Isaiah 64:1-9 and Mark 13:24-37
First Sunday of Advent
And so, it begins. Another turning. Time
yields to a new time, a new day. Advent. It means “coming,” from the Latin root
veni.
Something’s coming. Someone’s
coming. But, when? Time gets all mixed up in Advent. Perhaps that’s
why it’s confusing, even frustrating for the church, situated as we are in a
society where the Christmas season, we’re led to believe, arrives on Thanksgiving
(or after Halloween). We see the
decorations going up everywhere, except here in our sanctuary. We hear Christmas carols at the mall, but
here we sing unpopular carols in minor keys.
We’re easily seduced by the spirit of the season, but the liturgical
calendar says, “Whoah! Not so fast. Rein in Rudolph. Slow down.”
What time is it? Is it Christmas or Advent? The church says, Advent. But what is Advent? Yes,
Advent means coming, but what, who is
coming? Christmas? Jesus?
Isn’t Jesus already here?
Christmas is, of course, the celebration of Christ’s first coming, the first
advent. And so it's natural to view Advent as a time of preparation, of getting ready to celebrate
Christmas. The early church looked for
the second coming of Christ, a second advent, when Christ will come again at
the fulfillment of time. Our Advent
hymns and liturgies, even the lectionary readings for these weeks, reflect this
notion of preparing for Christ’s return.
The problem with the traditional two-Advents framework—the first coming
of Christ and his second coming—is that it’s easy to overlook, ignore, even miss
the countless other advents that occur all the time in this in-between time.
The two-Advents configuration seems to suggest that Christ is absent from us
today. But this simply isn’t the case
The Advent of Christ is happening all
around us and in us and through us. I love the way Malcolm Guite makes this
clear. “There are many other advents,”
he says. Didn’t Jesus say, “Lo, I am
with you always, even unto the end of the age”?
“Whatever you do to the least of these, you do it unto me.” “This is my body, this is my blood.” “In our encounters with the poor and the
stranger,” Guite says, “in the mystery of the sacraments, in those unexpected
moments of transfiguration surely there is also an advent and Christ comes to
us.”[1]
Encounter. In
many respects, that’s what advent points toward, leads to: an encounter. It’s a season of anticipation for that moment
of connection, when we experience communion with the Divine, when God comes
close and meets us in the flesh. This
notion is behind Isaiah’s petition, “O that you would tear open the heavens and
come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence” (Isaiah 64:1).
Presence. Here. Come, be
here, God. Remove the distance between us, between the
world and you. It’s a plea for
intimacy with God. Come close. It’s a plea for God to act, to wage justice and peace,
to be known, real. O come, O come,
Emmanuel. God with us.
God is the advent-ing God, always coming toward us and appearing,
taking up residence among us, becoming enfleshed in our lives. We discovered this most profoundly in Jesus. And Jesus revealed for us what is always true. God is always coming toward us and
appearing. The Spirit is always
searching for ways to take up residence in the world. God is always searching after ways to come
close to us, become enfleshed in our lives.
And when this happens, again and again, we are changed, the world is
changed. Time changes. We move from one dispensation to another; we
move from one age or eon to a new one.
And often the emergence of the new thing that God is doing in our midst
is disruptive. The coming of God, the
emergence of this new age disturbs the status
quo, it shakes the foundations.
Or, in the language of
Mark, the new age will be marked by a darkened sun and moon, stars falling from
the sky, and the shaking of powers in the heavens (Mark 13:24-25). Mark wrote
his Gospel around 69 or 70, during the Jewish Wars, as a warning to the followers
of Jesus. The Roman Empire marched through Judea to quell the Jewish revolt; in
70, they sieged Jerusalem, which was brutal, and demolished the Temple. An attack
could come at any moment. Beware. Keep alert. Now, Mark’s not calling them to
fight or to take sides. Instead, he says, be ready to decide whether you will
stand with Rome and their gods of war or those in revolt, or will you be
faithful to the way of Jesus. Keep
awake. Be vigilant. This is Mark’s ways of saying to his community of Jesus
followers, something new is emerging in the world.
God’s way, the coming of God’s kingdom is breaking into the world and it’s unsettling everything; it’s shaking the foundations, and so expect fierce resistance from the religious and political authorities. Political and religious authorities are rarely happy when God's kingdom breaks into the world. In fact, suffering is bound to increase, Jesus tells his followers, because they will have to choose. The turning of the age demands a decision: will they be identified with the way of Christ or will they give their allegiance to Empire and false gods? This question is just as timely for us today.
Jesus calls them to be strong, be faithful. He also wants them to see that their struggle is a sign that something new is coming into the world.[2] “This is but the beginning,” Jesus says, “of the birth pangs” (Mark 13:8). Something new is about to be born.
