Rupture, Not Rapture

Advent 1A-25

Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Isaiah calls us, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord… that God may teach us God’s ways…and that we may walk in God’s paths” (Isaiah 2:3). Today is the beginning of a new year in our worship calendar told mostly by Matthew. Seeking God on the mountaintop is a recurring theme.

There’s one mountain in Northern Colorado that calls out to everyone living along the front range. At 14, 259 feet, you can see Long’s Peak anywhere from Denver to Ft. Collins. It’s a six hour climb to the top, nearly one vertical mile above the trail head. It is a slog, but up there, life is a party. Many couples got married on top of Long’s Peak.  In the mid-70’s, half of a 12-piece brass band assembled on the summit to play the Star-Spangled Banner, and Nearer My God to Thee.  Strangers celebrate like old friends.

The day I was there, there was someone doing a headstand while his friends took a picture.  Another drove golf balls over the diamond face.  That day was especially magical. We watched a glider silently soar over our heads, piloted by someone who had overcome a different set of obstacles, riding the spiraling winds up from the mountains to carry their plane to incredible heights.

Mountain tops are wonderful, enchanted places, where nothing seems out of place except the ordinary.  They are foreboding, lighting storms are common after 12 noon on Long’s Peak. They are majestic, even sacred places which lift our minds and spirits to God, but you dare not linger there too long.  The gospel of Matthew makes frequent use of this theopoetic metaphor. The view from the mountain top invites us to take a wider perspective. It gifts us with a transformed way of seeing and hearing that is ours to keep and hold onto upon the return.  The mountain top would seem to be the perfect lookout point for the first Sunday of Advent.

Jesus sat and spoke to the disciples from somewhere on the Mount of Olives across the Kidron valley from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.  At that point, the disciples still don’t know what’s about to hit them although Jesus has told them on three separate occasions.

The Day of the Lord may come like a thief in the night. We are thrust to the forefront. We are called upon to bear the weight of discipleship. The kingdom arrives like the floodwaters that bore up Noah’s ark (Matthew 24: 38, 43). The moment of decision confronts us with a challenge to wage faith with our own words and actions.

Advent—this discipline of waiting, of watching, of expecting God’s liberating grace to break in upon our short and shallow lives—shocks us from complacency when the moment comes. “God desires to love others unconditionally in and through us. Those who live with such a faith can truly be called God’s instruments. God wants light to shine through us, and so our first response to this call is simply to heed it and remain open to divine grace, so that God might shine” (Richard Rohr, “A Grace-Filled Yes,” Daily Meditations, 11/30/25). Advent gifts us with spiritual spectacles to see somewhat more somewhat more clearly when the time comes to love and serve God.

“Eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage” (Mt. 24:38) as they did in the days of Noah will not put you in the goat line as opposed to the sheep line on the day of Christ. The people who lived in the days of Noah or the unlucky person whose house was about to be robbed are not singled out by Jesus in today’s gospel because they were more sinful than any others. Instead, their mess up was a failure of imagination. They were unprepared for grace when it came because they thought nothing could or would ever change. They were too cynical for faith to get ahold of them.

Cynicism may appear fashionable, or make you seem smarter or more cosmopolitan, but cynicism has deathly consequences. We risk accepting politics as usual, or accepting lies as truth, or becoming complacent in the face of injustice, or fearfully assigning blame to victims and outsiders, and thinking too small. We risk being obtuse and unaware to wonder and beauty at play all around us. We have been to the mountain, at the table, and in the waters of the font, from encounter with the Word of God and at prayer. We carry a little bit of that magic with us into our daily lives.

Today, we are called to journey by faith, not to a place, but to that day when “they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks” (Isaiah 2:4b). We live by faith and not by sight.We walk with Jesus into valleys of shadow like frail and mortal angels shining the borrowed light of heaven upon our path. We do not know what lies ahead. Yet we remain confident knowing the end of every journey return to our beginning in God.

Sadly, since about the fifth or sixth century, Christians in the West began to swap the view from the mountain top with a set of lenses created from Greek philosophy and Roman imperialism. This Greco-Roman lens distorts and obscures the gospel witness, including our understanding of texts like from Matthew today. Many Christians see things in the bible narrative that aren’t there. This distorted view has grown and compounded until literally the bible everyone thinks they know by heart is about escape from this fallen world either to life in heaven or eternal conscious torment in hell.  The so-called rapture is not a biblical idea. On the cross Jesus became the one left behind. When all others got swept up in the spirit of violence against him Jesus was the only one not caught up in it.  (Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, pp. 33-62)

When we remove our Greco-Roman-colored glasses the message of the Torah, the prophets, Jesus, and the first disciples’ changes. We are blessed with scholarship which has begun to help us remove the Greek and Roman lens our theological forebears laid over it. A new kind of Christianity comes into view that is actually very, very old. Our ancient ancestors in faith went to the mountaintop. Planted deeper than original sin is original blessing. The Spirit works tirelessly and creatively to liberate, reform, and renew us along with all creation. God calls us to inhabit the sacred dream of the peaceable kingdom like the one Isaiah foretold here on earth as in heaven. Advent is not about rapture but rupture. God’s rupture brings transformation and change. (Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Advent 1A)

You must remember the view from the mountaintop.  Remember that you are mine, God says. Remember the fellowship you experienced with strangers, for you are all my children. Remember the feast of joy prepared for you at the heavenly banquet. Remember you belong to the kin-dom of God.  Follow my way of the cross. Our spiritual journey runs from the mountain to the world.  Our heavenly home on God’s holy mountain extends into the world God so passionately loves.