When I was in high school, I had an English teacher named Miss Hayes who was famous for giving away the endings of the books we read. In fact, she’d do it deliberately. On the first day of class, she’d stand up front with the list of novels and short stories we were going to read that semester and speed-talk through every plot, like a movie reviewer. And because she was so good at it, we were always drawn into the story—spellbound 16-year-olds, ready to go home and tackle Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter—and then, with no spoiler alert…she’d tell us the ending. Every time. We’d groan, and she’d grin, and say, “The most important thing about a story isn’t what happens. It’s how it happens. I’m telling you the ending so you can read the story backwards.”
That’s what Jesus is doing here, in our passage from Matthew. And it’s what the church is doing, too, the first week of Advent. The Christian Year has turned over again, and once more, we start to tell the story of Christ coming into the world and redeeming it, of God entering human life and history. We have a whole year to tell it: Advent to Christmas to Epiphany; Lent to Easter to Pentecost; Ordinary Time to anything but ordinary. Sunday by Sunday, it’s the big sweep of the story we tell, Jesus’ birth to death and resurrection. And because we know the ending—that God in Christ has defeated the powers of death itself—we tell it in a certain way. We begin with the end. We read the story backwards.
Reading the story backwards means we know where we’re headed. God is going to redeem this world. That is our destination, the omega at the other end of the alpha. It is the central purpose of God in history. Everything we do, in the Christian Year, starts there, with that terminus. Some call it the end of the world and start fixating on when and where and who gets left behind. But it’s not a threat to scare the daylights out of us. It’s a promise, to stir hope in us—a central, holy intention. God wants to redeem this world. Not just some of it; all of it. And God will. Christ will bring about an end to all that is contrary to the ways of God.
Reading the story backwards means we know where we’re headed. It doesn’t mean we can predict the future, or get directions to it, or read the mind of God. Jesus is pretty clear about that in this passage: “About that day and hour, he says, when the Son of Man comes, no one knows—not the angels in heaven or the Son, but only the Father. Your job is to keep awake. Keep awake, keep alert, and keep watch. Look for the signs that God is doing a new thing.”
And on the first Sunday of Advent, that’s exactly what we do. We light the candle of hope, and we settle in to watch. We look for what God is doing right now, to liberate creation. In a few weeks, we’ll go to Bethlehem. But before we meet the baby, we have to meet the man he will grow to be. We have to meet our Maker in our Redeemer, so we can tell the world what child is this, who was born in Bethlehem, and is headed to Jerusalem.
I’m telling you the ending so you can read the story backwards. The first people to hear Matthew’s gospel really resonated with that idea. Things were so bad, they thought the world was about to end any day now. I can relate. Maybe you can, too. There are mornings when I don’t want to read the headlines, and when I do, I can’t believe what I’m reading. There are days when I go about with a sick feeling in my stomach, fearing for what is happening to our nation, our world, our planet. Has there ever been a time when the end of the world seemed as possible as it does, now? Has there ever been a better time for God to step in with a little holy intention to redeem the mess we make? Come, thou long expected Jesus and Advent bring it on.
But when we despair about the state of things, maybe we can take that feeling of urgency as a gift, or at least a holy opportunity. What if lighting the candle of hope means we pledge to kindle it, wherever we can? What if Jesus’ words in this passage are meant to give us some new verbs to put with the old familiar nouns, until we can read the story differently?
The disciples need to do that. Their main interest in this scene is timing: When will this happen, Jesus? When will God step in to right the boat and bring about justice and fix all that is out of control? Their question sounds as if they don’t think they can make a difference, in the escalating shadows. They might as well turn tail and run or at least find a good hiding spot.
Jesus responds by redirecting them. He points to a fig tree, something as familiar to them as an oak tree is to us. “Look at the fig tree,” Jesus says, “and learn a lesson from it. As soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is around the corner. That’s how it will be with the Son of Man, when he is very near the gates. Look for new leaves. Look for what God is already doing. Wake up to my words. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”
From the fig tree, learn its lesson…from the fig tree and its leaves. Where have we heard those words “fig leaves” before? The Bible is truly an echo chamber. A word that appears in one story may reappear in another, many chapters even books later. And asking “Where have I heard these words before?” is a way of listening for echoes of them and pondering what those echoes might mean. And when I hear “fig leaves,” I hear Genesis chapter three, and Adam and Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. I remember the story about our human beginnings, and the first time that human beings fell short and tried to hide from God. They sewed fig leaves together, which didn’t really work out the way they thought it would. Hiding from God never does.
