Christmas Before the End of the World

Christmas time is near, time for toys and time for cheer.[1]

The greens are hung. The halls are decked. The elf is on the shelf. The radio stations have switched over to the Christmas songs. It’s a good time of year.

It seems as though the Advent Lectionary didn’t get the message. Our reading today from 2 Peter sounds more like Halloween than Christmas. “the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.”

We don’t want that message. We want our comforting rituals and traditions. Our holidays laid out just. So. Gathering with friends and family as we always have done with the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. No alarms. No surprises.[2] No talk of the end of the world and everything being destroyed. Here we are though. We can’t get around these parts of the Bible just because we don’t like them or they don’t fit with the theme.

I have taken the long road of embracing these texts like our one today. I have a different understanding than I had when I was younger. I have a different understanding than many other pastors. When I was younger, I took passages like today’s to be about THE END. The end times. The end of the world. I used to believe in the rapture, where the good Christians get whisked off to heaven while the rest of the evil folk are left behind to suffer. It was an escapist theology. God would get us out before the proverbial stuff hit the fan on earth. Plenty of well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning Christian has predicted the end of the world, and each and every single one of them has been wrong.

I have a different understanding now. Different because I remember how Christmases were before the end of the world. And I now know how they are after the end of the world.[3]

Before the end of the world, we would head over to my grandparents’ house. Right on Main Street in Uhrichsville, Ohio, it had housed three generations on my family, starting with my maternal great-grandparents. Right after Thanksgiving, we would put up the wire tree with the big bulbs. It had those old style bubbler bulbs as well. The tinsel that hung like icicles. Then on Christmas Eve the whole family would gather and we’d eat poppyseed roll and honey ham. We’d open presents. Then we’d head to midnight mass. Christmas Day would be a simple affair at home, playing with our toys and having leftovers. That’s how we did it. The day was filled with cousins and family, and food and presents.

I was particularly close with my grandpa. He knew how much I loved science and specifically science-fiction. One Christmas, there was this huge present sitting in the living room. It had my name on it. It was a telescope. In my favorite color of dark blue.

Now I know Christmas is not supposed to be about the gifts or traditions. But that time was cemented, burned into my mind. No Christmas will measure up to that one. Then the world ended.

My grandparents divorced in 1998. No more poppyseed rolls in the kitchen on the 1950s aluminum table in the familiar kitchen. No gathering in a house that held 3 generations of my family. The Main Street house was sold to some stranger. No presents from grandpa as this was all his fault.

The day came like a thief in the night. Everything was laid bare. Everything was destroyed. Those days were dead and gone, never to return.

There is a question in today’s reading that we had to answer as a family. “What sort of persons ought you to be?”

We had to change. That world of the Main Street house had ended, and we couldn’t return. Just like Israel in exile. They couldn’t return to their temple if they wanted to as the temple was destroyed. We had to change our understanding of faith in this time. Just as the Jewish people understand faith. There is no room for escapist theology, like God getting us out before the proverbial stuff hits the fan. If this were true, there would have been no story of the Exodos. Of Assyrians sacking the Northern Tribes. No stories of the Babylonian Captivity and thus no need for Jesus’ favorite Prophet Isaiah. God would have gotten them out of all of these places and times. God didn’t. Israel had to endure. And wait. And mourn and grieve. Sit beside the river and weep when they remembered Zion.

Faith is never about escape. Escape is going around. Faith gets you through. If your faith is only for when things are going well, then you don’t actually have faith: you have a faith-based hobby. Faith helps you endure.

Why is this in the Bible then? 2 Peter is all about God’s coming judgment for the sin of the world. What Peter is doing today is talking about how God’s perspective of time is different from our own, and what seems to us to be a delay is not for God. The judgment is slow in coming to allow the ungodly to repent, but Christ will come at an unexpected time and the ungodly will be destroyed in the judgment.

