11-28-17 - On the Clouds

Rolling dark clouds are a staple of sci-fi movies, and they don’t generally presage a good time. When clouds start moving rapidly in a glowering sky, you know Someone or Something is coming, with or without benign intentions.

This is what I envision when I read the words attributed to Jesus in the gospel passage with which we begin the season of Advent: “Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.”

Jesus does not say when this event will take place, but he pictures a cataclysmic End that launches the great Beginning that will have no end. And anyone paying attention should have noticed that a return implies a departure; they thought he was going to finish his business then and there, but he sets up a later and much, much bigger event.

One of the few science fiction movies I’ve seen in recent years was Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar, in which intrepid scientists travel through space seeking a hospitable planet to colonize, since human behavior has rendered our own earth toxic to human life.      In Nolan’s vision, salvation comes from humankind cracking the cosmic secrets of space-time-gravity to access a new habitat. Our Christian vision of salvation has a similar theme – but its movement is from the cosmic to earthly. For us it is God, the author of the mysteries of the universe, who transcended them to come into our dying world, to plant a seed of healing among us. Christ’s redemption includes the restoration of the universe – and what we might call a re-colonization, as the “elect” are gathered from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

These apocalyptic images remind us where our Christ-story ultimately ends – not in the manger, not on the cross, not even with the empty tomb, but with the New Heavens and a New Earth. When we pray, “Thy Kingdom come,” that is what we are inviting into being, that eternal reality that we can occupy here and now, in glimpses and bursts.

Today pray very slowly through the Lord’s Prayer, and pause to reflect on that phrase when you come to it. How does that petition open up the other phrases in the prayer Jesus taught his followers to pray? What does it open up in you?

The great Advent hymn Lo, he comes with clouds descending captures the cosmic grandeur of what lies before us. God’s future is both now and yet to come. We live in it, and we live into it.

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