Remember What You Know

Advent 1: Proper 27C: Job 19:23-27a; Psalm 17:1-9

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

November 9, 2025

Good morning St. Aidan’s, and welcome to Advent. If perhaps you’re thinking (to evoke Mary) how can this be?, I hear you. We observe an extended, seven-week Advent at St. Aidan’s (this is our ninth year), along with a growing number of congregations in and beyond the Episcopal Church, as well as United Methodist and Lutheran congregations. We are part of a movement to reclaim Advent away from consumerist, secular-Christmas culture that casts the season as so many pieces of chocolate, Legos, or bourbon to enjoy the countdown to Christmas.^[1] Instead, inspired by early Christian examples of longer Advent practice, this way of observing the season seeks to recall and ground ourselves in the heart and purpose of the season, which is to prepare us for, to alertly anticipate, and to warmly welcome in the coming of Christ. That arrival is also not simply of the baby Jesus at Christmas – the first coming or Advent – but is of the kingdom of justice and peace that Christ the adult announced and embodied. That second Advent, the coming of Christ and the in-breaking of the kingdom, is the story that Advent always leads with—whether the season is four or seven weeks long. Only toward the very end of the season does it turn us toward the story of Jesus’ birth. And so in the gift of a longer Advent, we are invited to center ourselves in the vision of God’s just reign, to receive the deeply transformative, hopeful, message that the God of peace is with us, strengthening us to receive and actively participate in the kingdom.

The readings assigned to us this morning – readings we share with congregations who are not yet observing Advent – call us to a strengthened steadiness, steeped in the peace of God’s reign even as events in the wider world may inspire anxiety. They challenge us to remember, to reclaim, to be grounded in who we are and what Christ has already shown us and called us to manifest.

That call to a grounded, steady faith is especially prominent in the Apostle Paul’s second letter to the community at Thessalonica. “As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we beg you, kindred, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed,” he writes (2 Thess 2:1-2a). The word for “coming” here is παρουσία, adventus as it would be rendered in Latin, from which the term Advent derives. Paul is referring to the coming of the risen and ascended Christ back among the people to gather them and all creation into a fearsome, transformative, ultimately renewing process of creation’s completion. The problem seems to be that some among their community are interpreting the moment differently, and to anxious effect, that the “day of the Lord,” a vision of a final sequence of events, has come. But no, Paul says, not so. Do not let yourselves be deceived, vulnerable as you are in your anxiety and fear. Remember what I told you, he says (2 Thess 2:2b-3, 5). He might have added, be grounded in the words of our Psalm: “my footsteps hold fast to the ways of your law; in your paths my feet shall not stumble” (Ps 17:5). And if we should stuble, as humans inevitably do, we might pray as today’s Psalm famously appears in the daily office: “Keep us, O God, as the apple of your eye; hide us under the shadow of your wings” (Ps 17:8).  Remember who you are. And when memory fails, reach out to the God who loves us unconditionally, under whose protective wings we are invited to rest.

Our Gospel passage from Luke, while quite different from Paul’s letter, also demonstrates a response to potentially anxious distraction. We are shown a scenario in which Jesus is confronted by Sadducees, a group among several Jewish communal schools of thought and practice with which Jesus was in conversation. Jesus’ interlocutors present a scenario whose logic presses a paradox that would seem to undermine the possibility of resurrection life. Citing the practice of Levirate marriage in which brothers would marry the widow of their elder, deceased, childless brother, in order to carry on the (highly patriarchal) family line, the Sadducees ask to whom the woman would be married in the resurrection (Luke 20:28-33).^[2] It seems impossible that a woman could be married to more than one man, despite the examples of patriarchs in the Old Testament married to more than one woman. In any event, the Sadducees’ scenario causes Jesus no concern. He cuts right through the apparent contradiction and says, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Luke 20:34-35). The rules of this age are not those of the next.^[3] Risen life is not ordered by marriage. Nor, as numerous early Christian texts put together with this line, is gender differentiated in the ways we see in this world, for in Christ “there is no male and female.”^[4] In Christ’s risen, collective body, the categories by which humans classify and order one another are transcended, oppression is eradicated, and creation itself is transformed. The kingdom of God, opened out to us even now, even as its full realization awaits, calls us into a posture of anticipation, to practice its ways even as the world around us causes us pain, confusion, and anxiety. In the face of distortions, Jesus stands confidently and calls us to join him, remembering who he is and who we are in him.

He calls us to remember, because in the swirl and chaos of our world it can be all too easy to forget. We talked about this pattern in Bible study at the start of yesterday’s San Francisco Deanery meeting, reflecting on the Second Thessalonians passage and this moment in our world. “Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you?” one of my conversation partners underlined from Second Thessalonians (2 Thess 2:5). As he quoted and talked about it, I was reminded of a scene in one of my favorite fantasy/sci fi books, The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper.^[5] In it, the eleven-year-old protagonist, Will Stanton, discovers that he is an “Old One” with power to travel through time and to stand with other Old Ones to fight the shadowy forces of evil and division that threatened the world. But though he now knew this facet of who he was, he had not yet been fully brought into his full stature, his power. In a vulnerable moment he found himself alone with the eldest of the Old Ones, a Merlin-like figure called Merriman, as well as a powerful, courage-inspiring woman reverently called The Lady. They stand together in a chamber outside of whose walls the shadowy forces of evil lift up their cries, seeking to lure the vulnerable Will out through a small door. The Lady and Merriman hold hands with him, but from outside the walls suddenly Will suddenly hears things that tempt him to break the circle. First, what sounds like a suffering puppy. Then, a voice that sounds like his mother, urgently calling him. In the moment of panic and uncertainty he forgets that what he is hearing is a distortion, and he lets go of their hands, rushing toward the door. He had forgotten, for a moment, who he was, who he was becoming. As he recovers, as he makes sense of what had just happened, Merriman and the Lady explain the tenuous moment and call him to grounded awareness in the midst of his vulnerability. Merriman says, “They have failed with one emotion; they will try to trap you through another next.” Then the Lady interjects, “but it must not be fear… Remember that, Will. You will be frightened, often, but never fear them.”^[6] You will be frightened, often, but never fear them. The evil that sought to undermine them could never, in fact destroy him or any of them. Remember who you are, they tell him. Remember your call, they might well have said.

Remember what you know. As Job proclaims in our first reading, “I know that my redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth… and in my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:25-26). Stand in the strength of who you are, in the promise of risen life. Though events in our world greatly disturb and frighten you, though you may be anxious for your wellbeing for very real reasons, yet stay grounded in the God who has created you, redeemed you, who proclaims liberation of the captives, freedom of the oppressed, whose in-breaking kingdom promises healing and restoration, hope for the broken-hearted, peace among all people. This is what Advent opens out to us this morning, friends: an invitation to be people of peace, to be beacons of hope, compassionate and steady, held by one another’s hands and under the wings of God’s undying love. Amen.

^[1] See the website of the Advent Project: http://www.theadventproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/rationale.pdf. See also William Peterson’s further development of the idea in What Are We Waiting For? Re-Imagining Advent for Time to Come (New York: Church Publishing, 2017).

^[2] Justo Gonzalez, Luke: A Theological Account (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), 234-235.

^[3] Gonzalez, 235

^[4] Galatians 3:28. This link is explored in, for example, Dale Martin, “The Queer History of Galatians 3:28: ‘No Male and Female,’” in Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 77-90.

^[5] Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising (New York: Atheneum, 1974).

^[6] Cooper, 40