Scripture:
Isaiah 64:1-9, Psalm 80:1-7,
17-19
I Corinthians 1:3-9, Mark 13:24-3
Perhaps appropriately to the beginning of the Christmas
shopping season, as I was reading this week’s Scriptures, I thought of TV show
“The Price Is Right”. The studio
audience would waiting in anticipation to see who would be selected to play,
and then Bob Barker, the host of the show, would call out the names of the
contestants selected from the studio audience, saying, Joe Schmoe, come on
down! Mary Doe, come on down! And the game would begin.
This Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent, marking the
beginning of another church year. It’s
one of those times when we are reminded of the disconnects between chronos time – chronological time, the
time kept by our watches and calendars – and kairos time – God’s time, the time in which God acts, which always
seems too late by our standards, and yet always turns out to be just the right
time. The calendar tells us that we have
a few more weeks in 2017, and the new year won’t start until January 1. By contrast, for the church, a new year has
already begun. We’re also reminded of
the difference between the commercial calendar, in which Christmas shopping and
Christmas carols at the mall have already begun, and the church calendar, which
includes Advent – the four weeks of waiting for the coming of the Christ child
– as we sing “O Come, O Come Emanuel” and other carols of longing and
expectation. We’ll get to the Christmas
carols in a few weeks, but not just yet.
It’s a reminder that, as the church, we live with two calendars, live
between two sets of priorities, those of the world – which wants us to get out
there and shop till we drop, to march in lockstep to the drumbeat of
“obey/buy/consume/die” – and those of
God, who wants us to wait with expectation for God to act – just as Bob
Barker’s studio audience waited expectantly to see if they’d be called as
contestants - and in the interim to “occupy till he comes” with words of
kindness and acts of love and justice for our neighbors.
In this new liturgical year, most of our Gospel readings
will be coming from the Gospel of Mark.
Mark, the shortest of the Gospels, is thought to have been the first of
the four Gospels to be written, perhaps three or four decades after Jesus’
death and resurrection, much of the material from which was later incorporated
into Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels. Each
of the Gospels portrays Jesus in a different way, and I think of Mark’s gospel
as portraying Jolt Cola Jesus or a Caffeinated Christ. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is active nearly to
the point of being hyperactive. In the
original Greek text, the word euthus,
meaning “immediately”, recurs over and over – “immediately Jesus went here and
healed these people, and immediately Jesus went there and taught, and
immediately Jesus went to some other place and cast out a demon.”…..you get the
picture. In Mark’s Gospel, if nothing
else, you have to give the disciples credit for stamina, for being able to keep
up with Jolt Cola Jesus.
The church calendar, in trying to set the stage for Advent,
does one other seemingly odd thing each year.
Each year, on the first Sunday of Advent, the reading comes, not from
the beginning of the Gospel, but from a section near the end, in which Jesus
speaks of his second coming. The point
is to remind us that, just as those in Jesus’ time did, we too are waiting –
waiting for God to intervene, ultimately waiting for Jesus to come again, and
usher in the time when all rebellion against God is ended, and God shall reign
in fullness.
In our Old Testament reading, Isaiah is also waiting, and waiting
rather impatiently. Our reading comes
from the third section of the book of Isaiah, thought to have been written
after the Jews had returned from exile in Babylon, and had begun to rebuild
Jerusalem and the Temple. The Jews had
been in exile for decades – traditionally, for 70 years – and earlier in his
writings, Isaiah had expressed such hope for the time when the Jews would be
allowed to return to Jerusalem. But now
that they’d returned, Isaiah was starting to see things go off the rails,
starting to see his people repeat many of the same mistakes their parents and
grandparents had made before, repeat many of the same acts of injustice that
had led to the exile. Like “Really? Your grandparents got sent into exile because
of all the scammy, slimy stuff they were doing, you were just granted the
incredible gift of returning from exile, and now you’re going to do the same stuff
they did? Really?” And so Isaiah is urgent, crying to God, “O,
that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” Come down and fix all this. Come down here, and remind these evildoers
who’s in charge! Remind these ungrateful
people of all you’ve done for them! Come
down here, and do not forget us, for as sinful as we are, we are still your
people.”
In our Gospel reading today, Jesus, like Isaiah, also has a
strong sense that his society could not go on as it has been doing, that the
situation was not sustainable, that things were going to come crashing
down. Using poetic language, Jesus
speaks to his disciples of a coming time of great suffering and dislocation, in
which the Temple at Jerusalem would be destroyed, and there would be wars and
earthquakes and famines, and people would literally have to head for the hills,
and there would be great signs in the sky, with the sun, moon and stars
darkened. But he tells his disciples all
this, not to freak them out, but to prepare them so that they would keep awake
and alert and understand that God’s hand was in all this, that the horrors
Jesus described were only prelude to the splendor of Jesus’ return.
