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S. Advent 1.24 Luke 21:25-36

“There will be distress of peoples in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world… but when these things begin to take place, look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

I guess it shouldn’t surprise us when the things Jesus says will happen actually… happen! But it does surprise us. Or worse, we don’t even notice that his words are being fulfilled. It’s like we’re reading in the Narnia book “The Silver Chair” Wed. evenings, when Aslan tells Jill on his mountain to always remember, remember, remember the signs he’s given her—repeat them morning and night…

Because; in Aslan’s Country, the air is clear and our minds are clear, but down in the world, the air and our minds are not so clear and the signs and their fulfillment will look very different than we expect—so much so, that we can easily miss them or mistake them for coincidence or that idol we call “Chance”. And so it happened to Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum on their quest to find the lost prince, Rilian. They muffed or missed the first 3 of 4 signs and only heeded the last one out of sheer desperation.

And so it is with us! Well; so it often is, I’m sad to say, with me. I think it was only a few years ago, maybe just 3?—the last time I preached on this Gospel? that I noticed it, the quite obvious fulfillment of the sign I quoted at the outset. Did you notice it? It’s this…

“Distress of peoples in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting with fear and foreboding of what is coming on the world.”

You got it, right? Yes? No? GLOBAL WARMING! Sea level rise! We’re all gonna drown, or melt, or drown AND melt at the same time! It struck me with special power a month or so ago reading an article in “The New Yorker” on how the Greenland ice sheet is melting way, way faster than even the most dire global warming models predicted.

I know you’ve heard this tale: “because we’re burning fossil fuels at a record clip, CO2 is building up in the atmosphere with a “greenhouse” effect making the whole earth much warmer and more humid than it should be, which will melt the polar ice caps and the rising heat and sea level will flood-melt our major cities and cause a cataclysm unless we all buy one of Musk’s coal powered cars and quick like!”

The good news in this bad news is that… we are well able to stop burning so much fossil fuel and switch to wind and solar and electric cars and together we can save the planet! Except, maybe we can’t?

Very sheepishly and evasively, the New Yorker article admitted that the melting of the Greenland ice cap (which is very rapid!) simply cannot be explained by greenhouse gas as the culprit. Scientists don’t know what’s causing it! And there is much perplexity among scientists as they’ve discovered (drilling down in the Greenland ice sheet, seeing a record of past global weather) that wild swings of 10-20 degrees Celsius in a few decades or centuries is not anomalous but typical for Planet Earth—and for reasons scientists cannot account for!

The stability in global temperature at the current level turns out to be the anomaly! The article threw out theories about the sun being closer because of gravity fluctuations, orbital shifts (what? The world is getting warmer because the sun is getting closer and burning a bit hotter? What a crazy idea!). The author admitted the world’s leading scientists are… perplexed, even consumed with fear and foreboding over what is coming on the world!

The father of a friend of mine was considered a world-class climatologist, from the ‘nineties through the ‘naughties, Oxford educated and knighted by the Queen. He said: weather is a non-linear system. Increasing atmospheric C02 levels 50% won’t necessarily warm the planet 50%. It might instead warm 5% or actually cool off 20%—because, with non-linear systems, small inputs can have huge outputs and vice versa. The butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo can be the domino triggering a hurricane in Mexico next week. Non-linear systems like the weather defy human prediction AND management!

Yet… this is the great hubris of the modern age! We think we’re so smart with quantum theory and nuclear weapons that we can control the weather because it is a convenient truth for us (see what I did there?) to think that the thing threatening our stable planet is the fuel for our houses, cars, and planes and by managing that we can control the weather…

But now, more serious, empirical-minded scientists are realizing something much bigger is making the ice caps melt and the seas rise and roar and the storms get more ferocious. At the rate Greenland is melting, the Gulf Stream could stop in as little as 30 years, and Europe would freeze and North America would roast.

Roh-oh Scoob! It’s almost like… it’s not us, but GOD WHO CONTROLS THE WEATHER! Almost like that 😉

“Huh. So what Jesus says about people losing their sh… uh, minds over seas rising, roaring, and the planet warming (personally I like the warmer weather 😉 and this being a sign that the End really is near! is happening… NOW!?!”

Uhm, so it would appear—if you put more stock in what Jesus says than [Thomas Dolby voice] “Science!” [humming] Da, Du Duhm, dumb… and even Science! is starting to run scared.

Because the devil (the prince of the air of this planet) has clouded our minds, it’s not always easy to see. The thought: “We’re all gonna die!, maybe?, and soonish?” sparks fear that makes us bury our heads in convenient illusions, twirling 4 leaf clovers, not stepping on cracks in the sidewalk passing by the cemetery—as if that will save us.

Actually we will all die! (unless you’re Elijah or Enoch ;-)—and far sooner than most like to think. The mortality rate on this planet is well over 99.9999%!

But Jesus turns bad news into good. This planet and all its inhabitants will pass away. But Jesus’ words (even more than “The Dude” 😉 abide. They’ll all be fulfilled, as he says, in their own way, in their own time…

But, instead of fear and foreboding, this can fill us with joy and wonder! Jesus is engaged in a massive tear-down and rebuild of us and our planet to get rid of the shh…in, make us new, like him. By his word and sacrament we hear and receive today, the project is well under way! And Jesus says, gently, with a grin, I’m sure, that…

When wind and wave rise, roar, look up (not “straighten up” as the ESV has) but look up (like Christmas morning) lift up your heads (‘cause the only difficult thing about the Zombie Apocalypse, for us, is pretending we’re not excited!…;-) because Jesus has it all, everything, under his control, and works even the bad of the cross for the good of Easter. So look up, lift up your heads…

Because your redemption draws near. Even so… Come, Lord Jesus! Amen.