CSI, crime scene investigation: it’s a hit, both the original Las Vegas edition, and now the Miami version. What makes us watch is partly the watchfulness of the forensic detectives. They see things we don’t. They look into things deeply and detect what we miss. They know how to look intently, beneath the surface of the obvious, to what has been going on under the skin of a victim or in the arrangement of the apparently normal. They work backward from death to the events of life that led to it.

If only they could do the opposite. If only they could read the signs of the times and teach us to read them so as to prevent our perishing. In some ways this is what Jesus wants us to do: learn to read the signs of impending doom in order to prevent our perishing. We have to learn to see. There will be signs, Jesus says. Signs in the heavens — the sun, the moon, and the stars; signs on the earth — nations confused and distressed by the roaring seas and waves. People will fear and faint. The foundations of everyday life will be shaken. And then the Son of Man will appear in great power and glory, coming in a cloud. When these things begin to take place, Jesus says, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

Now, if I had preached this sermon on Sunday, September 9, 2001, it might have been hard to connect to it. It might have seemed a quaint piece of religious wisdom for pre-modern times when people still worried about the end of the world. We might have read these words and said [wiping our brows], Whew, glad we don’t have to live like that anymore! But after airplanes have crashed our buildings and pension funds have crashed our retirement parties and U.S. troops have crashed Afghan caves and Iraqi strongholds, we are right back with those ancient ones, wiping our brows again and worrying over what is coming to pass. And if we’re not, maybe we should be.

The church season of Advent is all about what is coming to pass. Most of us think of it as a ramp-up time for Christmas. We do our Hanging of the Green services, attend Sunday school Christmas parties, and take up a global missions offering to show our commitment to announcing the birth of the world’s savior to the world. Six days a week we match those church priorities by trimming our own trees and decorating our houses, attending office Christmas parties, and giving gifts of love to those we love to symbolize the gift of God’s love in Christ. But Advent looks beyond the Christmas coming of God to the cosmic coming of God. Advent asks us to raise our heads beyond Bethlehem to Jerusalem, beyond the Christ child to cross of Christ, beyond the birth of the babe to the death of the deliverer. And yet, just when we succeed in doing that, just when we start getting serious about this season, slipping some sobriety into our celebrations, Jesus slips a little kick into our eggnog: he gives us reason to celebrate again.

Jesus asks us to refocus our Advent by looking up for the return of the redeemer. He asks us to look up for his second coming, which is the content of the cosmic coming of God at the end of all things. All through Advent we are to Look for the Coming God. And the word made flesh is ever fresh, because the coming God is ever coming to us with signs that are terrifying and hopeful at the same time. If we raise our heads to life and open our eyes, we can see signs of death and signs of life both, and see in them all signs of love. Faith looks at the world for signs of the coming God of love.

Sir John Polkinghorne is both an Anglican priest and a former professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge. He is also a Templeton Prize winner for his contributions on the relationship between religion and science. He was asked about how he looks at the bodily resurrection of Jesus and the end of times from both faith and science spectacles. From the view of science, he says, all you can do is to look at how living things die and come to the conclusion that we are all going to die. We are all going to end up in a grave like Jesus. And the wider cosmic observation is that the world will, too. Things are winding down, no matter how well wound the world is in its remarkable put-togetherness. When science looks at the world, it cannot see beyond the futility of all things. What is the point of it all?

Faith sees with resurrection eyes. We see beyond death to life, beyond futility to hope, beyond suffering to joy. We see the beauty and wonder of creation and believe that these are signs, too. Behind the fruitfulness and history of the world there is the will and purpose of a creator. … God’s purposes will not be frustrated by death, neither by human death not by cosmic death, and therefore God must have a further destiny awaiting — and awaiting the whole of creation beyond the end of the world. … the only grounds for thinking of it fundamentally lies in the faithfulness of God. [Interview with Michael Keas, from Research News (2003), cited by Martin Marty, in Context 35.18 (October 15, 2003): 8.]

Faith, then, is the most fundamental view of things, not science. If there is something beyond the senses, beyond the appearance of things, then we need to look up, not down. We need to look to the source of life and not just the reality of death. We need to read the signs of the times, but we need to read them for signs of life and hope as well as rightful reminders of death that keep us from foolishness.

