Year A: Advent 1 | Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
November 30, 2025
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page (available for three weeks after the date of streaming).
Last year you might remember us walking through “Emo for Advent,” a series of sermons emphasizing the judgment aspect of this season. And Advent is a season of judgment; viewed rightly, the focus of our preparations isn’t to set up a cozy nursery—we only think that because we like to skip to the end of the story (aka Christmas). Rather, Advent is an opportunity for us to set our little corner of the realm in order so we can please—more along the lines of appease, really—the Great King at their imminent arrival. This new Church year, however, I’m going to do my best to follow the Bishop’s recommendation and turn our attention to resurrection.
As we discussed a few weeks ago,[1] our general concept of resurrection appears to be lacking, at least by Jesus’ standard. Like the Sadducees, who mocked the idea, we imagine resurrection as something along the lines of resuscitation or reanimation. Life after death is largely about us reawakening to a similar, albeit improved, existence. Hence, we hear songs about spending eternity watching the sunset with friends or enjoying the company of loved ones who’ve already passed or even gathering for a friendly game of football after a Thanksgiving-style meal.
While it isn’t bad or wrong to imagine things that way, we need to recognize that neither is it necessarily right. All our concepts of the Afterlife are, at best, inherently metaphorical. They can’t help but be. We, after all, can only be familiar with this plane of existence and the things that go with it: bodies, hunger, emotions, and other inherently corporeal experiences.[2] We can only understand and relate to reality in terms of what we know and already are. But while we humans imagine and describe ideals of Celestial existence in terms of feasts or weddings or reunions or other types of celebrations or beloved activities, we need to remember that we’re always—always—speaking in terms of analogy.
Talking about post-life reality is like trying to describe a favorite yet uncommon flavor. You can relate aspects of the taste to things people might recognize: “it’s kind of like apricot blended with cream, honey, and cinnamon, but better—and not at all the same.”[3] However, no one can fully savor it until they eat it for themselves. It’s the same thing with resurrection. We might be able to vaguely recognize and then attempt to express the concepts, but our language and even our current experiences will never be adequate to explain such alien abstractions.
When Jesus approached the concept of resurrection, he did so with a different emphasis than we typically do. He describes it less in terms of human activity and more in terms of quality or intensity. It’s almost like right now everything we understand to be solid and real about life is actually just a shadow. In resurrection, thought, we emerge to a Life that can only be related to as becoming the object casting the shadow. So, although we like to imagine what we might do to pass the time with one another in Heaven,[4] for Jesus, our individual selves lose focus or even fade toward irrelevance. Instead of the Hereafter being a collection of people forever reveling in something externally transcendent to ourselves, it’s as if Life itself somehow envelops and transcends us.
So that is our impossible task for this new Church year—to somehow grasp the fringes of what exactly that Resurrection Life may be. But more than simply trying to comprehend a future experience, what I’d really like is to incorporate some of that reality into now, because I suspect that’s the sort of thing the Bible is talking about when it references “eternal life.”
In context of the ancient world, “eternal” is far more a measure of quality than of duration. Any “everlastingness” we associate with it is simply a by-product of just how solid and well-built the “eternal” thing is in the first place. Thinking along those lines of excellence, “salvation,” then, is closer to our understanding of “preservation” or even “restoration.” Because of its initial underlying quality and value, someone can “save” the item by restoring it to a proper working condition, preserving its beauty and recrafting it into something useful. Set back in order, realigned[5] with its purpose and function, the object can turn from simply cluttering the space to once again provide benefit to its user and the community they serve.
Now if Resurrection Life is truly eternal, so weighty and substantial—so intensely and crushingly real—I doubt it could help but bleed from a deeper existence into ours. If so, the question for us becomes how we can align ourselves with that Life, not so we can use it to control our individual destinies but so we can ride its wake, so to speak, to unite our relatively ephemeral selves with its greater density and flow, hopefully easing the burden of our own lives and, once they end, already recognizing the sensation of what comes beyond, whatever form it may take.
So, then, what might this Resurrection Life look like now? Despite its raw incomprehensibility, what metaphors and analogies might we use to tilt our understanding toward that which can’t possibly be understood? For that we turn to our readings.
Both Isaiah and our Psalm reflect this concept with people excitedly and joyfully streaming into a city they’ve been longing to reach their whole lives. They emphasize visions of peace, going so far as to show us a society where violence is completely forgotten, where people don’t understand what weapons even are and simply melt them down to become tools for harvest, transforming them from implements that stripped others of life into ones that ease access to the bounty Nature provides.
Paul speaks of this Life in terms of waking up to a new day, starting fresh with honor and dignity, walking in the example and pathway of love and service that Jesus established for us. For Paul, Resurrection Life frees us from darkness and shadow. It empowers us to live nobly and passionately. It allows us to turn from the metaphorical activities and cravings that so easily overwhelm and enslave us so we can shine with purity as children of Light.
Our Matthew text is, admittedly, trickier, with its overt themes of dread, uncertainty, and judgment. But even there, amidst the images of kidnappings and tight escapes, Resurrection Life seeps through, this time in the form of presence and preparation, of watching and being alert. However, for those connecting themselves to this Life, the watching has less to do with danger or fear but rather with opportunity. After all, what is there to fear when Life itself underpins all reality? Death, pain, and fear lose meaning in context of resurrection. So when seeming threats arise, rather than cringing and hiding, we can face them boldly and discover within them abundant opportunities for love, for mercy, for growth, and for building peace.
So this Advent, as we prepare for the arrival of our mighty King, take time to imagine not what the Afterlife might look like but how you can manifest the reality of Resurrection Life right now. What opportunities might you embrace as you make your way forward? What might you do to level this world’s pathways, to ease access to God for everyone? What opportunities might you discover as you set aside fear and embrace your connection not just to life after death but to Life beyond life?
[1] https://www.slouchingdog.com/sermons/year-c-november-09-2025-proper27
[2] Even “out of body experiences” require a body in order to occur.
[3] My best description of a ripe Asian persimmon.
[4] The concept of which is also, like everything involving the afterlife, metaphorical or analogical.
[5] Or “justified,” to use common Bible terminology