The First Sunday of Advent
Scripture
Epistle
– 1 Corinthians 1: 3-9[1]
3Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
4I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that
has been given you in Christ Jesus, 5for in every way you have been
enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind—6just as the
testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you—7so that you are
not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord
Jesus Christ. 8He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you
may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9God is
faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ
our Lord.
Gospel
– Mark 13: 24-37[2]
24“But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon
will not give its light, 25and the stars will be falling from
heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. 26Then they will see ‘the Son of
Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. 27Then he will
send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of
the earth to the ends of heaven.
28“From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon
as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is
near. 29So also, when you see these things taking place, you know
that he is near, at the very gates. 30Truly I tell you, this
generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. 31Heaven
and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
32“But about that
day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only
the Father. 33Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time
will come. 34It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves
home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the
doorkeeper to be on the watch. 35Therefore, keep awake—for you do
not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at
midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, 36or else he may find you
asleep when he comes suddenly. 37And what I say to you I say to all:
Keep awake.”
“We Wait for the Coming of a New Day."
24“But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will
be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, 25and the stars
will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. 26Then they will see ‘the Son of
Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. 27Then he will
send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of
the earth to the ends of heaven.[3]
In so many ways the Bible is a strange and anachronistic
document, outlandish, even alien, and no more so than at this time of year when
we're directed to read such accounts as this from the thirteenth chapter of
Mark – a chapter often called "the little apocalypse" for its
disconnected images of the last days of the world. One of the ways in which it seems most
disengaged from reality for us is in its sense of time. The Second Testament[4]
often seems to be just as bizarre as are parts of that first two-thirds of the
Bible – the Hebrew Scriptures. Time is
compressed in so much of the biblical accounts, with the world of the
supernatural about to break in on the natural.
God is about to "return" with a cataclysmic show of
"great power and glory," complete with "angels" flying
around everywhere overhead. At any
moment "Judgment Day" is to arrive and we will all experience the
final separation of the "sheep" from the "goats" – the
"righteous" from the "unrighteous." Powerful and influential individuals that
shaped this theology of the early church had convinced people that the whole
message of Jesus was reduced to "repent, the kingdom is at hand! Turn to God and accept God's mercy while
there's still time; act now before it's too late!" Even Paul plays upon such fears as he
lectures the people in
Every generation, it seems, has its "doomsayers" and
yet God doesn't seem to be any more ready to bring about the end to everything
than when such threats first were made many, many centuries ago. I don't know about you, but it's become
harder and harder to hold on to a belief that God's in control of history and
that even now the last act of God's great drama of salvation is coming to a
close. To a lot of us – and particularly
those of the "church alumni association"[5] –
the hope of a final divine vindication of holiness and justice and the defeat
of all evil, has come, instead, to be a quaint, naïve, and most likely
dangerous superstition.
And yet consider, again, the wildly popular Left Behind series of books that have been
on the bestseller list now for the last several years.[6] Its literal interpretation of scripture would
have us live with a sense that our time, in fact, is short and that human
history is about to play itself out.
What I find missing in all of that is any hope that we might join God in
doing something new within creation, something worthwhile, even great. To these modern-day apocalypticists it's
simply too late; there's nothing left to do but get your "own house in
order," "circle the wagons," and make the best of the short time
that's left.[7] The message is clear: to hope for anything more than survival and
small consolations is foolish.
Is it any wonder that hope – a spiritual joy – has been
lost and so many of us are starved for it?
We must've learned by now, though, that compensating for the lack of
hope by chasing after whatever pleasure or mind-numbing moments that we can
just moves us deeper into hopelessness and spiritual emptiness. The epidemics of empire building, substance
abuse, sexual promiscuity and rampant violence will never give way to a feeling
of health, wholeness, well-being, harmony, peace – shalom. So, like me, maybe you've found all of this
"end time" talk in the church just a little bit embarrassing or
simply irrelevant. And yet this is what
Advent is about: it calls us into a time
of imagining the end of the known world, the world of abandonment, grief,
alienation and injustice, so that a new world, finally, might take its place –
and by "a new world" I don't think that it's meant to be extraterrestrial! It should be about this place; and it should
be about us – all of us, and not just the privileged few.
The story was told in one family that Tucker did not take
his parents' announcement of a new baby very well. For three years he'd been the only child in
the family, the sole object of his parents' attention and the sole beneficiary
of his grandparents' frequent trips to the toy store. When
Things are never the same after a birth – whether that
birth is of a child or of some new dimension in our lives and our
relationships. Advent confronts us with
the opportunity for just such a new birth and a new way of being in the
world. What needs to be born in us this
Advent – as individuals as well as a church – in order for us to become the
people that God has created us to be?
What do we need to let go of to allow that kind of birth to happen?
Beginning with this day, we who are the new Advent
community must come to know that maintaining a "state of alert" has
nothing to do with a color-coded homeland-only security system.[8] It means a watchful absorption in bringing
about God's justice here and now, instead of using some kind of "Second
Coming" imagery as an excuse to head off to a cave somewhere and remain
uninvolved.[9] We who should be named a community of hope
must not let ourselves be overcome by fear or by those who interpret all of the
"signs" ominously, but replace them with the signs of "open minds,
open hearts, and open doors."[10] Staying "awake"[11]
has got to imply a different kind of readiness, a readiness that comes from a community
that knows the name of the One to whom it belongs and will risk the dismantling
of an old, familiar order so that a new one – one of abundant life – can be born
and given to all people.
