Advent 1B

Our liturgical year begins in a devastating fashion. The first lesson for today features an extended outburst from Isaiah, in which the prophet decries the absence of God in both public and private spheres, when a sense of violation and the ache of meaninglessness strike deep within. Then we move to Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians in which he tries to persuade the Corinthians that their lack of collective identity is their fundamental problem. They are too busy building up their individualistic interpretations of life in the Spirit while neglecting their common life together. They have focused on the stronger members of their community while neglecting the weaker members of their congregation.

Then we arrive at the gospel. We stand in a funny place, looking ahead to the end, while circling back to our beginning of our story as Christians.

We look forward, we look backward, we live in the present and all time seems to collapse.

+

This morning, we hear the end of the story, which is also the beginning of a larger picture. The end of the story is about the return of the Son of Mortals, the Christ. Jesus tells us about what will happen on that day and which signs we must notice. If we think about it, we are currently living in a very precarious in-between time! If we were really to stop to think about what is going to come, we would not be sitting as complacently as we are this morning!

In Mark’s ‘little apocalypse,’ Jesus’ warning about the times to come arrives as the last teaching he will give before he leaves for Jerusalem, the site of the Passion. The warning we hear this morning is not only about cataclysmic change in the world, but also for the lives of Jesus’ followers. Jesus is giving his followers and us a heads-up, watch out, here come times you could not have ever possibly imagined happening. The times that are a-coming bring cosmic change, times when heaven and earth will pass away, but the words of Christ will not pass away. The warning is so important that it appears not only in Mark, but also in Matthew and Luke. The end times are serious business — we cannot escape them so we had better be prepared. Jesus’ words remind us: Keep awake! Pay attention!

+

That is what we are supposed to take away from this gospel reading. Not worrying about the end — that will happen in God’s time, whenever God’s time is — but keeping awake and paying attention. How? By watching, waiting and hoping.
Watching, waiting and hoping certainly are major themes of Advent, the all-too-short season that is sandwiched between Thanksgiving and Christmas. We, who live in two worlds, will hear from the merchants during this Advent: ‘Spend, spend, spend, buy, buy, buy!’ From the gospel we hear: ‘Be alert. Keep awake! Something big and important is about to happen, but it ain’t about Santa Claus.’ If it weren’t for Advent, we would have little incentive, perhaps, to slow down, pay attention, and be mindful of what is about to happen in our world.

There’s something terribly wrong and tragic that a horde of people should stampede a Walmart worker to death as they rushed into the store to get their holiday bargains. There’s something terribly wrong and tragic that two people died in a gunfight at a Toys ‘R Us store. Yet these two events happened this past Friday — Black Friday, as the commercial world calls it. Waiting was horribly lost in these events.

What if we were to watch with care and attention — reflecting on events in our life and in our world, thinking about the past, present and future? What if we tried to reflect on, rather than react to, events in our daily life? Doing so is extremely difficult in this day and age — only a select few seem to be able to live at a much slower pace. Perhaps one thing to try this Advent is to carve out a bit of quiet space and time, even as small as five-ten minutes a day, to watch and reflect on God’s action in our lives and overall, slow things down.

Waiting is another seemingly impossible task for a society that expects the turn-around of information to happen in nano-seconds. I think about how impatient I can get when my computer freezes or crashes, when my e-mail takes five seconds longer than usual to download. How poor is my memory — I used to have to wait a lot longer for things than five seconds. I want my house organized now, forgetting that unpacking and sorting doesn’t just happen in one week. Hanging out, waiting around, just being is one of the hardest lessons gringos undergo when they go to El Salvador; yet when they finally let go of their calendars and their internal time-clocks and just be, they find God’s presence in the people and situations around them in ways that had they been rushing might not have seen.

What if this Advent we were to let go of our desire for instant gratification in all aspects of our life, including in our prayers, for wanting God to fix it (whatever ‘it’) is right now? What if we accepted willingly, not grudgingly, God’s invitation to wait — not only for answers to our prayers (answers that are not always cast in our terms) but also for the Christ child? God’s time is wondrous and mysterious, and often, the answers we seek are not immediately apparent but manifest themselves in surprising ways down the line.

Finally, living in hope (to me the opposite of living with apocalyptic thinking or even optimism; it is active engagement) is another Advent task. Our culture offers an odd assortment of hope — most of it material. How many of us live a neutral hope — a hope that is not filled with fear or dread per se, but that is not filled with joy?

What if, instead, this Advent we tried living in a joyful hope of Christ’s coming? Living in the assurance of God’s inbreaking into this world, even though the inbreaking is awesome and mysterious? Living and knowing that God is with us all the time?

What if by living this way during Advent, hopefully, reflectively and patiently, we could then carry that way of life into the rest of the year? What a marvellous thought!

If that seems like too much, for starters we can at least try to live this way for four weeks. Watch, wait and hope. And, as Jesus in the gospel of Mark reminds us: Keep awake! Pay attention!


[photo: Votives — something new! — in the chapel next to an icon of John Henry Hopkins, first bishop of Vermont, holding the plan of Trinity Church, which he designed... and a new book in which people can write prayers. We actually ran out of votives so next week I will put out more.]