But then I felt rather guilty as I saw them turn and go back down the walk.  I had rejected them a bit curtly, I thought.  I needed to go to the store for one last item we had forgotten to get for dinner, and as I drove down the street I kind of hoped I’d see them so I could at least apologize.  Chances were good, I mused, for who among our neighbors would be inviting them in on Thanksgiving afternoon?

And, yes, there they were, just a few houses away.  I stopped and rolled down the window.  “I’m sorry I was rude back there,” I said.  “Oh, that’s all right.”  It was the man this time.  “No, it’s not.  I shouldn’t have been rude.  It’s O.K. that you’re doing what you’re doing; it’s just that I don’t share your interpretation of Scripture in some important ways.”

Still smiling that smile, but, countering my latent prejudice, eliciting what I felt to be genuine warmth even for me – a Presbyterian – he launched into his interpretation of the “end times,” filling out that title on the tract about all suffering ending.  He’s convinced that though God gave Satan an opportunity to rule the world for a while that period of time is about to end.  God is about to take over again.  And though the takeover will be marked with great tumult, those who are saved will be glad in the end.  He offered evidence from First Thessalonians and Revelation about the nature of the great upheaval and God’s reign that will be so different from anything we know now.

“ . . . and God himself will be with them, he will wipe away every tear from their eyes.  Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” 

I know those words from Revelation well.  We often hear them spoken at memorial services, offering comfort and hope.  I cling to them.  They speak of a dream we cherish, namely that our prayers will be answered:  Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.  But I don’t imagine that before our generation has passed away – if we’re to think of “this generation” only as those of us now living – we will see a world where – literally – all human suffering as we know it – disease, natural disaster, wars and human conflict, death itself – will end.  That when God takes the world back from Satan we will live in Eden again like Adam and Eve before they became disobedient – unspoiled, enjoying a paradise of unending bliss, never to give up our mortality to Satan’s death. 

I imagine that’s how biblical writers composing the creation story must have imagined the time before Eve’s daughters were cursed with the pain of childbirth and Adam’s sons were made to work hard, sweating out a living from an earth that is often rocky and lacking rain.  So some among us believe that when God takes the world back from Satan we’ll all live in paradise again, never to grow sick or ever to give in to death.

Even if all of us don’t share that literal dream of returning to the paradise of Eden, most of us mortals – even people who claim no religious faith at all – probably do long for a place we’ve not known in our own lifetimes but which offers a promise of unearthly bliss on earth, especially when we experience dark and difficult times.  And there’s something very good about that in a pragmatic way.  Elusive as the dream of paradise may be, it yet plants a seed in us to work for and to pray for a world that is better than anything we have ever known. 

And so we pursue medical science to relieve the suffering brought on by cancer and heart disease and diabetes and Parkinson’s and a host of other dreaded illnesses.  We work the diplomatic channels, pursuing peace as an alternative to war to solve human conflict.  We begin to take measures to restore our planet to the way it used to be, unsullied by the effects of our greed and neglect that despoil the earth.  Even in those efforts we just might ward off some “natural” calamities we call “acts of God” but which we bring on ourselves by heating up the atmosphere with our own exhaust.

I would agree with my Thanksgiving visitors that God does promise a better world, but I would not presume to know just how that world will look or precisely when that world will come.  But what we share, at least, is that great word with which we brought light to our first Advent candle this morning – the word HOPE.  Jesus urged us to be alert to the signs of God’s coming among us in newness of justice and love.  Jesus told us to pray and to work for that better world.  And, most important of all, Jesus told us never to give up hope in God’s redemptive work.  Never.  For it’s often in the midst of deepest darkness that light shines.  It’s often in the emptiest of places that God fills our lives once again.

Yes, we can take a lesson from the fig tree.  In Palestine the fig tree is one of the last of the trees to take on leaves for a new season.  And when you see that happen, you know that winter is soon on its way out and summer is about to spring forth.  In our world, the liturgical season of Advent – the time of preparation for Christ’s coming, both as baby Jesus and as crucified Christ come alive again – occurs in the time of deepening darkness in the flow of our seasons of the year.  The days are growing shorter, the light is growing dimmer, it will get even darker before it gets lighter, but the calendar tells us that soon it will be getting lighter, imperceptibly at first, but then unmistakably lighter.  Brighter.  The days are surely coming . . .  God promises us that.  And in the sign of our meteorological seasons, we are reminded of God’s promises for renewal in our lives once again.

When Luke’s Gospel was being written – when the story of Jesus was being written down from oral history – people also needed to know that it wasn’t always going to be dark.  If we read a few verses before our text for this morning, we read of the prophecy that Jerusalem would be destroyed and that despair would fall upon the people.  All Jerusalem would be laid to ruin.  The Second Temple – the one re-built after the Babylonian captivity – would be rubble.  Is there no end to suffering?  And, in fact, when the Gospel of Luke was being written those things had just happened.  It’s in the midst of those events that Jesus’ words take on the urgency to hope:  “Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”

It will get darker before it gets lighter, but it will get lighter.  That’s the promise of God.  Some journalists are claiming that we Americans have just lived through the worst decade since the years following World War II.  They cite such things as 9/11 and the growth of the threat of terrorism, the economic collapse that both began and ended these past ten years, the enormous natural disasters in New Orleans and Southeast Asia, increasing poverty throughout the globe, effects of global warming, etc.  But how can we measure such things?  When has it appeared the darkest?  Our nation has certainly endured some challenging decades. 

How about when we struggled for independence from an oppressive colonial power?  Or when we killed each other in massive numbers across an imaginary line separating us north from south?  When flu killed hundreds of thousands and we joined the rest of the world in war just a little over a hundred years ago?  When my parents and their generation turned out our lights at night and rationed meat and gasoline that we might defeat Fascism and the Nazi menace?  When we practiced descending to bomb shelters during my childhood to avoid the nuclear holocaust to come?  Or when we lived through the frustration of Vietnam and the great social upheavals of the 60s?  Which of these decades was the worst?  It’s hard to measure such things.

But one thing is certain.  All people in all times have experienced the kind of darkness Jesus’ followers experienced when the hope they had invested for themselves in him was dashed as he hung on a cross on a scraggly little mound of earth and then when the house they had built for God was torn down by angry occupiers who were bent on destroying them forever.  We all have known that kind of darkness in our own generations and in our own times.  And yet it’s precisely in those times when the voice of hope cries out:  Lift up your heads! 

These seemingly awful times are not the signs of ultimate despair; they are instead the signs of the end of darkness and the beginning of light.  Quite the opposite of what we might imagine.  But that is the message of our faith.  We need to read the signs of the times.  What we see is not the last word.  God brings light out of darkness, life out of death.  Remember the cross – yes – but remember more the empty tomb.  Jesus tells us that precisely in the midst of “distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting “from fear and foreboding,” we can yet see the Son of Man coming in a cloud to usher in God’s rule among us.

And with this reassurance we begin a new year in the church.  We begin afresh, not just on a calendar, but in our hearts, in our relationships, in our congregation and community and world, yearning for a promise worth living for.  We are called anew this day to live lives of faithful, active waiting in what we might call the “meantime” because we still hear the beckoning voice of the One who will hold us in the end time.  Amen.