(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Beginning at The End”, originally shared on November 23, 2022. It was the 241st video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Where to begin? Most people begin at the
beginning. Today, we’re going to find out why sometimes it’s better to begin at
the end.
How do you
like to read a story. Front to back and then be surprised at the end? Or
reading the end first and then seeing how the author gets there? Do you just watch
a movie from beginning to end, or do you find the Wikipedia article and read
the plot first to see how the film maker presents the story?
I prefer the later and this liturgical year,
the Gospel reading for the new year is satisfying to people like me. It begins
at the end.
We will begin a new
year this coming Sunday. What? Christmas starts in June, Halloween starts in
August, Thanksgiving starts in September, and now New Year’s Day is on November
27th?
Actually, only one of those statements is
correct, and it’s the last one.
We begin a new Church Year this Sunday.
How does that work? Why doesn’t the Church
have the same year as everybody else? Do I need to buy another calendar?
We celebrate Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, so
Happy Thanksgiving! It’s many people’s favorite holiday because there is so little
that is expected of us except to provide a meal, focus on the people we share
it with, to give God thanks, to have an attitude of gratitude, and to express
our thanksgiving with thanks living. But we’re not going to talk about that
today.
We’re going to talk about the new liturgical
year in the Christian church that starts this coming Sunday.
We’re going to talk about a fresh start, but
we’re going to begin at the end.
The new church liturgical year begins at the
end of time.
The word “liturgical” refers to the way we
do our worship. All churches are liturgical if they have an “order of worship”.
Typically, these include formal acts of engagement with God including such
things as repentance, confession and forgiveness, readings from the Bible, a
sermon, remembrance, prayer, praise, and thanksgiving.
Most churches include these elements within
the same structure that Jesus used in the synagogue where he grew up at
Nazareth: gathering, word, and sending. The Christian Church that followed
Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven added Holy Communion or,
“meal”. Otherwise, they are the same.
In the pre-Christian Greek world “liturgy”
meant a religious service offered by a rich patron. In the Christian world, it
became the work of the people. Worship is directed toward God. So, Soren Kierkegaard,
the 19 century Danish philosopher and theologian, once observed that the
question to ask oneself after a liturgical worship service is not, “What did I
get out of that?”, but “How did I do?”
Liturgical worship is not about us. It’s
about God and about life with God.
The liturgical calendar is structured to
help us live that life.
I saw a picture of a liturgical colander a
while ago. It was a colander built with the colors of the liturgical seasons.
Do you know what a colander is? It strains out what you don’t want and leaves
what you need.
The liturgical calendar not only measures
time, but it also concentrates it and infuses it with meaning.
Worship in the Christian Church has themes
and colors and cycles and seasons, and if you worship regularly, you’re used to
seeing things change throughout the year, including the colors that, like
leaves on trees, signal the changing of the seasons. The fabric paraments that
decorate the altar, pulpit, reading desk and other places, and the stoles worn
by pastors are made with the colors of each season.
You may also have noticed that the Gospel
readings follow a three-year cycle; a year of Matthew, a year of Mark, and a
year of Luke with John mixed in here and there. 😊 In fact all the
Bible readings follow a three-year cycle that is used by the vast majority of
churches throughout the world. It is set-up so that, if you came to church
every Sunday for three years, you would hear most of the Bible and all of the
history of salvation read out loud.
Each liturgical year has two halves: the
time of Christ and the time of the Church.
The first half has two cycles: No, not a
bicycle and not a motorcycle. The kind that is a complete set of things.
The two cycles are the Christmas Cycle and
the Easter Cycle.
Each cycle is divided into three seasons: a
season to prepare for the main event, a season for the event, and
a season to reflect on what the event means.
A new church year begins with the Christmas Cycle.
And the Christmas Cycle begins with Advent. It’s the season of preparation.
Christmas Day is fixed at December 25th
and Advent starts four Sundays before Christmas Day. This year, that’s this
coming Sunday November 27th. It’s the beginning of a new liturgical
year.
Advent means “coming”. What’s coming?
Christmas.
