1 Advent – December 3, 2023
Mark 13:24-27
Happy New Year. Happy Advent. It is the beginning of the new church calendar year and isn’t it interesting that the new church year is roughly one month before the secular new year? There is a lot that rides on the turning from December 31 to January 1 — new resolutions, new starts, new beginnings. I suspect there is less consideration given to this move from the season of Pentecost to Advent. But if we take these liturgical seasons seriously, these seasons of the church that mark our time as believers, they should, on many levels, shape how we view time, how we choose to live time, how we make sense of time.
After all, the Gospel text designated for this Sunday most certainly signals a change in time. When apocalyptic shows up in biblical writings, you know time has changed, time is changing, and it’s time to pay attention — not to prepare for the end of time, as this genre is so frequently misunderstood, but to expect the revelation of God in our time. And not just God’s arrival, but God’s ongoing presence and God’s certain reign that transforms our time. God’s control of time. God’s directing of time toward all that is good and perfect and true.
As Debi Thomas shares: Advent prepares us for the God who is coming — a God who will turn out to be very different from the one we expect and maybe even hope to find. Today, Isaiah longs for a Very Big God to do Very Big Things. Recalling the history of the Exodus, he asks God to once again do “awesome deeds” — deeds that will make the mountains quake and the nations tremble. Who among us has not prayed such big prayers? Haven’t our prayers been as outsized as Isaiah’s: Bring an end to the war in Israel and Gaza. Protect the refugees. Spare the children. Save the world!
But why stop there? Why not go further? Eradicate all illness. Clean up the mess in Washington D.C. End world hunger. Root out corruption. Destroy systemic racism. Thwart corporate greed. Protect this wounded planet before we ravage it past saving, and most of all shield us, O Lord, from our sinful, self-destructive selves. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”
I don’t believe we should stop praying these prayers. God is big. But during Advent, we are asked to prepare ourselves for something else. Someone else. Someone so unexpected and so small, we may be tempted to either laugh or cry at the thought of him. After all, the world is falling apart, our hearts are exhausted, people are dying, and God chooses to send … a baby?
In his sermon entitled, “The Face in the Sky,” Frederick Buechner describes the Incarnation as a kind of scandal — one that requires us to ponder the shocking unpredictability of God:
“Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in the stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humankind. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too.”
Jesus calls upon us to attend to the signs around us, to look beneath the surface of our patterns of relationships and rhythms of life. He urges us to discern for ourselves the activity of God.
Barbara Brown Taylor shares the story of visiting her friend John at Nacoochee Presbyterian church. He showed her through the new fellowship hall that was under construction and then went into the church, where a curious thing sat on the communion table. It was a fat white candle sitting in a deep dish with a spiral of rusted barbed wire climbing the air all around it. “What is that?” she asked him, thinking it had something to do with prison ministry. “it’s a symbol I came across that really spoke to me,” he said, gently touching one of the steel barbs. “See, the light has already come into the world, but there is still work to be done. There is still darkness between us and the light.”
There is not any barbed wire around the candles on our Advent wreath, but in their own way they remind us of the same thing. There are four candles, one for each Sunday before Christmas and the one in the middle for Christmas. The first reminds us that this is the beginning of a new church calendar year. And for us, this is also the time of year when darkness settles in. The days are getting shorter and darker and will continue to do so as we light the Advent candles. By the time the earth rounds the bend on December 21, it is the shortest day of the year, barely nine hours long.
One thing Advent tells us is that people of faith know it will get darker before it gets light. Week by week we will light new candles, but even as we light them the darkness will increase. We know the sun will come back, just like we know that God will be born in a barn in Bethlehem. These are sure facts of our lives, but so is waiting in the dark. Anyone who has ever hungered for morning knows that. It will come, but it will not be rushed. You can prop the clock right by your face on the pillow. You can count to sixty 500 times and it will not change a thing. Night creatures will still rustle in the leaves outside your window. Your heart will still beat like a drum in your ears. Morning will come, but it will not be rushed. Our job is to wait without losing hope.
Amidst the holiday parties and late-night shopping trips, the gospel reminds us to be awake to God in the world. This is a way of being awake that might actually be restful, and give us peace. The one who is coming is not an enemy but a friend. He may come in the light, but he may also come in the evening, or at midnight, or at three in the morning. The darkness does not stop him, and it does not have to stop us either. Our job is not to lie in bed with pillows over our heads or to shove all the heavy furniture in front of the door for fear of the darkness outside. Our job is to light the candle wrapped in barbed wire and set it in the window.
“Keep awake”. Keep awake to those opportune moments in our lives. those crucial; special moments. Christ is present in the world. Be patient. Be still. Hope fiercely. Deep in the gathering dark, something tender is forming. Something beautiful — something for the world’s saving — waits to be born.
Amen.
0 Comments