But the truth of the matter is that we really are always in the midst of some sort of ending, we are almost in the midst of some sort of disaster which threatens to end us, or at least threatens to end our hopes and dreams. There are signs and wonders all around, warning us not to get too comfortable, because the world we are in right now might not be the world we will be in tomorrow – some new thing has happened, the ending of something, the beginning of something else. So, to echo Jesus’s words in the last part of our text, let’s take care that our hearts aren’t dulled by distractions of everyday life, and that we don’t find ourselves stunned by the last Great Ending of all things, the last Great Last Day, but also let’s take care not to be surprised by the everyday endings, the ones that just come with being human and being human in this world, as it is. What is revealed in all endings is a new beginning, an unveiling, an uncovering of that which we did not see beneath the surface of the life we just saw end before us and within us. Some of what is uncovered we will be glad to see, and some of it, not so much, but with the ending comes the new beginning and this promise: that the Human One, the Christ will meet us there, as he will meet us on Christmas Day, as he does in every moment of our lives. Amen.