This is where the fig tree parable comes in. Jesus says, Look, look at the fig tree and all the trees, as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Jesus wants us to look at the world for signs of life, even when so many see only signs of strife. The world is charged with the glory of God, as Hopkins put it. God is everywhere present, everywhere brimming with divinity right before us, calling for our attention. Stand up, raise your heads. Look! he says.

Barbara Brown Taylor is a wonderful preacher and theologian who spots things all around her that remind her of God. When she sees them and reports them, it’s kind of like a docent in a museum pointing out something in a painting that was right there before your eyes that you had missed. Once she shows you what you might see, you can’t imagine you missed it. Anyway, Taylor recalls when she was a little girl of 7. Her family moved to a new town, and a Methodist preacher came to her home. Before her parents could trap him in the living room, she led him outside where she had set up a nursery that would save tadpoles from the murderous neighbor boys. The next Sunday, she sat in church smiling at the preacher she was already in love with. He smiled back and then started preaching about how God’s care for the world is like unto a little girl’s care for a mess of tadpoles. Something in her clicked, and she has spent her life looking for signs of God everywhere — for God sightings, don’t you know?! When she became an Episcopal priest, it was natural to reflect upon how God’s presence could be seen in baptism and Holy Communion. But she never stopped looking for God outside the sanctuary. When I walked outside and looked at the smoking compost heap, she says, I saw a sacrament of death turning into life. When I used a bottle of white-out to correct a mistake, I remembered that my errors did not have to be permanent. … Everywhere I turned, the most insignificant things in the world were preaching little sermons to me. Everywhere I turned, the world was leaking light. [The Living Pulpit (July/September 2003) 2003, cited by Marty, Ibid.: 6.]

How good is that phrase? The world was leaking light! This is just what Jesus is saying about how we are permitted to look even at disasters and tragedies in nature, as signs that point to hope. We are to see beyond them to the coming God, who by the power of love makes all things new.

But to do so, to see the world and God that way, we cannot become weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, as Jesus says. These things blur our vision and make us drop our heads instead of raising them. These things make us vulnerable to perishing ourselves, instead of by our alertness to life making us able to endure and stand strong when the Son of Man returns.

When I first drafted this sermon, the Florida Marlins had just defeated the New York Yankees and taken a 3-2 lead in the World Series. Columnists everywhere, except in New York, announced that the Yankees were one loss from apocalypse. They took glee in seeing that the team that has now been in the Series 40 times, and six times in the last eight years, might be falling. The Evil Empire is coming undone, wrote Laura Vecsey joyfully in the Baltimore Sun. The Marlins have now won the Series, but at that moment people were rightly reading the signs, looking at events and seeing apocalypse. More bitingly, the papers noted that Yankees’ pitcher David Wells lasted only one inning in game 5 before leaving with back problems. The overweight, hard-living lefthander was bragging the night before about how overrated are clean living and conditioning. Said reporter Jeff Jacobs sarcastically: Perhaps Wells, a man who believes in beer, heavy metal, Harleys, diner fights, curses and other matters metaphysical, will now believe in the ‘Curse of The Workout Gods.’ [Carl Bialik and Jason Fry, The Wall Street Journal Online (Oct. 24, 2003).]

Jesus wants us to be fit to go the distance in the biggest game of all — life. He wants us to come through at clutch time — when life is on the line. He wants us to be strong and endure, so that we may be left standing as winners at the coming of God.

Final word: our NRSV version of verse 36 urges that we may have the strength to escape all these things. Some tie this escape to the idea that Christians are going to be raptured out of the fray when all these things take place on the earth. We will be spared tribulations to come that precede the coming of God. But the word does not mean escape from but rather escape through; it means to stand victorious after all, after it all. We should not look for resurrection before a cross when our Savior endured the cross before resurrection.

The dulcet tones of Josh Groban sing romantically what could also be a sign from God to us: A breath away’s not far to where you are. … Love will live on and never leave. Jesus calls us to look up for that love always. Look up, people of God, for even when things are not looking up, those who are looking up will see even in all things the redemption of God drawing near.