When the world ended, my family found that there was an after. The word repent means to think differently afterwards. We had to think differently in the after. After we found ourselves in this new situation, we had to come to terms with our family and what mattered. We gathered again. We celebrated Christmas in a new way. Some familiar notes and tastes and sounds were around, but it was fundamentally different.

Our faith got us through. Our family found each other. Some ungodly things were destroyed. We found that Christmas wasn’t about the wire tree with the big lights and bubblers and tinsel than hung like icicles. It wasn’t about the Main Street house or midnight mass or even about family. It may come to a shock to my kids, but it wasn’t even about the toys and presents.

It was my Uncle Scott who reminded me what it’s all about. At the end of our gathering, he prayed. This was unusual, we didn’t pray like this, but he prayed at the end of that Christmas gathering. I don’t remember his exact words, but I do remember how it made me feel. The prayer was about God’s promise. The kin-dom of God. The peace that surpasses all understanding. The forgiveness of sin. The grace of the Trinity breaking into our lives and helping us deal with all there is to deal with.

You might be lamenting that you weren’t able to celebrate Thanksgiving like you used to. You might fear that given how things are going, you won’t be able to gather for Christmas. It is a distinct possibility. Christmas will look different this year.

I don’t think we will have an in-person worship between now and the end of the year. We will have worship in our building again sometime in 2021. And that thought is tough, and we could ignore it and open back up and act like things are just the same as they were before. But that’d be an escapist faith. Faith doesn’t get us out of situations, it gets us through.

We may yearn for the before, that’s understandable. But don’t miss the life in the after. There is a stronger sense of purpose in the after. If we’re honest, the world has ended a million different ways. It’s not a huge dramatic event. It’s not all at once. It comes like a thief in the night. We are called to repent. To forgive. To find grace. To live closer to God’s ways until we’re there all the time, or it comes in its fullness.

To that end… I see that many of you put your tree up way before Thanksgiving. Some right after Halloween. I get it. I do. With all that’s going on, it’s a good reminder of a less stressful time. It is a way to remember, as the song goes, “tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.”[4] This year, there will be no parties for hosting. The year has been like a scary ghost story. I can promise caroling outside on Christmas Eve at 6 p.m. I can’t promise a White Christmas, but you can still dream of it.[5]

What I can promise you is that the promise of God still stands. It stands beyond all our traditions. It stands beyond all our rituals and songs and decorations. It is as true now as it was in ancient times.

It is the promise of a loving God who gifted us with all this… everything. It is about faith in that love that can help us bear all things, believe all things, endure all things. Even this thing. Whatever your thing is. Maybe your family is going through a divorce. Maybe you have lost someone you expected to be at the table. Maybe your world has ended in a crashing crescendo or a subtle way you didn’t notice at first. Maybe everything is fine in your world. Maybe your gathering will be virtual, and that weighs heavy. Maybe job stress and pressure means not as many presents. I don’t know what your thing is… but I do know we can get through it for that’s what our faith is for.

It is in this faith, in accordance with God’s promise, that we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

I can say this for certain. God’s kin-dom is already among us. It’s already here. You have glimpsed it before. It was when you opened that great gift from grandpa. It was that time eating that amazing meal, you’ve tasted it. It was with you when you were able to stop crying and see the love on the faces surrounding you. It was in the room when you gathered again after the event that changed everything, and your world ended.

These were all glimpses. Glimpses of home. Home in its fullness and in every sense of the word. Home where you are welcomed in. Given a ring and a robe. The feast is prepared. Your prepared speech forgotten and unnecessary in the welcome and grace given to you.

That feeling of home, of God’s beloved community, shines especially bright at this time of the year. I promise you it is still there even in all of this. God’s beloved community is still among us with those who have the faith to perceive it.

Works Cited and the 4 Hidden Songs

[1] The Chipmunk Song by Alvin and the Chipmunks

[2] Radiohead, No Alarms, from the album Okay Computer

[3] See the 2018 sermon on Hope for more on this concept and story: https://www.uccmedina.org/sermons/hope/

[4] It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

[5] I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas

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