Sermon on November 29, 2020: Advent 1
In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I’d like to take a moment and wish all of you a very happy 40th Sunday in Lent.
You may be under the impression that this is the 1st Sunday of Advent, in accordance with the official church calendar. But when the 1st Sunday of Lent showed up exactly forty Sundays ago, our lives as we knew them changed drastically soon after that, and it’s almost as though Lent came and never left. The church year moved on, the seasons changed, and some semblance of ‘normal’ returned for a while. But the Lenten disciplines are here to stay. Disciplines that included a penitential dress code, and giving up things like handshakes and hugs, and sitting next to your grandmother at the Thanksgiving table. In the early days, we imagined that we would just need to hunker down for a few weeks, maybe a month tops, to bend the curve and stop the spread and by Easter we’d be right as rain. We thought we would be able to move past the season of death, and be delivered from a memory that plagues us, the memory that we are dust and to dust we shall return.
But, here we are, forty weeks later, and the memory still haunts us, and the disciplines remain. I did not sit next to my grandmother at the Thanksgiving table this year, nor any other of my extended family members. I suspect that my story is not unlike many of yours. And even as the good news of effective vaccines are a ray of light piercing through this pandemic darkness, all the same, there is no telling when this Lenten way of life will end. There are only supposed to be six Sundays in Lent. And yet here we are.
To wish someone a happy 40th Sunday in Lent is, well, a joke. But it is not a very good joke, I think.
No, today is the 1st Sunday of Advent, and like Lent, we find ourselves in the pitch black once again. As the priest and theologian Fleming Rutledge has said, “Advent begins in the dark.” The story of Christ’s coming into the world begins in the middle of the night, at the time that is the least convenient, a time we would much rather be sleeping. We may well be in the midst of the Advent darkness, but the teaching of Jesus is clear: keep awake.
These are the two words of instruction that Jesus gives us in Mark’s gospel, in a passage that is known as the “little apocalypse.” Jesus is on the Mount of Olives, and he is describing an apocalyptic scenario: the sun and the moon go dark, the stars fall from the sky, and the Son of Man comes in glory, gathering up the chosen and whisking them away to heaven. When we hear the word apocalypse or apocalyptic, we naturally imagine a dooms-day scenario like something out of a movie starring Kirk Cameron or Nicholas Cage. The cosmic order is disturbed, and torn open by the coming of the Son of Man. In today’s reading we only get the second half of the little apocalypse, but there’s plenty more: about wars and rumors of wars, persecution, and what Jesus calls a “desecrating sacrilege,” also known as the anti-Christ. What are we to make of this dreadful prophecy that Jesus has spoken?
To answer that question, we have to go back to the year 70, right around the time when Mark’s gospel was written. The Roman Empire had grown tired of all the protests and rebellion by the Jews, so they sacked Jerusalem and then burned and destroyed the Temple. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how devastating this event was. Imagine if you awoke tomorrow and learned that every church building throughout the world had burned to the ground overnight. That is the scale of the devastation that the Jews would have felt at the time. For them, it may have seemed as though the end had finally come. Imagine the depth of the gloom that would have overwhelmed them. But even in that darkest of moments, it was not the end. It was devastating, but it was not the apocalypse.
When we hear the word apocalypse we may think disaster, but there is an older meaning of the word, and the older meaning is revelation. To be faced with an apocalypse is to have a revelation, to see a deeper truth than we are used to seeing. And so in Jesus’ little apocalypse, the disciples are given a revelation of a deep truth, pressing into ordinary time and also extending to the end of time. What is the revelation? It is that, no matter how awful things get, no matter the scale of devastation that may befall us, it will not be the end, because the Son of Man is coming. He is the ray of light that is piercing through the darkness. He is the apocalypse, the revelation, who will come again in glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead.
What does it mean, then, to “keep awake”? It means that we should not be lulled into a sense of complacency, a sense that the way things are is the way they are always going to be. To keep awake also is to resist believing in the finality of the darkness, that disaster and devastation is the end of the story. Either of those things—complacency or despair—will distract us from the work that God has given us to do. No matter how many more Sundays of Lent there are to go till we reach the end of the pandemic, or even if there are worse disasters yet to come, the message of Jesus to us at all times and in all places is, “Keep awake, for I am coming.” Do the works of Christian love and mercy in the time that we are given, even when we find ourselves in the darkest of nights. The night is not the end of the story, for the dawn from on high shall break upon us like a revelation. Like an apocalypse.
Jesus says, “Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.” We do not know when Jesus will come again in glory, but we are making preparations all the same. We do not know when Christ will appear before us in disguise and expecting to be welcomed, but we must stay awake so we are ready to welcome him when he does. As it happens, the last Sunday of the church year is a seamless transition into the first. We welcome Christ when he comes as a stranger, so that he will welcome us when he comes again in glory. The point is that we do not know when the time will come for us to welcome him. And that’s kind of the point. Whether the world’s last night is tonight or far in the future, the work of Christian witness and the task of loving our neighbor and welcoming the stranger remains the same. It is not a work that we are called to do from time to time, or a temporary Lenten discipline; it is the work that we are given to do for our whole lives, as followers of Christ.
It is not the 40th Sunday in Lent; it’s just another day to practice following in the way of Jesus, even if the sun grows dark and the stars begin to fall from the sky. In this new season of Advent—in this new church year—let us go forth as a people who are staying awake, who are watching and waiting for the Spirit of Christ to break forth into the world. His Spirit does not depend upon a “normal holiday season,” on full church buildings on Christmas Eve, or on gift-wrapped boxes under trees. The Spirit of Christ will break forth into the world, even to a people who are sitting in great darkness.
Advent may begin in the dark, but it doesn’t end there. Eternal darkness is not the end of the story. Keep watch. Stay awake. Do the work. Keep your wicks trimmed and your lamps lit. For when he has shown us the light of his countenance, we shall be saved.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.