Sky Signs

Homily for Advent I, Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad
Luke 21:25-36
November 30, 2009

There will be signs in the sun, the moon and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding…

This is a warm and fuzzy reading for the beginning of our Advent season! We may be far more used to cheerful images leading up to the Christmas season. But what is referred to here is a section of the Book of Daniel. In the first year of King Belshazzar of Babylon, when Daniel “had a dream and visions of his head… “ and not of sugarplums.

These were wild and varied visions which Daniel had, including great winds stirring up the oceans, great beasts who rose up from the sea, and finally the coming of the son of man. Daniel’s wild beasts look variously like a creature with a lion’s head and eagle wings, like a winged leopard and like a bear with three tusks in its mouth. In this wild hallucinatory dream, which also inspired parts of the Book of Revelation, these strange beasts transform, devour, and come and go, apparently symbolizing the various powers that overtook Jerusalem.

Finally, the “Ancient of Days” presumably Yahweh, the one Hebrew God, appears and sits on a throne of judgment. After the various beasts are punished, Daniel proclaims:

I saw one like a Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. To him was given dominion, glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.

All over the Old Testament, in Isaiah, Haggai, The Wisdom of Solomon and in the Psalms, horrendous storms and wrenchings of the earth, darkness and the falling of stars are foretold- these are the signs leading up to the Day of the Lord- the end of time as we know it.

But also in our passage today, is the hopeful parable of the fig tree is invoked- the green leaves in summer signifying the promise of sweet fruit. The reference is to the sweet coming of the Reign of God after the recognizable signs. We are implored to be ready. Not to be distracted by unconsciousness and the worries of this transitory life. To stay conscious- to stay awake.

In this Advent season, we might be expect to be hear lessons foretelling the gentle miracle of a newborn baby on Christmas Eve, we may not be used to contemplating the end of the world.

But in Advent, what we contemplate is enormous- the world as we know it is coming to an end. God is entering time through Jesus, and things will never be the same. The early Christians too were talking about the end of the world as they knew it- the end of the Kingdom of the Romans and the beginning of the Kingdom of God. It’s what Jesus talks about again and again- the grand and cosmic event of everything being turned upside down- the first being last and the last being first.

As I read the passage about the signs of the sun, the moon and the stars, I thought of a different set of cosmic signs I had witnessed lately. I recently I went to visit my daughter at college in New York, and among other things we visited the planetarium at the Natural History museum in New York City. We had often taken our daughter to the Chabot observatory in Oakland, and watched the wonderful planetarium show there. She was thrilled one time when we went home and found the Andromeda Galaxy from our roof top using only binoculars. Apparently from that cosmic inspiration, she decided to change her name from Lilly to Andromeda, and now insisted that we call her Andromeda, or at least Andy. This was a cosmic shift for me! “You’ve gone from being a flower to a galaxy,” I said. “Pretty good.” We perused the outside of the planetarium room that starts with the big bang and goes through the history of the known universe, constantly shifting, changing, birthing stars. We saw incredible images of the star nebulae, the unimaginably beautiful birth places of those stars.

When we got back to Berkeley there was a series of very clear nights, and, by luck, the street lamp on our street was burning out, and emitted only a rosy glow like the red light of a dying sun. So we saw the stars with startling clarity. The constellations spelled out their ancient stories, I even think could see the milky way. I know I was seeing only the light emitted from these stars, millions of years ago. Some of them might already have passed out of existence. But in the glow of that dying streetlight, even knowing that these stars may have already died, I saw them as great beacons of hope, great and joyful expressions of the glory of creation. The vast and thrilling and changing universe I was staring at , even with its roiling star births and exploding suns, seemed to speak of an unchanging God, in the great quiet of that silent night. I had a powerful feeling of something unchanging, something constant.

The universe will always shift and change, it is the nature of creation. The sun and moon, the familiar stars we know, the very earth under our feet should be expected to shift. But there is something unchanging, whose birth we are preparing to celebrate. A light soon to come out of the darkness.

And we are called to be that light in the darkness- we are called to be the love of God, the light of Christ, the sign of new life in the fig tree. We are part of the inevitable coming of God, part of the coming Kingdom. This is the way we welcome in the incarnation of the holy in the improbable form of a tiny, fragile and unimaginably vulnerable child. A child whose holy presence causes our accustomed dark earth to blaze into the light of present eternal life.

Amen