Advent 1B Wake Up Sunday
Mark 13:24-37, November 29, 2020 St. Mark’s
This first Sunday in Advent is always “wake up Sunday,” but we are already awake. We can’t sleep. Friends are sick or dying. Leaving home takes us into a dangerous world. Our planet is heating up to dangerous levels. Storms and fires destroy our country. We live in scary times that could sound like Mark’s prediction of the second coming.
How do we survive with this high anxiety? Some turn off the news. Others are drinking more. Online shopping is at a new high. One of the most benign answers has been the Hallmark explosion.1 The continuous stories with a happy ending on Hallmark have moved its ratings beyond CNN. It soon may surpass ESPN and Fox news./ But in our tradition on the first Sunday in Advent, we are accustomed not to escape reality but to expect something, and Mark’s story tells us who and where.“
Summer is near.. He is near.”
Barbara Brown Taylor2 tells us that Christ has been coming back for so long that many have given up on him. Before he dies, Jesus tells his followers, “I’ll be right back.” People make no long-range plans. A decade passes, then another. Those who knew Jesus die off. We have Mark’s gospel because someone wakes up and says, “There are almost no eyewitnesses left. We must record what they know.”
Scholars’ best guess is that Mark’s gospel is written at least 30 years after Jesus’ death.3 The stars are still in the sky, but that is about all. Mary is probably dead. Peter and Paul are martyred in Rome. Jerusalem and the temple are destroyed. The emperor keeps inventing ways to kill Christians. There is fighting among the Christians themselves with entire families torn apart. Things are going to pieces, and Mark has a lot to explain.
“Summer is near... He is near.”
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. Then he gives clues where and when we will see his coming, his presence, his light amid what seems like darkness.
Edgar Allan Poe also wrote a story about similar clues.
In the story of the “Purloined Letter,” a famous amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin attempts to find a letter stolen from a woman’s boudoir by an unscrupulous minister who blackmails his victim. Other police and detectives thoroughly search the hotel where the minister lives, 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, hiding 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 called to put on a new pair of glasses to see the depth of the world around us. We are to observe carefully, not just to be awake,/ but to be alert.
Jesus’ illustration of what is in plain sight is the parable about a sprouting fig tree. “From the fig tree, learn its lesson. 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.
Let’s read it again from Eugene Peterson’s The Message Study Bible (28-31). “Take a lesson from the fig tree. From the moment you notice its buds form, the merest hint of green, you know summer is just around the corner. And so it is with us. When we see all these things, you know he is at the door. Don’t take this lightly. This is not just for some future generation, but for this one, for us.”
Mark and Peterson are telling 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 many of us have forgotten to look for them. God constantly speaks to us, but we often are not present to the present, present to the present moment, the now./
One significant barrier is the CNN Complex. We become glued to our televisions and smart phones, watching the same political battles over and over again. The CNN Complex is the postmodern addiction to breaking news. It is an addiction to information. Whether we understand or comprehend the information is immaterial. We are pathologically addicted simply to the information itself, which puts us into an addiction black out spell to the world immediately around us. We INGEST information, but rarely DIGEST it. We take in information 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 are so accustomed to hearing the train they no longer hear its approaching clickety-clack across the tracks.4
We live close to Interstate 430, but our minds block out the loud rumbling of 18 wheelers crossing the Arkansas River bridge. 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. Take a break from news, shopping and listen to the people and the world around us./
Pay special attention to the world outside where fig trees and the evergreens surround us. Let their majestic beauty transform us, photosynthesize us to live into the moment. Sit outside, take a walk, engage in the outside world rather than television or iPhone screens./
“Summer is near.. He is near.”
Pay special attention to the interruptions from our multi-tasked agendas. They cause the squirrels running around in the cage in our minds to come to a screeching halt and open us to the present moment, the now.
Pay attention to children. They live in the present. I recall one afternoon when our young daughter comes running in shouting. “Mom, Mom, come see the rainbows!” Only by God’s Grace do I stop/ and go outside to see a sprinkler in our yard, where sunlight is producing multiple rainbows in and out of the water streams. This was a personal 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 only by 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,” where we look at something in our life and suddenly see it for the first time,/ whether it is the sunlight changing water into rainbows, or the love we see in our neighbor’s eyes, or the trees outside our window. Revelation is the moment we see through, see into, see beyond what is going on, to what is really going on—not because of our intellectual knowledge but because God opens our eyes, and we pay attention to what is nearby us, and the word that never dies comes in.5 //
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.6 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. /
“Summer is near… He is near.”
1Barbara Brown Taylor, “How to live with High Anxiety, Always a Guest, (Westminster 2020) pp. 1-8.
2Barbara Brown Taylor, “God’s Beloved Thief,” Home by Another Way, pp. 3-9.
3Barbara Brown Taylor, “With Power and Great Glory,” Gospel Medicine, pp 133-137.
4Lillian Daniel, Feasting on the Word, year B volume 1, pp. 20-24
5Barbara Brown Taylor, “Apocalyptic Figs,” Bread of Angels, pp. 156-160.
6Martin Copenhaver, Feasting on the Word, year B volume 1, pp. 21-25.
Joanna joannaseibert.com