"Come On Down!”

Scripture:  Isaiah 64:1-9,  I  Corinthians 1:3-9,  Mark 13:24-37

 

Come On Down!

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 2014, 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 – and those of God, who wants us to wait with expectation for God to act – just like the 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 Java Jesus.  In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is active nearly to the point of being hyperactive.  The Greek 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 course, starting to see his people repeat many of the same mistakes they’d made before, repeat many of the same acts of injustice that had led to the exile.  Isaiah sensed that his society was spinning out of control.  And so Isaiah is urgent, crying to God, “O, that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”  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 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 run 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.  The word “apocalypse” means “unveiling” – you might think of the scene in 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 – and these passages describe scenarios that could easily fit into present day movies like the Hunger Games or The Purge – 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 all welcome that reassurance.   We live in a frightening time of war abroad and of a broken, gridlocked political system and of societal upheaval at home, of resurgent racism, sexism, and homophobia – reading the news, lately it seems like all the crazies have come out of the woodwork - of unsustainable extremes of wealth and poverty, of increasing disrespect for low wage workers and for the poor.  Historically, Americans have been optimistic about the future, assuming or at least hoping that their children’s lives would be better than theirs, but I’m not sure that feeling is as widespread today.  Many commentators, from the left and from the right, sense that our country’s best days are behind us. 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 it’s entirely possible that, at some point, the system will come crashing down.  A worldwide financial collapse was narrowly averted in 2008, and the same financial scam artists, who by and large were never held to account, are back to the same financial shenanigans. The money our country could have spent maintaining our power grid and our infrastructure – roads, bridges, rail systems – and building up a public school system to educate our children has instead over the past 25 years been spent bombing other peoples’ power grids, roads, bridges, rails and other infrastructure and killing other peoples’ children.  And so our country, even with our vaunted military strength, all our drones and bombs, is incredibly vulnerable.  An enemy wouldn’t even have to bomb us – all that would be necessary is to launch a cyberattack not only on our defense systems, but on our power grid, on the computer systems that power our rail systems and drive our communications systems and purify our water and deliver heat to our homes – and we could all end up dying of hunger and thirst while freezing in the dark.  Merry Christmas.

The bad news is that the system – the political system, the economic system, the social system -can’t save us.  It never could, and it never will. 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, important as that is, 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 the God’s reign is not only about heaven – it begins here, now, today, in this place.

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.  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.