Looking forward to Sunday: The First Sunday of Advent

Apparently the Mayans believed that the world is going to end in 2012. Maybe you saw the movie in the last week or so. Karen and I are going tonight.

According to one, very small and questionably informed, group of modern Christians the world is going to end on May 21st, 2011. (I guess the Mayans were close? . . .) They base this date on a crazy string of biblical quotes from totally unrelated pieces of scripture, and depend on the date of 4990BC as the year of the flood (as in Noah). According to their calculations May 21, 2001 is 7,000 years to the day since Noah's Ark set sail on it's first and last voyage.

Hal Lindsey, the author of The Late Great Planet Earth, said that he thought that last decade of human history would be the 1980's.

Ooops.

The fascination with the 'End Times' has spurred a multi-billion dollar industry. Books, movies, websites, billboards - media of all types feeding curiosity of 'the end.'

Into this climate - and with two upcoming end-dates hovering over our heads - we enter Advent. And, Advent is about the coming of Christ, and the fulfillment of God's righteous victory over evil. Advent (a word which means 'the coming') end with the celebration of the first coming of Christ in a manger in Bethlehem, but Advent always begins by pointing our faith towards the next coming of Jesus.

Just about every week we state the mystery of our faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

What do we mean by 'Christ will come again?' What did Jesus mean by the speaking of his return? What do the many references to 'the Day of the Lord' throughout the Old and New Testaments mean?

Do we join the crazies and build bunkers and arks? Do we claim that we've intellectually moved on from this pre-modern way of looking at the world and God? Or, is there something really here?

Not exactly fun, fluffy thoughts to wake up to as we crawl out of our turkey-and-stuffing-induced-coma - but important issues of faith to wrestle with as we move into Advent, and sing those familiar tunes: O Come, O Come Emmanuel. . .