Preached on the First Sunday of Advent (Year C), December 1, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.
Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25:1-9
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36
A few of our children and youth sharing with us the burdens and the blessings of existence on this wondrous and troubled planet, December 1, 2024.
Recently I’ve been taking little mental-health breaks from the traumatic news around the world by watching YouTube videos about the solar system, about stars, about the natural universe. Guided by a soothing narrator and expert astronomers, I take serene trips through outer space to, say, Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, which has only thirty to fifty million years of life left, before the tidal forces it shares with its parent planet tear it into countless pieces. Mars will one day be adorned with a new planetary ring.
I also watched a video illustrating the formation sixty-six million years ago of the Chicxulub Crater, when an asteroid slammed into what we now call the Yucatán Peninsula, ending the era of the dinosaurs. I marvel at the speed of death and destruction that circled the globe in the minutes and hours after that catastrophe.
But maybe that’s a little on the nose, that particular video. I don’t necessarily want to imagine the world as we know it coming to a violent end. And yet even that video offers a strange sort of consolation: after all, the biosphere recovered quite well in the following eons, and here we are. Our home planet has seen a lot of ecological “reboots,” if you can call them that, over millions of years. We humans ironically may not survive the Anthropocene Era, the age of the planet we’ve named after ourselves, Earth’s most ingenious and most destructive species. But whether or not we survive our own dubious adventures, the planet itself will be fine.
Earth will be fine, I should clarify, until our sun reaches the end of its life. YouTube videos about the sun are particularly intriguing. Did you know the sun contains 99.86% of the mass of the solar system? Stop your doom-scrolling for a moment and reflect on this with me. The planets and other orbiting rocks are just flecks of dust by comparison to our home star. Yet the sun is only medium-sized compared to the countless other stars, so it won’t be large enough to go nova at the end of its life. But it will swell greatly in size, likely bumping Earth into a wider orbit, after incinerating all earthly life.
Now, why is all of this comforting?! The videos all seem to follow a common theme of death and destruction! Well, for me, these dramatic yet serene videos are sage reminders that we live in a vast mortal arena, a universe of destructive change, but also creative change that occurs across incomprehensible lengths of time. Earth will someday lose its ability to support life, but not for hundreds of millions of years. Phobos will disintegrate, but humanity likely won’t live to see that. Even the sun is mortal, but now we’re talking about five billion more years. Sol — Sol, the serene name we give our sun — Sol will enjoy a long, relaxing retirement. And new stars are born from the remnants of dead stars. Astronomical realism is oddly soothing.
And so I listen with great interest when, in the Good News according to Luke, Jesus includes in his description of the end times this intriguing detail: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars.” There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars.
Like most human societies across history, the world of Jesus of Nazareth assumed that everything they could see, no matter how distant, was caught up in the drama of human cultures and conflicts. Red-faced Mars is the god of war; gorgeous Venus is the god of love. The sun rises at God’s command from a pavilion in the east; it does not shine in all directions, with puny Earth running in circles around it; no, the sun is just one of the great lights in Earth’s sky, placed carefully by God, for our lives, for our needs, for our days and our years.
And so it stands to reason, for the people of the first century, that if the world is coming to an end, so too will these great lights show signs of distress, signs of dismay, signs of despair. Human affairs have cosmic implications. We humans are universally important.
And Jesus then predicts the all-too-human response to the world and all the heavenly beings coming to an end: “People will faint with fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world,” he says.
In our age, even with our comparatively impressive understanding of the universe, our fears about the end of the world are hardly less intense. At Thanksgiving dinner this week, one of my friends said, “I wake up every morning with a pit in my stomach.” Father Phillip and I — and the whole Pastoral Care Ministry team — are spending time with many of you here who are trying to make sense of a world gone mad. And that’s both kinds of “mad”: the insane form of madness, and the angry form. Many of us are awakening dully to a gray, bleak landscape reminiscent of 2016 and 2017, when protesters flocked to airports to object to the Muslim Ban, and the nation was still absorbing the shock of the lethal, racist demonstration in Charlottesville. More than one of you has said to me that your country just isn’t what you thought it was.
This year has felt so apocalyptic for me that I felt palpable relief when I noticed the sun moving through its predictable course in the western sky. In high summer, the sun sets far north of The Brothers, the two most famous peaks in the Olympic mountain range. Now it sets south of Bremerton, and I had to wear a warm jacket on the day after Thanksgiving — just as I have done in past years — to hang icicle lights along our west-facing porch railings. Things are going kablooie down here, on Earth, in our human world; but the universe is still mostly the same. The sun is still mostly the same. The heavenly beings follow a billion-year-by-billion-year arc of time. So I breathe, in through the nose, out through the mouth; I relax, and my heart rate slows.
Jesus of Nazareth calls me, calls you, calls us all, into this practice of calm acceptance, this practice of stability, this practice of sober wakefulness, even if the sun goes kablooie right along with human affairs; even if an asteroid slams into our home planet; even if the moon falls apart. Even if it gets much worse, Jesus seems to be saying — even if the whole universe is coming undone — we should breathe, in through the nose, out through the mouth; we should relax; we should close our eyes, check in with our bodies, allow our heart rates to slow down.
And so we gather here, week by week, to do just that. We light candles — little suns, little explosions of light — and like our home star, we light the candles on a reliable schedule. When you arrived this morning, maybe you noticed that the candle by the baptismal font — the paschal, or Easter, candle — was burning. If you noticed, you likely thought nothing of it. (It’s just a candle…) But If you’re deeply familiar with our rhythms of Sundays and seasons, you may have wondered whether we lit it by mistake. We light the paschal candle at specific times, on particular days, and normally, the little “sun” of our paschal candle would be below the horizon, as it were, on this day, the First Sunday of Advent.
But this year, there is a sign in the sun, in the moon, in the stars! Today the paschal candle burns brightly (if off-schedule) to announce with gladness the unlikely news that we are baptizing two new Christians this morning, Salvador and Sebastián, two new leaves on the fig tree of our communal life, two new signs that the summer of God’s life-giving love is close at hand.
The paschal candle is first lit at the Great Vigil of Easter, that night brighter than any day, that night when the sky of our faith brightens with the good, glad news that “Christ has trampled death by death, and given life to those in the tombs”; that night when our most joyous song of Alleluia — ‘alleluia’ means “Praise the Lord” — rings out once again. We then light that candle through the fifty days of Eastertide, and light it again every time we baptize, and every time we bury one of our beloved dead.
But today, outside the usual rhythm, with the little sun of our paschal candle shining like a beacon across the universe, Salvador and Sebastián will be baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ. They will join us in the troubled life of this world, life that is continually bordered by death, but life that rises up. They will share with us the burdens and the blessings of existence on this wondrous and troubled planet, this blue-green speck of grace that orbits our home star, so bright and warm, so full of years.
“Heaven and earth will pass away,” Jesus says, and he knows this even without the benefit of YouTube videos that trace the finite arc of even the longest-lived star. Phobos will disintegrate; great rocks will again find their way to Earth; the sun will burn itself out. But the Creator endures, Christ dawns, the Spirit descends. Our children are mortal, like all of us, but they have futures filled with promise, and today they are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.
And so today we light our lamps a bit off schedule, we stir the warm baptismal waters outside of the usual time, and we prepare the royal oil for anointing and the homemade bread for breaking, because the warm summer of God’s enduring, unending love is drawing near.