A word from our Hebrew Scriptures (not read aloud today),
the anguished cry from Deutero-Isaiah, might be instructive:
1O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so
that the mountains would quake at your presence— 2 as when fire kindles brushwood and the
fire causes water to boil—to make your name known to your adversaries, so that
the nations might tremble at your presence![12]
How many of us haven't felt like this at
one time or another? How many of us
haven't wondered at some point where God was in the midst of our individual or
collective experiences of hell? How many
of us haven't asked God – even in secret –
to jump down on stage and slay the dragons of our world, or at least
swoop down and carry us up and out of harm's way? In the absence of that happening we might
have imagined that God has become comatose to the cares of the world or maybe
just been taking a nap for a millennium or more. The psalm given for us today (but, again, not
read aloud) hints at this same sentiment when it makes its plea to God: "Stir up your might, and come to save us!"[13] Get a move on, God! Wake up yourself!
It
is worth noting, though, that when it comes to our own relationship to God our
passage from Isaiah also depicts the entire human race as walking around in a
kind of unholy haze: "There is no
one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you…."[14] In much the same way, Mark has Jesus
cautioning the disciples against falling asleep on their watch: "And what I say to you I say to
all: Keep awake."[15] It seems as if there is a constant need for
us to be warned against becoming like zombies as the door to the kingdom stands
open and waiting for us.
I
think that we have more in common with the great religions of the world than we
care to admit. The very word
"Buddha" means "the one who is awake." Meister Eckhardt, one of the great Christian
mystics of history and founder of the Dominican Order,[16] once
wrote that the very nature of spirituality is "waking up." Paying close attention to all that is holy in
creation, then, is the only way in which our lives ever will be transformed
from one of just sleepwalking to, finally, being wide-awake.
Advent
can be a time for us to realize how important it is for us to become partners,
co-creators, with God in the ongoing work of creation. Staying awake may simply mean being aware of
how often God is constantly breaking in on our lives, enriching us in
unexpected ways, filling us with blessing just when we were feeling the most
helpless and vulnerable. The waiting and
wakefulness of Advent isn't meant to be a passive thing, either. It's the kind of hope-filled faith that's
meant to change our very lives from moment to moment.
Not
surprisingly (given the place where I grew up and my avocation as a sea
kayaker), I've been struck by the imagery of someone who once said that
"living in our time is to walk the beach of history after a great tide has
ebbed."[17] I've become very much aware of the power of
great tides; searching for God is a bit like searching for the signs of that
incoming tide.
This
is what we're called to do during this season of Advent: to walk the beach in that hour just before
dawn, to take in the immensity of the darkness and confront the cold light of
moon and stars. And then to see, as if
it were rising from the limits of the ocean, the sun of a new day, huge and
orange and warming, bringing light to a world whose hope for it has been all
but extinguished. May the holiness of
that kind of advent hope fill us all with the joy and Spirit of shalom.
* * *
[1] In this
prayer of thanksgiving it's clear at least to Paul that the grace given to the
church at
[2] Mark's Jesus went to a lot of trouble to dissociate himself from the expectations of the Davidic monarchy that had long been connected with the Jewish Temple. It's worth knowing that this gospel account was probably written not long after the destruction of that temple in 70 CE; Mark reassures his Jewish-Christian readers, then, that that catastrophe is not the end. God's reign will come "after that suffering."
[3] Mark 13: 24-27.
[4] As I've noted before, I am reluctant to perpetuate the categories of "old" and "new" testament because of its subtle supersessionist implications (i.e., that – even in the sight of God – the Jews got it all wrong and we Christians have correctly replaced them). Both represent a people's legitimate attempt to testify to their experiences of the reality of God. What's more, we should do no less now for our own time and place.
[5] This phrase, I believe, was first used by retired Anglican Bishop John Shelby Spong to indicate those believers who've come to feel so alienated from the church's anachronistic and rigidly doctrinal positions that they've left the institutional church – even as they continue to seek spiritual sustenance and direction for their lives. An example of this is found in one of Spong's earlier works, Liberating the Gospels:
…it became increasingly obvious that the primary theological structures of the Church, including its doctrines and dogmas, depend on [a] literal view of scripture, which was no longer intellectually defensible…. If these things did not really happen, then Christianity was suspect at best, perhaps fraudulent at worst…. Biblical foundations once thought to be invincible no longer appeared to be so. Indeed they appeared to many to be no longer even credible…. The ability of a modern person to continue to view the Bible literally had all but disappeared.
· from Chapter 1, "The Crisis in Faith Today: Finding a New Question"
[6] Take a
look at the marketing of this series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry
[7] An
indication of just how pervasive this feeling is can be seen in an entire genre
of post-apocalyptic films as diverse as the early Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man movies with Charlton Heston (that rifle-wielding
champion of the NRA!), to Bladerunner and the Terminator series, as well as Waterworld,
Escape from New York, Escape from L.A., and
the whole Road Warrior and Mad Max films that gave rise to Mel
Gibson's star as an actor.
[8] See this
outlined at the official government site:
http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/display?theme=29.
[9] This kind of imagery has been both poetically stunning as well as bizarre. For the poetic there's none more memorable than William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming:"
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards
And
for the bizarre there's none more curious than "Tomorrow's World"
website at http://www.tomorrowsworld.org/
or "The Second Coming of Jesus Christ" as revealed by God to Steve
Pardue: http://www.cynet.com/Jesus/!
[10] One day
this may truly represent what The United Methodist Church is about: http://www.unitedmethodist.org/.
[11] As in today's gospel lesson: Mark 13: 37.
[12] Isaiah 64: 1-2.
[13] Psalm
80: 2b.
[14] Isaiah
64: 7a.
[15] Mark 13: 37.
[16] Read
further at the URL http://www.op.org/eckhart/meister.htm.
[17] I can't
confirm the source of this quote, but I think that it's been attributed to a
theologian by the name of Herbert O'Driscoll (see the URL http://www.explorefaith.org/bio.odriscoll.html).