God’s way, the coming of God’s kingdom is breaking into the world and it’s unsettling everything; it’s shaking the foundations, and so expect fierce resistance from the religious and political authorities. Political and religious authorities are rarely happy when God's kingdom breaks into the world. In fact, suffering is bound to increase, Jesus tells his followers, because they will have to choose. The turning of the age demands a decision: will they be identified with the way of Christ or will they give their allegiance to Empire and false gods? This question is just as timely for us today.
Jesus calls them to be strong, be faithful. He also wants them to see that their struggle is a sign that something new is coming into the world.[2] “This is but the beginning,” Jesus says, “of the birth pangs” (Mark 13:8). Something new is about to be born.
Contemporary Quaker
poet, Lucy Duncan, captures this experience in her poem A Prayer for the coming of the Light. She says:
Hold still,
feel the turbulence of creation
The old world is crumbling
The Light is on the edge of slumber
Lend your
hands to the labor
Midwife the spiritual birth.[3]
God is coming—right now.
The coming of God always brings about
something new. Will we cling to the old
world or welcome the new world that God is creating? Will we cling to our former selves, or
welcome the transformation that God longs to bring us? Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) once
said, “Advent creates people, new people.” God is coming, all the time. These places of meeting, the moments of encounter can be
anywhere. It’s tough to see them with the
naked eye, but they’re there. They’re
easy to miss in the news of the day, when so much seems to be unraveling all
around us. It’s easy to be lulled to
sleep—perhaps bytoo much news, news that overwhelms and offers little hope. The
consumerism and materialism of our age lulls asleep too.
Are you awake? Awake as you need to be?
It’s easy to be numb to the pain around us; maybe numb to your own pain and grief. We prefer to be comforted and assured. We don’t want to deal with the birth pangs of a new world. But, we can’t afford, the world cannot afford for us to be asleep. We need to be woke. God is coming. That’s why we need to wake up. Be alert. Watch.
Are you awake? Awake as you need to be?
It’s easy to be numb to the pain around us; maybe numb to your own pain and grief. We prefer to be comforted and assured. We don’t want to deal with the birth pangs of a new world. But, we can’t afford, the world cannot afford for us to be asleep. We need to be woke. God is coming. That’s why we need to wake up. Be alert. Watch.
Christ calls us to be expectant. This aspect of the Christian life was
especially important to Rudolph Bultmann (1884-1976), one of the towering theologians
of the twentieth-century. Few read him today, although thanks to contemporary
theologian David Congdon, there’s new interest.[4]
Congdon sees Bultmann as a “theologian of Advent.”
Throughout his long career, Bultmann preached many Advent sermons at the University of Marburg, Germany. On December 12, 1943—in a nation facing the cataclysm of war—Bultmann preached these words of hope, “To be a Christian means to be one who waits for God’s future”—not the Führer's future, not the Reich's future, but God's. “Hence for the Christian perhaps all seasons are essentially an Advent season. For Advent is characterized above all by this note of expectation…It is intended to remind us sharply of what we so easily and so often forget, namely that, as Christians, we are expectant.”[5]
Throughout his long career, Bultmann preached many Advent sermons at the University of Marburg, Germany. On December 12, 1943—in a nation facing the cataclysm of war—Bultmann preached these words of hope, “To be a Christian means to be one who waits for God’s future”—not the Führer's future, not the Reich's future, but God's. “Hence for the Christian perhaps all seasons are essentially an Advent season. For Advent is characterized above all by this note of expectation…It is intended to remind us sharply of what we so easily and so often forget, namely that, as Christians, we are expectant.”[5]
The Table of the Lord is given to help us remember what we so often forget. Communion is a perpetual Advent. The English poet John Betjemen (1906-1984) said it well
at the end of his poem “Christmas,”
No
love that in a family dwells,
No caroling in frosty air,
Nor all the
steeple-shaking bells
Can compare with this simple truth compare—
That God was
Man in Palestine/ And lives today in Bread and Wine.[6]
Come, let us expect to encounter the living Christ here in the breaking of the bread
and the sharing of the cup. Expect to
meet the advent-ing God here at this table, who “lives today in Bread and Wine.”
[1]
Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A
Poem a day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany (Norwich: Canterbury Press,
2015), ix.
[2]
See Ched Myers's extensive exegesis of this text in Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), 324-340.
[3]
Lucy Duncan, A Prayer for the Coming of
the Light. https://www.afsc.org/friends/prayer-coming-light
[4]
See David W. Congdon, The Mission of
Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2015).
[5]
Cited in David W. Congdon, Rudolf
Bultmann: A Companion to His Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 157.
[6]
Cited in Michael Harrison and Christopher Stuart-Clark, eds. The Oxford Book of Christmas Poems (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990), 129.