If our first instinct, as scared human beings way back in Genesis, was to take fig leaves and cover ourselves with them, maybe Jesus in this passage is giving us something else to do with them, and so another way to end the story. Fig leaves aren’t for covering up what you don’t want to see, or don’t want God to see. Fig leaves are lessons in how God grows things. They’re signs of what God is already making green. You don’t need to put your head down and hide from the evil and hopelessness of the day. Lift up your head with hope! Read those fig leaves backwards, and God will turn your paralysis into partnership with the redemptive work of Christ.
And don’t we all need that? So much can happen in a year, and has, since last year. You and I know people whose hearts were filled and whose hearts were broken, and even some whose hearts were mended, after a long time of waiting. We’ve seen floods and fires and wars and elections and new laws and sweeping changes that claim to move us forward but might be sinking us back to a time we thought was behind us. Another Advent comes, another Christian year begins, and we start the cycle again. God’s way of marking time is like a spiral staircase that we travel together, trying to remember and keep alive the promises we know are true. But we need one another to do it, so where we’ve been doesn’t become where we stay crouched and hidden. When we know where we’re headed, we can read the sacred story backwards.
My aunt and uncle used to come through Atlanta, every fall, in their Class A motorhome, on their annual trek from Maine to California. When my uncle retired, they decided they would leave Massachusetts and live half the year in the wilds of northern Maine, on the border of Canada—that’s what my uncle wanted—and half the year in Pasadena, in my aunt’s childhood home in California—that’s what she wanted. The cold north for him; the sunny west coast for her. Every year, when the snow began to fly, they’d head south in the motorhome, stopping to see friends and family along the way to California, including our family, in Atlanta. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Like clockwork. We always looked forward to it. They’d pull into our driveway, park the behemoth motorhome, let the dog out (his name was Turbo), and after a lot of kissing and hugging, join us to make dinner and spend a wonderful evening. They were the easiest guests ever; they brought their own hotel on wheels. And they were always eager to join us in whatever family activity was happening: a high school basketball game, a seminary chapel service, a neighborhood party.
After thirteen years of these visits, we had traditions we looked forward to. My uncle always brought scallops that he’d dug himself at the beach. My aunt always brought a new kind of tea that we pretended to like. Turbo the dog always bolted for the woods, after my uncle assured us he wouldn’t, and my husband and son would spend the next hour looking for the dog. And after supper, which always included those scallops, and a recitation of my uncle’s favorite poem, “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” my uncle would go to the piano. He had a repertoire of show tunes and folk songs and hymns that he played, and we’d all sing. I’d sit on the piano bench beside him, as I did when I was a little girl. My uncle would play and sing with joy and gusto, and then at nine o’clock sharp, he and my aunt would head out the door to the motorhome to bed. The next morning after breakfast, away they’d go, with promises to be back next year.
A few years ago, my uncle told us the motorhome was getting to be too much. From now on, they would be flying from Maine to California each Thanksgiving, and back again each spring, which meant our annual visits in Atlanta were coming to an end. My uncle was matter of fact about it. “We’ve had great times,” he kept saying on that last visit, “great times but when we leave tomorrow, we won’t be coming back. No, we won’t be coming back.”
That night at dinner, my uncle interrupted our long-established traditions with a new thing. Suddenly he told us he wanted to recite a poem he’d written himself, when he was fifteen years old, about the wonder and mystery of life; he recited it twice. At the piano, he played a song he’d written in Vietnam, as a young medic, about an eighteen-year-old soldier he’d taken care of, who had then gone out on patrol and died. The song had a refrain which was clearly the question my uncle had been asking himself as a young man, over fifty years ago: “Why, oh why, did he have to die? He died for you, and he died for me; he died for a promise we’d all be free….”
My uncle had never shared these things with us, and he rarely if ever talked about the Vietnam War. But that last visit he did. I think he was reading his life backwards. He knew the ending: we are in God’s hands, in every season of life. But there were pieces of himself he hadn’t shown us and had maybe even kept hidden. And now, he wanted us to see them—to read his life, and these stories, in God’s time.
I wonder what might happen this year if we took a lesson from the fig tree: took our stories—the ones we’ve been hiding in, and the ones that have hidden us—and wrapped them up in God’s time, every piece of them. Every stone upon stone, whether building up or crumbling. Read them backwards, with holy intention. Because we know where we are headed: God is going to redeem this world. We don’t know when and we don’t know how, and we don’t know how long the labor pains are going to last. But God in Christ will come. And we will keep awake, because that is our job: to be part of things.
It’s Advent, everyone. Happy New Year. And come, O come, Lord Jesus.
Amen.