Many churches place an Advent wreath on a
stand in their worship space with four candles, each candle with a significance
related to the coming Christmas season, such as Prophecy, Bethlehem, Shepherds,
and Angels, and they light them to count the Sundays to Christmas. Some people
do the same at their dinner tables and they light the candle/s appropriate for
the week in Advent at their main meal.
Many homes post an advent calendar counting
the coming days to Christmas. Sometimes these have a small gift or a piece of
chocolate behind each day’s window.
The color for Advent is blue. It’s a royal
color and a color for hope. People hoped for the birth of a deliverer for about
1,000 years, and then Jesus was born. Christians believe that Jesus will return
to judge the living and the dead in his second advent, or “coming”.
We prepare to celebrate both the first
coming of Jesus in Bethlehem and the second coming of Jesus in Judgement at the
end of time for which we prepare during Advent, the season of preparation. It’s the second advent, the second coming of
Jesus, that is the subject of our reading from the gospel of Matthew this
coming Sunday, in Matthew 24:36-44,
36“But about that day and hour no one
knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 37For
as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 38For
as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and
giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, 39and
they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be
the coming of the Son of Man. 40Then two will be in the field;
one will be taken and one will be left. 41Two women will be
grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. 42Keep
awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. 43But
understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night
the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his
house be broken into. 44Therefore you also must be ready, for
the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.
We are pointing to the end of time at the
beginning of a new Church year to give us a sense of destiny. It reminds us
that our destiny is in God’s hands.
For example, I read a short article last
week about the possibility of life on other planets. It discussed the study,
not peer reviewed, of one of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory physicists who
built on earlier theories.
Mathematicians estimate that there could be
billions of planets capable of supporting life as we know it, and that many of
them could support intelligent life.
The theory is that we haven’t been visited
by any of them because of the technology and energy needed to travel the vast
distances between us and those planets. Not that those are the determining
factors by themselves, but instead that as a civilization develops what it
needs for long-term space travel, it will destroy itself before it gets there.
Well, that explains a lot. And it kind of
fits with our world view. We are sinners. We mess things up with our rebellion
against God. Technology is sometimes the means for that rebellion as in the
warning of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9.
On the other hand, could there not be planets
where people did not rebel against God and lived in perfect harmony with God
and all of God’s Creation for them?
That’s the theme of another theory I heard
once, that God created life on many planets for a personal relationship with
God. God created many perfect worlds where all creatures and all creation lived
in harmony.
The creatures on some planets rebelled
against God and evil entered those worlds. God sought to bring them back to a
perfect relationship with God and some returned. Where they didn’t return to
God, God came in the form of those creatures and they returned to God.
But, when God came in the form of the
creatures on one planet, they killed him. God had given his life to reconcile
them to God by God’s action and he took his life back again. But the reputation
of that planet as a place of inexpressible violence was such that nobody wanted
to go there.
And that’s why no intelligent life from
other planets has visited earth.
Beginning a new church year with the end of
history provides us with a reference point for the future: the end will come,
but it is in God’s hands. It will not be the end, but the beginning of a new
heaven and a new earth, and we will be a part of it.
The sum total of all baptized believers,
those who have accepted God’s gifts of grace, have become a new creation, one
that will be perfected in the life to come.
It will come like the flood in the time of
Noah described in Genesis 6-8: with warnings but ultimately unexpectedly.
I once lived in a house that was broken
into, I lost count, but I think that it was around 13 times. I didn’t have much
to steal, but the house was bordered on one side by an empty lot covered by
tall bushes in the front, and I was rarely at home except to sleep, so only one
person was ever seen and caught. I didn’t know when a thief might come, so I
had bars put on the windows when Sally and I were married. Then, we were
prepared.
Many of us have home security systems, monitoring
services, and Ring doorbells. We want to be prepared.
We also live between two advents: the coming
of God in Jesus Christ, born as an infant to redeem the world, and the coming
of Jesus Christ to judge the world as we know it and usher in the world to
come. We will consider both this coming Sunday, by beginning at the end.
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