Transcript
A Gift to the City: Hope First Baptist Richmond, December 1, 2024
The First Sunday of Advent
Luke 21:25-36
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…
Welcome to the Season of Advent at Richmond’s First Baptist Church! It really is the most wonderful time of the year, as we count down the Sundays to Christmas and anticipate the coming of Christ. This year our theme is “A Gift to the City,” and our staff started planning in April. For several weeks we talked about giving the people in our city an actual gift, something they could take home with them to remind them of Richmond’s First Baptist Church. I listened for a while and even offered some suggestions, but eventually I realized, “No, the gift is Jesus.”
And that’s when I began to think about a photography contest where we could invite people to take pictures of a manger in various locations around Richmond. I could almost see it on the steps of the capitol, with that caption at the bottom: “A gift to the City.” I could see it in front of City Hall or the VMFA with the same caption. But I could also see it at the bus station, and in a back alley, and under the bridge, that is, I could see it not only in some of the most picturesque places in Richmond, but also in some of the places where such a gift would be most welcome. I was looking forward to seeing how our photographers would handle the assignment.
And then as we began to talk about the traditional Advent themes of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love, I thought about how powerful it would be to enlarge the
winning photograph to the size of a poster and print those words at the top. I could almost see that manger under the bridge on North Arthur Ashe Boulevard, where so many of our homeless neighbors seem to gather, with the word HOPE in big, white letters above it, and at the bottom the reminder that Jesus was and is “A Gift to the City.”
But when I looked at this Sunday’s Gospel lesson that’s not what I found. There was no manger, no baby Jesus. No, instead there was the grownup Jesus sitting with his disciples on the Mount of Olives and telling them that, “In those days 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 of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” That doesn’t sound like hope to me, but it must have sounded like hope to Jesus. At the end of today’s Gospel lesson he tells his disciples, “When these things begin to take place stand up, and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
And I think they would have understood, because the people of First Century Israel were steeped in a belief system called Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology. Let me try to break that down for you a little bit. Eschatology is the study of the end times, that is, the Eschaton. There are a lot of people who do that now, who say, “I believe we’re living in the last days.” They look for signs in the sun, and moon, and stars. They underline whole paragraphs in the Book of Revelation. I’m guessing that for as long as people have been around they have believed that we were living in the end times. Certainly there were people in Jesus’ day who did—lots of them. They were the practitioners of Jewish Eschatology. But within that larger framework there was a study of the end times
that focused on the apocalypse. Let me see if I can help you understand what that means.
In Greek, apo means “from,” and calypto means “cover.” Put them together and it means something like, “to remove the cover from.” When I think about that word in connection with today’s Gospel lesson I often think about it like this: Jesus was in Jerusalem for the Passover Festival. He was with his disciples, teaching in the temple day after day. One day, as they were leaving the temple precincts, the disciples said, “Teacher, look what large stones and what large buildings!” But Jesus said, “You see all this? Truly I tell you the time is coming when there won’t be one stone left on top of another.”
I picture them later that same evening, sitting around a campfire on the Mount of Olives as Jesus cooked up a big pot of eschatological stew. It didn’t smell so good, and the disciples asked, “What’s in there?” Jesus said, “Do you really want to know?” They said they did, and so he reached out and removed the cover from the pot. “Look,” he said. “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 of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory.” That what an apocalypse is: it’s taking the lid off the pot, it’s looking into the future to see what’s coming. In this case Jesus sees some very bad things coming, but in the end something very, very good.
Do you know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of Pandora’s Box, that Greek myth about the first woman on earth who is so curious that when Zeus gives her a big, beautiful box and tells her not to open it she can’t help herself. She
opens it. And when she does all the troubles of the world fly out: greed, envy, hatred, pain, disease, hunger, poverty, war, and death. But the last thing in the box, a bright, beautiful, birdlike thing, is Hope. The moral of the story is that it is hope that makes it possible for us to bear all those other things. And in the story Jesus tells it is the coming of the Son of Man that will help us endure all the hardships that are ahead. “In fact,” he says, “when you see all these things happening, lift up your heads; your redemption is drawing near!”
