I think that everybody recognizes the language of this reading from the gospel. It is kind of the stock in trade of a lot of the televangelists. There is to be this ghastly scene at the end of the world where the sun is going to be darkened and the moon is going to lose its light and the stars are going to fall from heaven. I remember when I was a little kid hearing this stuff and it sounded Cartoon-like, the stuff of comic books. It was trivial, I suppose. And then the more you hear it, the more inured do we come to it and then we just ignore it, I think.

But when the Jews created this kind of language, as they did around one hundred and fifty years before our era, they really were trying to say something of enormous human significance. The language is called apocalyptic language. This is the kind of language that is used both in the readings at the end of the church year and the beginning of the church year, because they both talk about "the End" time. So, I would like to talk a little bit about that and see how that may illuminate the time we spend at advent.

For the Jews, life was pretty short. I mean, by the age of sixteen, two thirds of the population would be dead. By the age of six one third would be dead. So, Jesus would have been a pretty old man at thirty-three or thirty-five when he was finally executed. Life was difficult, life was tough. Disease was epidemic and all kinds of people suffered from all kinds of serious ailments. And so, in that sense, life was difficult. Economically as well, life was extremely difficult; if most of the people were not existing in a state of extreme pauperism they were pretty close to it. But, the Jews, at their best, did not locate the absolute difficulty of life in those economic or social or physical terms. Rather, as I said, at their best, and they were not often like us at their best, but when they were at their best, they saw the difficulty of life as consisting in a struggle of trying to be good, trying to be faithful to God in a world where that is anything but an easy thing to accomplish.

And, of course, it is not just in their world, that life is hard. We in the west have a somewhat easier time in that we have all kinds of distractions: "when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping" -- that is our byword. And so we can dissipate our concentration, we can ignore vast ranges of reality. And these people could not escape from it. On the other hand, our life is more difficult, because I can turn on the television tonight and find out what is going on in Bosnia and see all those starving people in North Vietnam, the floods in Somalia, and the violence that pervades so much of this planet at this very moment. So, that complicates life. But as I said, we have all of these devices whereby we can simply blinker ourselves against all that and, in fact, we do.

So, we need to work very hard to reappropriate what this language meant for those people, because they thought that was the absolute struggle and it was so big that it was going to involve the entire universe, even the cosmic forces: the planets, the sun, the moon and the stars. And they devised this kind of hyper-dramatic language when in their history, and it happened often enough for the Jews, the powers of evil seemed to be so monumental and so pervasively arrayed against them that they thought "unless God does something then we are all hell-bent; we are doomed to destruction; we will not survive".

So, they thought, believing in God, that there was going to be this final, absolutely cataclysmic battle between God as supreme good and the forces of evil dispersed on the earth. And because this was the deepest level of struggle, and we are talking about the deepest meaning of the whole cosmic enterprise, not just the human enterprise, it is not surprising that they cast it in these large, large terms.

There is apocalyptic language and now we have to figure out some further implications, because for the Jews the apocalypse is not just going to happen to them. I am trying to say this: that the Jews did not have, by dint of their religion, the radically individualistic sense of themselves that we do in the west today. In other words, the destruction that threatened by the forces of evil were not just going to kill me, they were going to wipe out all of the world.

This is contrary to what I was told when I was growing up as a little kid in Catholic school; the nuns always told us, "your business is to save your soul". That is wrong, because that basically privatizes the whole work of religion and isolates me from everybody else. For the Jews, what was threatened was not just their own individual well-being, but the well-being of humanity. Again, a small footnote: this is the Jews at their best; they kept falling into this sort of tribal idea that what was really being threatened was "me and my crowd". But at their best their fear was for the destruction of all people, just as conversely their hope was only real when it was the hope for everybody. I cannot just hope for myself, to hope for myself is to fail God. My hope is real only to the extent that it embraces everybody.

But there is something that is, I think, peculiar to our possible interpretation of these texts which we can see by looking at this cosmic dimension. The Jews were not living in a world where they were in danger of so polluting their world that nobody could live there-- we are. I mean, the massive forest fires in Sri Lanka, for example, which went on for weeks killing all kinds of people. Why was this done? This was done because they were simply clear-cutting and destroying vast ranges of forest in that part of the world. And, of course, we are all party to that sort of indifference to the world that we live in. We, in North America, live in what has been called "the throw-away society"; we can always get another one of any thing. And, of course, with throwing away we pollute what seems to be endless amounts and we create further pollution by endless replication of the stuff that we threw away that we did not want so we can get new ones.

I just spent a couple of days in Columbus Ohio. Columbus is a major city -- it is three quarters of a million people -- they do not recycle anything in that city -- nothing. This is a trivial example of a kind of almost studied indifference to the world and, above all, to our responsibilities for this world and for each other. Because, to be faithful to each other means, as we now know better than we have ever known in the history of the race, we have to be faithful to the earth too.

So, what does it have to do with advent? Well, advent is a time of expectation; it is a time of hope. So these readings on the first Sunday of advent give us the opportunity to question ourselves. What is it we hope for? What do I really hope for and how broad is my hope? Is it just for me, or my family, or my friends, or is it for the world? And then, what are my expectations? And how can I act on those expectations, so that God is not going to find a kind of wasteland when He finishes off the human project. I propose that we cannot celebrate Christmas adequately if we do not use this time to examine our hopes, to alter our expectations so that when we celebrate Christmas, which is the celebration of this man Jesus whose life and death and resurrection is a playing out of the cosmic battle between good and evil. Well, His arrival, His appearance; isn't that what we are supposed to be thinking about, celebrating, and shaping our hopes in the light of?