Advent 1B Wake Up Sunday
Mark 13:24-37, December 3, 2017 Collierville, Tennessee
This first Sunday in Advent is always “wake up Sunday,” but goodness knows we are already awake, sleep deprived, planning the best Advent, the best Christmas for our church, our family, friends. We are already over scheduled,1 wondering how we can bake, chauffeur, buy, wrap, write cards, make visits to those who are homebound, teach, stay focused on our work, meet with friends, and go to more parties than we attend during the rest of the year.
Then of course when we listen to the news, it does sound just like Mark’s apocolypse message: the world is coming to an end, and this could happen very soon.
For most Episcopalians, talk about the second coming and end times is embarrassing and amusing. I recently read a parody on how the media might report the end of the world. The Wall Street Journal Headline could be: “Dow Jones plummets as world ends.” Amazon online might say: “Our final sale.” We might get a message from Google or Facebook saying : “System temporarily down, try reconnecting back in 15 minutes.”
As we go through the check-out line at Kroger, we see at least one magazine article about when this cosmic blockbuster is going to open. We chuckle and shake our heads. Yet, every week we celebrate at our Eucharist our expectation of Christ’s return: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” We pray for it in the Lord’s Prayer: “thy kingdom come.”
We profess it in the Nicene Creed: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.”
Barbara Brown Taylor2 tells us that Christ has been coming back for so long that plenty of people have given up on him. Before he dies, Jesus tells his followers, “I’ll be right back.” Believing him, they do not make long range plans.. Then a decade passes, then another. The people who actually knew Jesus begin to die off. The only reason we have gospels at all is that someone finally wakes up to say, “You know, there aren’t all that many eyewitnesses left. We really ought to put this stuff down on paper.”
According to anyone’s guess, Mark’s gospel is probably written at least 30 years after Jesus’ death.3 The stars are still in the sky, but that is about all. Jesus’ mother, Mary, is almost certainly dead along with the apostles Peter and Paul who are martyred in Rome. Jerusalem and the temple have been destroyed by Titus while putting down the Jewish rebellion. The emperor’s favorite pastime is thinking up inventive new ways for Christians to die, and there is fighting among the Christians themselves with whole families being torn apart. Things are going to pieces, and Mark has a lot to explain.
However, /Jesus’ wake up message today doesn’t leave Mark’s audience or us still in this chaos. Jesus tells us to be alert, wait for him, and then he gives us clues where and when we will see his coming, his presence, his light in the midst of what seems like darkness.
Edgar Allen Poe also has written a story about similar clues that might help us.
In the story of the “Purloined Letter,” the Paris chief of police asks a famous amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin to help him find a letter stolen from the boudoir of an unnamed women by an unscrupulous minister who is blackmailing his victim. The chief of police and his detectives have thoroughly searched the hotel where the minister is living, behind the wallpaper, under the carpets, examining tables and chairs with microscopes, probing cushions with needles, and have found no sign of the letter. Dupin gets a detailed description of the letter, visits the minister at his hotel, complaining of weak eyes, wearing green spectacles, so he can disguise his eyes as he searches for the letter. There it is in plain sight in a cheap card rack hanging from a dirty ribbon. He leaves a snuff box behind as an excuse to return the next day and switches out the letter for a duplicate.
Like Inspector Dupin, we are to put on a new pair of glasses, not green or dark glasses as we wore to see the recent eclipse of the sun, but perhaps 3-D glasses to see the depth of the world around us. We are carefully to observe, not just to be awake, but to be alert.
Jesus’ illustration of what is right in plain site is the parable about a sprouting fig tree. “From the fig tree learn its lesson,” Jesus says. “Summer is near….he is near.” If you want to learn what God is up to, we must pay attention to the world immediately near, the world right around us. Look closely. Pay attention. Parables are happening on every street corner in the most ordinary events of our lives with clues to the presence of the kingdom in every square foot of earth, but most of us have forgotten to look for them. God is constantly speaking to us, but we so often are not present to the present, present to the present moment, the now.
