I have to confess, I do not know much about fig trees or their leaves.  In fact my only tangential notion of figs themselves comes from the occasional fig newton.  Not being convinced I wanted to build a sermon around a Nabisco cookie product, the second fig reference that popped into my wandering mind was Adam and Eve's use of fig leaves in the book of Genesis.  You remember the story.  The young couple in paradise decide to eat the fruit from the tree that the serpent tells them will give them the knowledge of good and evil and make them Godlike.  Upon finishing their snack they see everything differently.  "Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves."  The story continues downhill from there.  The question is are the two texts linked in any way beside the random wanderings of my undisciplined mind.
 
 Well actually the image of the fig tree does exist in other biblical literature, it occurs over sixty times in scripture.  So there is no telling whether Jesus was referencing back to this Genesis example or another Jewish scriptural citation.  I can say with some degree of certainty that he was not making a connection to the twentieth century cookie.

 Yes I suppose I am in a rather flippant mood this morning. I think it has something to do with the issue of preaching on these apocalyptic texts every advent.  In this season as we prepare to celebrate the first coming of the Christ child, our scriptures bring us word of the Christ’s second coming.  On Christmas Eve we will also hear about signs in the gospel of Luke.  A sign brought to shepherds abiding in the fields.  An angel of the Lord will speak "Do not be afraid; for see-I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.  This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger."  This is the kind of sign we are prepared to look for in this holiday season.  We wish to catch a glimpse of the Prince of Peace, a tiny cherub of a child bathed in warm light, cooing quietly as he nestles in the straw.
 
 But those are not the signs we are brought today.  The signs we are told to watch for today are distress and confusion, roaring seas and waves, fear and foreboding and the shaking of the powers.  The savior is not to be found close to the ground, lying in a manger. This Savior descends from above "with power and great glory."  The image of this arrival of the Christ feels stark and dark and very large.  This morning we are given no Frank Capra celebration with Clarence the friendly but bumbling angel sent down to set things right.  We are given a film noir Christ, Christ as portrayed by Humphrey Bogart if you will, bristling with power underneath his dark suit and fedora. It is clear who is in charge and it is clear that things will be taken care of and it also appears clear that it may not be too pretty.  If we were one of those new age multi media churches there would be a slide show behind me right now showing earthquakes, and tidal waves, forest fires and hurricanes, and all manner of raw power beyond our best attempts at control.
 
In our tradition we do not often talk of fearing the Lord.  We stress God’s loving ways and God’s immanent gentle presence in our midst.  When we run into these texts we have the desire to flip the page.  Couldn’t we just hear about Jesus healing somebody or something else warm and safe?  But today’s text is pretty clear that it does not want us reaching for the same old comfort zone, living under the usual assumptions, looking at the world with the same tired eyes.
 
These signs from God we are told of are about our sight, the way in which we view the world.  This is where I believe we do find the connection between our fig leaves in the garden of Eden and the fig leaves we watch for in Jesus’ parable.  As the book of Genesis says, Adam and Eve’s eyes were indeed opened in the act of eating the fruit.  They were opened to the fact that they could choose to live a life where they viewed themselves as God and God as irrelevant.  It was not their nakedness that brought them shame and had them reaching for fig leaves.  It was their embarrassment that they had chosen to turn their backs on their maker that caused them to seek to hide themselves.
A biblical scholar, quoting Thornton Wilder, refers to Adam and Eve’s subsequent condition as them being "children of the Eighth Day."  We all are children of the eighth day, living in the imperfection we have made following the seven days of God's amazing creative action.  We live our lives in the midst of God’s creation which is good and yet oftentimes our place in this good creation is far less than good.  Our eyes, like our symbolic primary ancestor’s, are opened, but only opened half way.  They are opened wide enough to recognize that we can indeed choose to attempt to live apart from God’s ways.  We can make ourselves and our own desires our number one priority.  We can ignore God’s call for justice to the weak, compassion for those in need, and acceptance of all God’s children as equal and valuable.  We can even fool ourselves into believing that seeing the world through our own selfishness is the entire view to be seen.
 
But ever since the eighth day God has been seeking to open our eyes the rest of the way.  The divine has revealed Godself to a chosen people, performed amazing acts of liberation through Moses and Miriam.  God has sent prophets with mighty words, and even sent a Son, a part of God’s very self into our midst in the humble and vulnerable form of a child.

Today we learn that God is not done attempting to open our eyes wide enough to recognize not only that we have a choice whether we choose to be in right relationship with God but also that indeed it is the only viable choice for us to choose.  The apocalyptic sayings we heard from the Gospel of Luke bring us an urgent word.  They remind us that we should always be sensitized to God’s movement in the world.  Every day of our lives is an advent day, a day meant to be filled with expectation and wonder as we watch and wait for the new ways God may burst forth into our midst.  The promise of apocalyptic literature is that nothing will stand in the way of God’s plans.  God is indeed large and in charge.  Apocalyptic literature is there to comfort us when we are fearful and give us a taste of fear when we are comfortable.  Either way when we come in contact with the apocalyptic we should be forever changed.
 
Apocalyptic literature reminds me of the lightning storm we had in the midst of the blizzard a couple of weeks ago.  I was in the midst of trying to get my car out of its precarious location spread sideways across the street, huffing and puffing and cussing under my breath when it began.  The sudden flash of light reflecting off the whiteness on every surrounding surface was blindingly bright.  Each blast nearly overwhelmed my ocular nerves but for a split second I saw the world in a different way.  The world grew, it was larger than my little battle with ice and tires.  It stretched on for more miles than I could fathom shrinking my current difficulty down to a rather manageable skirmish in the snow.  For that dramatic moment the world stretched beyond my singularly limited corner...

It is in the nature of being children of the eighth day that quite a bit of our lives are spent heads bent low watching the ground beneath our feet and mumbling under our breath, consumed by insignificant personal details.  We rarely open our eyes wide enough to recognize that God is indeed powerfully present in every moment of our lives.
When God feels absent or irrelevant it is our limited vision that creates such an illusion.  God is always present sending us signs.  The author Joseph Wood Krutch writes, in his book  The Desert Year, "The rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at but the moment when we are capable of seeing."

This advent season let us look wide eyed toward the skies for the Christ on the way.  Let us keep watch along our office corridors and our living rooms, during our afternoon daydreaming, our suppertime conversations, and our late nights awake in bed.  The Christ is coming and the Christ is here.  God is working in new ways each and every moment in a vast array of possibilities for each and every one of us.  So keep your eyes peeled for fig leaves growing and signs and wonders in every nook and cranny of creation for there is only one choice to be made.  The choice is for our God, the one who chose for our sake to come in the amazingly unlikely form of a crying infant in a manger.

Who can say what will be next?