Theologians use the term “apocalyptic” to describe language
like that of Jesus in today’s Gospel. There are similar brief passages in
Matthew’s and Luke’s gospel as well, and the books of Daniel and Revelations
also contain apocalyptic language. When we hear the word “apocalyptic” we may
think of the line from Ghostbusters: “a
disaster of biblical proportions, real wrath of God stuff….fire and brimstone
coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling, forty years of darkness,
earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, cats and dogs living
together, mass hysteria.” Cue the Stay Puff Marshmellow Man. But instead, the word “apocalypse” means
“unveiling” – so you want to think, not of Ghostbusters, but of the Wizard of
Oz, where Toto pulls back the curtain so that everyone can see the man behind
the curtain. The apocalyptic passages of
Scripture, such as today’s reading from Mark, and such as we find in Daniel and
Revelation, reassured their readers that even though from their standpoint,
their society was coming unglued and falling apart, God was working behind the
scenes, and even though in the short run things would get even worse than they
were – these passages draw back the veil on the events of the day, give the
reader a peek behind the curtain, so to speak, to tell the reader that in God’s
own time, God’s intentions will ultimately prevail.
I think we can relate to Isaiah’s cry to God to “Come on
down!” We live in a terrifying time of
war abroad and of a broken, gridlocked political system at home, as our leaders
fiddle while millions starve and the planet burns. Fewer and fewer people are hoarding more and
more wealth, while the rest of us battle each other across lines of race and ethnicity
and national origin for the crumbs and table scraps they leave behind. Like the “bread and circuses” offered by
ancient Rome to distract their oppressed population, our economic system urges those
who can afford it to buy more and consume more, but all this consumption is
accelerating climate change, destroying the environment, and reducing the
planet’s ability to sustain life for all. With rising sea levels, climate scientists
have projected that 60 to 80 years from now – perhaps within the lifetime of
our young children - many communities within an hour or so drive from us may
well be dealing with chronic flooding – think of the water levels along the
Jersey Shore and the outer boroughs of New York City during Hurricane Sandy,
but all the time.[i] I guess the silver lining is that we won’t
have to drive quite as far to the shore, because the shore will have come
closer to us, but it’s still not something we should want. The entertainment
industry tries to keep us numb and distracted, but there’s a growing sense of
unease. Among some segments of our
population, life expectancy is actually on the decrease, and the decrease is
attributed to what are called “diseases of despair” – addiction, obesity,
suicide. And many have always been shut
out of the system, and life has always been a constant battle against poverty
and oppression and despair, as it was for their parents and grandparents. While we get by from day to day, we may look
to the future with an unsettling sense that, at some point, the whole system is
going to come crashing down, possibly taking us down with it.
The bad news is that the system – the political system, the
economic system, the social system, what Dorothy Day called “this filthy rotten
system”, what Thomas Merton called “the Unspeakable” - can’t save us. It never could, and it never will. It
couldn’t when Jesus walked the earth either.
That’s why the early Christians made the commitment to say that Jesus is
Lord – not just Lord of Sunday morning but Lord of their lives 24/7/365 - when
everyone around them said that Caesar was Lord. The bad news is that Caesar – the Caesar of
Jesus’ day and the Caesars of our day – cannot save us. More often than not,
they’re the problem, not the solution. The good news is that God can and does
save us. God has saved us, is saving us
now, and will save us eternally – not only in the sense of getting into heaven
when we die, but walking with us and working through us while we live, walking
with us and working through us to save, not only ourselves, but our neighbors. Because God’s reign is not only about heaven
– it begins here, now, today, in this place.
It begins with us.
The bad news is that our society is going to shake, rattle
and roll. The good news is that God
hasn’t left the building. The good news
is that God has sent Jesus, and until Jesus returns, God has given us the gift
of the Holy Spirit working through each of us, so that each of us is a gift to
the other. The good news is that, in the words of the hymn, “And though the
wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.”
“O, that you might tear open the heavens and come down!”
Isaiah wrote. The good news of Advent is
that, in Jesus, God did come on down, not with an army, but with a baby. The good news that God did tear open the
heavens at Jesus’ baptism to say, “This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am
well pleased.” The good news is that, as
sinful and broken as we are and as sick and broken as our society is, God has
not abandoned God’s people. This is the
good news of the Gospel. Thanks be to
God. Amen.
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