What is the barrier? One is what is called the CNN Complex. This syndrome, first identified during the Gulf War, continues to proliferate in our present political climate. People become glued to their television and smart phone screens, watching the same battle scenes and battlefields in the political arena over and over again. The CNN Complex has become the postmodern addiction to breaking news and bulletins, and most generally an addiction to information. Whether we understand or comprehend the information is immaterial. We are pathologically addicted simply to the information itself, putting us into an addiction black out spell to the world immediately around us. We INGEST information, but rarely DIGEST it. We take in information constantly without comprehending or conceptualizing it and crave for more.
We take for granted and ignore the immediate world around us as we carry the syndrome over to seeing and hearing but not really seeing and hearing what is immediately around us. We are like people living near train tracks who become so used to hearing the train go by that we no longer hear it.1
My family lives close to Interstate 430 but we no longer hear the loud rumbling of 18 wheelers as they cross the bridge over the Arkansas River. We have become so accustomed to the noise that is now background. On my desk are icons to call me to God, but I look right past them as I obsess about my daily trials and the condition of the world.
This is Jesus’ early morning Advent wake up call to become aware of our everyday lives.
Pay special attention the world out side where the fig trees and the evergreens now surround us. Let their majestic beauty transform us, photosynthesize us to live in the moment. Sit outside, take a walk, engage in the outside world rather than neon signs, malls, televsion or iPhone screens./
Pay special attention to the interruptions from our multi-tasked agendas. They make the squirrels running around in the cage in our minds come to a screeching halt and open us up to the present moment, the now.
Pay attention to times of darkness in our lives. This is where Jesus promises to be very near beside us. I see this so vividly in grief recovery groups we work with.
Pay special attention to young children. They still live in the present. I remember one afternoon when I was deeply focused on some task in our house and our young daughter comes running in shouting. “Mom, Mom, come see the rainbows!” Only by God’s Grace do I stop/ and go outside with her. We had a sprinkler going in our yard and the sunlight was producing multiple rainbows in and out of the water streams. For me, this was a God moment, sharing joy and beauty with my young daughter in the present moment. This was a small taste of the second coming. The stars did not fall and I was surrounded by only a tiny angel, but I saw the love and joy of Christ in the joy and love of a small child.
Jesus comes to us in the present moment, not the past or the future. The precious present is where God meets us./
Apocalypse means “revelation,” as when we look at something half our life and suddenly we see it for the first time, whether it is the sunlight changing water into rainbows, or the sorrow we finally see in our neighbor’s eyes, or our own face looking back at us in the mirror. Revelation is the moment we see through, see into, see beyond what is going on, to what is really going on—not because we are some kind of genius but because God lets us, and we pay attention to what is near by us, and God comes in.4//
The physical birth of Jesus has occurred. We have decided on a date to celebrate it. Jesus’s second coming is repeated again and again in each of our lives. even in the darkest darkness. We have been promised in the resurrection to live in the realm of God where there is no sorrow, no pain, but until that time we also can experience a taste of what that life is like today.5 Advent calls us to that life.
Today Jesus asks us to wake up, be alert, to be fully alive, so we will recognize very near beside us, the one who was born, who has died, who is risen, and who comes again--- and again, and again, and again.
1Lillian Daniel, Feasting on the Word, year B volume 1, pp. 20-24
2Barbara Brown Taylor, Home by Another Way, “God’s Beloved Thief,” pp. 3-9.
3Barbara Brown Taylor, “With Power and Great Glory,” Gospel Medicine, pp 133-137.
4Barbara Brown Taylor, "Apocalyptic Figs,"Bread of Angels, pp. 156-160.
5Martin Copenhaver, Feasting on the Word, year B volume 1, pp. 21-25.
“The Great Intrusion,” Homiletics, 11/28/1993.
O.C. Edwards, “Advent 1, Year C,” Tuesday Morning, pp. 20-21.
“Return of the King,” Homiletics, November 2003, pp. 42-45.
Joanna joannaseibert.com