Face-to-face with God

Today is of course the first Sunday in Advent. Last Sunday you saw the colour white on my stole, and on all the altar hangings, and covering the chalice. White is intended to signify God’s peace in recognition that in Christ, God has completed his redemptive plan and now we are seeing the fruits of the Holy Spirit enfolding or drawing all things to God the Father, in his Son, Jesus Christ.

As you see now, though, everything is draped in purple (or some churches, light blue). Why? The change in colour is intended to wake us up; to command our attention so that we do not become complacent or arrogant, trusting in our own righteousness. The light blue or purple is intended to remind us that our reconciliation to God was accomplished by Jesus’s willingness to take on our humanity and so suffer the consequences of rejecting God and by his faithfulness to his Father in proclaiming God’s kingdom which ultimately took him to the Cross where he shed his blood. The colour is a reminder that it is by following Jesus’s way, not our own way, that we are made witnesses to the only reality that is: God gathering all things to himself in Jesus Christ by his Spirit.

And that’s the crux of it: to follow Jesus’s way - to say in our own respective Gardens, “not my will be done but yours Lord,” - we actually have to wake up, focus, be attentive to, and frankly, know, the difference between God’s way, and our own way. It’s extremely easy to become complacent about that difference. We go about our day to day lives maybe with a prayer here or there, but often marking our progress, our days, our work, how we spend our time, our energy, our money, how we treat both friends and those whom we don’t like much, how we respond to this or that person, or how or in what we place our value and worth, or even deal with our struggles and suffering, as if these things are all measured by this particular time and culture in which we find ourselves. 

What if tomorrow didn’t come at all? What if tomorrow you were standing face-to-face with God. No slow drift toward your death where you could get all your ducks in a row and ensure you’ve been as faithful in the last bit of your life as possible. This is what Jesus is getting at with the disciples today: “no one knows the time or the hour when you will be standing face-to-face with God.” Jesus tells them that not even he knows the hour, not to imply that as God himself he is somehow ignorant; but rather to indicate that he won’t tell us when all things will be finally gathered to God.

With this statement, he forces the disciples’ and so our own attention to him: “I am in the Father and the Father is in me; when you see me, you are seeing the Father,” Jesus will say in so many ways throughout the Scriptures. If you want to know what God is like, look to me. And if you want to know how your life will be measured standing before God, look to my life. 

When you experience fear and temptation to act on the basis of your fears rather than on the reality of your present moment, where does your mind go? Do you become like Annanias and Sapphira who fear they might not have enough from the sale of their property, and so hold back the proceeds from the common pot? How do they fare before God? Or do you become like Abraham, who when called out from his home to travel to a foreign place, who, though barren is told he will become the ancestor of many descendents, who is told by God to sacrifice his son, who proceeds not without fear, but nonetheless with courage, and endurance, by faith. When you experience frustration with how things are going or not going, do you lash out like King Saul, or like Pharoah or focus on what God can provide and pursue it despite ridicule, being an outcast, or even being arrested, like so many of the women and tax collectors and outcasts who approach Jesus and refuse to let him go; taking hold, in a very physical sense, of his grace, his very reality and being? When you encounter those with whom you disagree, who frighten or threaten you, who make you feel lesser than, do you reach out with the figurative sword of your mouth to cut off the figurative ear of your supposed opponent? Or do you remember that you too are but dust; that the other is also made in God’s image, that Christ died as much for them as for you? Do you respond to them as Saul did with the Christians whom he persecuted? Or do you respond to them as Paul did when he and Silas were arrested and held prisoner. Rather than escaping when presented the opportunity by an earthquake - an escape that would have seen the guard punished and executed by the Romans - Paul treats his jailer with compassion, kindness, and charity and stays put so the jailer will not commit suicide to avoid being tortured then executed.

Who are you, before God. If you stood before God right now - and my friends - you are standing there already - who would God say that you are? The point here is not that your actions will or won’t save you - Christ alone accomplished this. The point is that he accomplished this and joined you to himself, as his body, a member of the church - so that you might come to know him more deeply by learning the Scriptures; that in seeing him revealed there, you might let go of your fears and your presumptions, and allow yourself to be remade into a witness to him. AMEN