This is the central tenet of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology: that when it looks as if all hell is breaking loose it might just mean that heaven is on the way. I’ve thought about that a good bit as we have talked about bringing heaven to earth at this church. I often tell you to look around for anything that doesn’t look like heaven and then roll up your sleeves and go to work. I may have started saying that in 2012, when I learned that 39 percent of the children in the City of Richmond were living in poverty. 39 percent! That’s staggering, and for those children probably very much an experience of hell on earth. If I were a different kind of pastor I might have said, “Friends, we’ve got to do something about that. We’ve got to find those children and say, ‘Look, I know you don’t have enough to eat. I know you go to bed hungry almost every night. I know that you might not even have a bed to sleep in, just a piece of cardboard on the floor. But if you can put your faith and trust in Jesus, if you can make him your Lord and Savior, then when you die you will have a mansion in heaven, and all the food you could ever want to eat.’” And that might give some of them hope. They might lie on the floor at night, looking up toward the ceiling, and dreaming of their heavenly home. But to offer that kind of hope, and that kind of hope alone, to a hungry child seems cruel, and not at all like the kind of hope Jesus offered.
He didn’t tell his followers that someday they would go to heaven; he told them that someday God’s kingdom would come. Hope wasn’t up there somewhere, in the sky; it was out there somewhere, in the future. I’m not saying that evangelism isn’t important. I want every child to know the love of Jesus and the hope of heaven. But as I once heard an African-American preacher say, “We don’t just want pie in the sky by and by; we want something sound on the ground while we’re still around!” So I checked to see what the latest figures on childhood poverty in Richmond were and I was surprised. According to the US Census Bureau that number has dropped from 39 percent to 27.4.i And according to the American Community Survey it’s 21 percent: nearly half of what it was twelve years ago.ii I don’t know which one of you rolled up your sleeves and did that, but I want to thank you. That’s incredible! But I also need to remind you that it’s not OK for 21 percent of our kids to be living in poverty. It’s not OK for one kid to be living in poverty. If we wanted to give those children the gift of hope, how would we do it?
You may know that we’ve elected a new mayor in Richmond. His name is Danny Avula, and he says, “It’s going to take all of us, but together we will build a Richmond where everyone’s rights are protected, where everyone has the right to thrive, and where no one gets left behind.” He says his priorities for Richmond include investing in our schools, children, and families so that all kids can succeed. So, once he’s sworn in I’d like to call him up and say, “Mister Mayor, this is Jim Somerville. I’m the pastor of Richmond’s First Baptist Church and we’re concerned about the number of children living in poverty in our city. We know it’s better than it used to be but it’s not as good as it could be. What can we do about that? How can we help you make sure that all kids can succeed?”
I wonder what he would say?
I mean, we’re only one church but we’re a big church and we’ve got a big reach. There are thousands of people who watch our services on television. What if all of them and all of us started working together and praying together and making phone calls and volunteering. What if we really believed that it wasn’t God’s will that even one child in Richmond should have to go to bed hungry at night? What if we partnered with other churches and local organizations committed to that kind of justice? What if we put our hands to the problem like we were trying to push a car out of the mud, and then pushed together until we made a difference? Do you know how good it would feel if next year that number had come down by five more percentage points?
I don’t know. Times are hard. This latest election seems to have left our country even more divided than it was before. Around the world we hear about nation rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom. There are “earthquakes in various places, famines and plagues, dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.” Watch the news for even a few minutes and you could get the idea that all those things Jesus was talking about are coming true. Maybe we are living in the last days. Or maybe…this is just how it feels when the kingdom starts to come. Maybe there have to 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. Maybe this is how it is when the world itself goes into labor, when the mountains and hills begin to heave and the Kingdom starts to come. Maybe this is when we have to stand up and raise our heads because our redemption is drawing near.
Now, that all sounds very dramatic. But if I could leave you with one thing on this First Sunday of Advent I would want to leave you with this: that the
redemption Jesus told his disciples to wait for and watch for was not up there somewhere, in heaven, but out there somewhere, in the future. We can work toward it, we can move toward it. And if it feels like the world is coming unglued it may only mean that we’re making progress; we’re getting close. The last book of the Bible, the one we call “Revelation” is actually called “The Apocalypse of Jesus.” It’s when he takes the lid off the pot for the last time, and shows us what’s coming in the future. And in the next to the last chapter of that book the author sees the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven like a bride adorned for her husband, and hears a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and be their God; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more (he might even say that childhood poverty will be no more), for the first things have passed away.” Which is to say that in the end—in the very end—we don’t go to heaven, heaven comes to earth.
“So, lift up your heads,” Jesus might say. “Have some hope. Keep bringing the KOH2RVA. And when it looks like all hell is breaking loose it may only mean that heaven is on the way.”
—Jim Somerville © 2024
