Advent 1

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
J. R. R. Tolkien in The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings

No doubt a few of you recognize these words from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. A good friend and fellow priest posted this on his Facebook page yesterday and I admit it captured my imagination as all good fantasies must – just like our gospel text this morning.

Yes, you heard me right – this gospel sounds like a fantasy. Jesus tells his disciples that there will be signs in the heavens, distress upon earth, roaring of seas, people fainting with fear … and then the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory and this will bring the redemption of his followers. Really?? Be honest … have you seen anything like this before? I sure haven’t! Oh sure, we’ve seen distress and people fainting with fear, roaring of waves (Hurricane Sandy anyone?), and all kinds of trouble and destruction – that’s called the evening news. But this Son of Man coming in clouds with power and glory? Um … sorry … haven’t seen it. It seems like something out of Men in Black, or some kind of science fiction story. It is a fantasy.

Notice I didn’t say it wasn’t true but it is a fantasy – something fantastic, beyond our experience or comprehension, extraordinary, out of this world. It is precisely because it is beyond our experience of the material physical world that it has the power to save us. This image is so far outside us, it pulls us out of our puny, meager, finite lives. Something small enough to live in my head has no power to redeem me – only a promise this big and beyond us has any power at all to redeem us!

Episcopal poet W.H. Auden in his epic Christmas poem For The Time Being wrote this:

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

There it is … our Pilgrim Way: this life we can comprehend and know and understand – the one lived on our terms – only leads to one place …to the abyss, to death, a dead end. And absolutely nothing within our lived reality, nothing which is possible in this temporal life can possibly save us … we need a miracle. We need something beyond us to save us.

And that’s the point: when we are on the brink of death from failure, illness, addiction, heartbreak, depression, or whatever – when you are at the edge of the abyss of death you know with every fiber of your being that you are finite, this world and reality are temporary, and you desperately stand in need of a salvation which is beyond you and impossible by this world’s standards. This is what the gospel offers – a promise that there is a great and deeper Truth that we cannot fully comprehend which is beyond us and is enfolding us and is giving our lives purpose, integrity, meaning, and salvation.

Now some will say this is an escapist’s dream to ward off the specter of death. And this is the risk – the ultimate gamble of our Christian life. For the truth claimed by the Gospel isn’t about verifiable scientific measurable facts contained within our experience; but about a greater Reality and Truth beyond our meager and finite lives – a truth which we will not experience until this world passes away and the Reign of God is fully realized.

It is a risk – a great gamble; however, it is one we are drawn into like Lucy through the wardrobe because we have been caught up in a captivating love story of faith we know as the Word of God which we encounter in Scripture. And once we have had a brief taste of the promises of God, we cannot turn back and we will not settle for anything less than participation in this great love story. The Gospel is true, and it is fantastic, otherworldly, and beyond our experience.

It all sounds really too good to be true, doesn’t it? By our own reasoning and experience, the whole gospel sounds too good to be true. We proclaim a God who created the vast cosmos, and sustains it, and created you and me and … even more incredibly, gives a damn about you and me and our meager lives – so much so that he sent his Son into this world among us, to live and die for you and me so that we might live fully and freely for each other and for God.

This is incredible, unbelievable and in the face of the bad news we hear all the time it really does sound too good to be true. Or maybe, just maybe … it is so good it must be true. That was the opinion of J.R.R. Tolkien, the Oxford English professor and devout Roman Catholic who authored the Lord of the Rings. In an essay over 50 years ago, he argued that the gospel story is not only the perfect fairy tale but is actually the root of all fantasy, because it tells the deeply true and ultimately joyful story of humanity – fallen and redeemed – and God’s passionate love affair with us in spite of us and God’s tenacious quest to love us back to life and redeem us.

We hold a paradox in our faith: things are simultaneously unbelievable and true. The whole of Scripture points to this paradoxical reality. Genesis proclaims God created us and cares about us; ridiculous but true. Prophets declare God’s love for us even when we fall away and reject God; unbelievable, but true. Mary’s song, which we will hear in a few weeks, proclaiming a reversal where all who are hungry would be fed; beyond our experience, but true. Colossians declares that we are more than the sum of our past failures and shortcomings, that God has in fact nailed the record that stands against us to the cross; highly doubtful, but true. And at the end of all this Revelation promises that God will wipe every tear from our eyes and create a new heaven and earth and dwell with all of us in peace – sheer fantasy, but true!

The Bible makes amazing, extraordinary claims about a God who is far beyond us yet who also knows us intimately and wants to redeem us, heal us, and love us – claims which sound too good to be true, yet when we hear them we cannot help but believe them on some level and live our lives according to their truth. It is the promise which is more than we can ask for or even imagine – it is a promise big enough to save me and you.