First Sunday of Advent, November 28, 2021 – Jeremiah 33:14-16; 1 Thessalonians 3:12-4:2; Luke 21:25-28, 34-36

Most of life is the experience of continuity and disruption. Everything’s going along fine and, all of a sudden, you lose your job, you move to a different location, you get a frightening diagnosis from the doctor, someone in the family dies, and there’s disruption. But the disruption’s just for you. All around you, other people’s lives are moving along on a continuum. There’s continuity. Until something happens in their life. Sometimes it seems like the whole world is suddenly disrupted, like it was starting in March of 2020. All of a sudden, the whole world shut down. But look what happened after that disruption. Children began to learn how to use their cell phones and their computers to learn at home. People started working from home as they got used to Zoom and all that kind of stuff. What did we discover? This ain’t so bad after all. I can sit here in my PJs and do my work. I don’t have that two hour commute to the city. I don’t have that annoying coworker disrupting me all the time. I don’t have to sit in class for five straight hours and a brief lunch break; I can do a little bit, stop, do a little bit more, stop, do a little bit more. And continuity picked up in the middle of the disruption. It happens all the time.

There also is an experience of disruption and continuity in our society at large. The last two or three weeks there’s been a lot of information in the news about Facebook, and the fact that they secretly knew that they were causing people to talk badly to other people on their platform, because the more hits you get, the more people are drawn to that particular website, the more people click on that website, the more advertising dollars Facebook can make. And, according to the internal memos in the company, they were planning for it to be that way.

And yet, even though that’s one of the many disruptive forces in our society, on the other hand, every day lots of people talk to one another on Facebook that could never talk to each other for that long or that conveniently by phone or by mail, people who are unable to talk to others in any other way. It’s a godsend. So, continuity midst disruption.

That’s what Advent is like. Advent is the experience of simultaneous continuity and disruption. Here’s the disruption. For the last three months or so, you’ve been coming to church, everything was green – my vestments were green, the altar was green, the banners were green. All of a sudden, you come in after a very busy Thanksgiving weekend, everything is purple. And that Advent disruption is a deliberate disruption on the part of the church to wake us up, to make us realize there’s more to life than the same-old, same-old. That’s the disruption. What’s the continuity?

That every year there’s a cycle of things that we can count on. First comes Advent, then the cycle of Christmas feasts, then a little bit of Ordinary Time, then Lent, and Eastertime and Pentecost, and then Ordinary Time again. And we can count on them. It’s always going to be that way. A cycle that repeats itself every year, bringing the same challenges, bringing the same comforts, bringing the same joys, bringing the same questions to people whose own lives have moved on over the course of the year. For people whose challenges and needs and consolations are different from what they were the last time that cycle began.

And our readings this morning reflect those two things. The first reading, from the Book of Jeremiah, reflects the need for continuity. When the Israelite people began to believe in one God, they were a nomadic people. They were governed by clan chieftains. But, after they began to settle and build cities, one after another they chose various forms of government, each with its benefits and its problems, until finally they believed the pinnacle of their experience as a nation was when they were governed by King David. And King David was a complex character with some very grave faults, but he also had some tremendous skills and talents. He was the only one to unite all the warring factions of the Israelite people themselves and weld them into one nation. That union only lasted through the death of his son, Solomon, then began to unravel again. But, for that one point, there’s a pinnacle of governance in which the leader was both a man of great spirituality, a poet, a warrior, and a cunning politician. Forever after, the people kept hoping that the new people on the throne, who were his descendants – grandchildren, great-grandchildren – would bring them back to that greatness. It never happened. Until finally, the Israelite people were conquered and taken away into slavery. Disruption and continuity.

And Jeremiah is one of those who keeps on hoping that the future will be better. You get to the gospel, however, and Jesus’ gospel this morning, what he says to his followers, is very disruptive. He talks about two kinds of destruction. The expectation that eventually the Roman legions will destroy Jerusalem, that something will tip the balance away from the delicate negotiations that were constantly going on between Rome and Israel, and that someday, somehow, the world would end. This ending would be kind of frightful.

I was channel-surfing a couple of days ago. And I came upon one of those disaster movies – it was about California falling into the sea, huge earthquake. In this one scene that I happened to come upon, this guy’s driving his car, and the fissure in the earth is chasing him down the block. He’s like three car lengths away from this big opening that’s splitting California in half. Sort of overdone in a way, but nonetheless, it gave you an impression of the kind of fright that natural disasters cause. There can suddenly be disruption in our continuity.

And so, I asked you, before the first reading, do you think our religion teaches us that we simply have to love one another. Most people would say yes, because that’s how it comes out most of the time. The two great commandments – love God, love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus – love one another as I have loved you. But look at what St. Paul says, today, at the beginning of the second reading. It went by so fast that it was hardly even able to be caught. He says, “May the Lord make you increase and abound in love.” May the Lord make you increase and abound in love. So, apparently we cannot increase and abound in love unless God makes us do that, or lets us do that.

All the disruptions in life are somehow traceable, finally, in the last analysis, to Original Sin. We don’t believe that human beings are intrinsically evil. We believe that we are intrinsically good. But, because from the beginning, people made selfish choices, rather than choices for the common good, rather than choosing to believe that God’s way is the right way, we have a tendency to disrupt things in our own lives and in the lives of others.

So, St. Paul says, “I pray that God will make you abound in love.” It takes God’s grace for us to love one another in times that are disruptive. It’s easy when things are flowing along nicely. You feel very benevolent and warm toward other people. But, when the crunch comes, we tend to say, “Me first, and to hell with everybody else.”

What Advent invites us to do, by a simultaneous theme of continuity and disruption, is to pray to God, ask God, to give us the grace and the power to love one another both in good times and in b