Worship

What is freedom to you? When you hear the word, what images does it conjure? In America, I’m sure that we all have some idea of what Freedom is about. It is one of our core values. It shapes us from the first time we learn the flag salute—which was likely preschool or kindergarten for most of us—as we recited “liberty and justice for all” with high voices and wiggly bodies. What did they describe liberty to mean to you, as you were there in all your worldly 5-year-old glory, shifting from one foot to the other, eager to lift your voice loudly enough to earn a kudos from the teacher?

From my place in the world as an older millennial white woman, when I hear the word freedom, if I close my eyes, the vision usually bears some resemblance to a post 9-11 t-shirt emblazoned with flags, eagles, and the faint sound of some patriotic country tune in the background. There’s a hint of irony to it—also probably part of my social location as a millennial—because the image and the Toby Keith song silently floating through the air strike a dissonant chord with the ways that freedom is actually lived out in America. I can’t scrub the flags and eagle from the way I visualize the word—they’re too imbedded—but I can also hear the cries of people screaming for equality, for equity, for liberty and justice as they attempt to break through.

I share my own visualization because words are important, and words can be loaded with a lot of implied meaning that carries emotional weight. My formed-by-being-a-college-kid-during-9-11 imprinted image of Freedom is likely not the same as yours. Before we go any firther, I invite you to take a moment and think about what freedom looks like to you. Not the definition. What is that first image? What do you hear? How does it feel. Is it a swelling of pride? Is it discomfort? Is it tinged with irony, or disappointment? Is it hopeful? There are no right answers to this exercise. My final question, when you hear about freedom, and be honest as we turn inwardly with this loaded word, if it your freedom, or is a freedom that belongs to others?

In our text from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, we are given some words about freedom. I know, I know, there’s a whole lot loaded into the 8 verses that make up our lectionary epistle reading today, and not one of them is “freedom.” The words we do have to work with are kind of…uncomfortable. I want to unpack this text before we jump back to “freedom” because if you heard or read it this morning and it set you on edge a bit, you’re not alone. Just a note for for those who are listening to the sermon with their kids, there will be some PG-13 content moving forward.

“Shun fornication!” is harsh. Just the word “fornication” is enough to raise some red flags for anyone who has been hurt by their church. We really don’t hear “fornication” anywhere outside of these scriptural contexts, and when it comes up, it often gets weaponized and used as a tool of shaming. This scripture can be pulled out of the larger context to be used as a means of controlling the ways in which we use our bodies.

This isn’t a “sex is bad” argument.

Rather, Paul is writing to the Corinthians to get them to look at the bigger picture of what they’re doing and who they are as members of the church.

This community is one that has a lot of freedoms. In the graco-roman world, prostitution is pretty common, and is socially accepted. As we look at power dynamics of the time, we also know that women do not have much agency. Prostitutes are probably not in the business for the love of the work in this time (or now, in most cases) but instead it is because of the lack of options available to women. A woman who does not have family, a woman who has been divorced, a woman who has experienced some sort of scandal may have limited ways in order to survive in the time of this writing. They are more likely to be enslaved than they are to have decided to take this career path. Paul is addressing men in this letter—paul is rarely concerned with addressing women—and he is telling men that taking out their fantasies on women who are oppressed is not a proper use of their bodies. Our bodies are the vessels that tie us to the larger body of the church, and so to use our bodies at the expense of other people’s bodies is a sin that is not external, but is one that is internal. If the body is a temple, than using one’s body to overpower another’s is akin to using the temple to conduct some shady business deals. To paraphrase Paul, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

So, we come to the issue of Freedom.

In America, with all of our visualizations of the soaring eagle and the red white and blue flag on the breeze, what are our freedoms? This is pertinent as we’ve seen the word freedom thrown around a lot lately. Was Trump’s freedom of speech violated when he was dropped from multiple social media sites for the irresponsible spread of misinformation and using the platform to incite violence? Is an individual’s freedom impeded upon when they are mandated to wear a facial covering in public? Are the people who chose to illegally storm the nation’s capitol while wearing anti-semitic t-shirts and posting live video to their social media free from the repercussions of being recognized and fired from their jobs?

When I read paul’s words, ‘“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are beneficial.’ I think about the way that we have perverted and distorted the meaning of the word “freedom.” In true American fashion, we think that liberty belongs to us. Me. My freedom. The freedom that can be taken away from me. It is individualistic as can be, and does not factor in how our “freedom” impacts the freedom of others. Paul warns the Corinthians against this kind of freedom that sees only individuals, and implores them to recognize what their freedoms cost the larger community.

With tomorrow being Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, a day when we sit with how un-free our nation has been historically, we as called to consider the ways in which the unsacred reverence of our personal freedoms trump the freedom of the collective. It was legal to own slaves in America, and our country was built upon stolen lives. Was it beneficial? As we see the racial tension that only continues to grow, the disparities between communities of color and white communities, or I’m just going to say it, the differences in the ways that the terrorists who stormed the capitol on January 6^th were treated by law enforcement versus the ways that Black Lives Matter protestors were greeted by militarized presence everywhere they went—as we see these things, we can’t say in good conscience that just because it was legal, that it was beneficial to us as a nation. We are experiencing the painful fallout from an American assumption that an oppressive use of individual freedom is free from any sort of reckoning.

Liberty and Justice for All is not an individualistic statement. It is not liberty and justice to put lives at risk by my behavior. Liberty and Justice for All recognizes the same principles that Paul is writing to the Corinthians about. If our individual freedoms are carried out in ways that hurt or trample on someone else’s freedom, then they are not contributing to the freedom that God has in mind for us. We are not in beloved community when our own interests get in the way of our neighbor’s health, safety, or humanity.

The process of divesting ourselves of the individualistic “My Freedoms!” will be difficult, but in shedding this and asking ourselves “just because I can, should I?” will help us to draw nearer to the kind of community that God wants for us. The kind of world where our bodies are not instruments of oppression, but are used in sacred ways that free others, that see the larger picture and usher in a true realization of liberty and justice for all.

This week’s guest preacher is Christopher WiIlliams, a Member in DIscernment in the Northern California Nevada Conference of the United Church of Christ. Christopher is a first-year student at Pacific School of Religion, where he is working on his MDiv with hopes of becoming a chaplain. He is currently serving in the California National Guard on a fire-fighting mission, but has a background in social work and healthcare. He is a father of four, has a menagerie of animals, including a potbelly pig named Slippy, and he lives in Hanford, CA. Oh, and did we mention? Chris is also Pastor Kim’s husband.

It’s a new year, and I think I can speak for many of us when I say Thank God! Right? Gotta love a fresh start, and with a rough year behind us, it was unsurprising that people were dusting off their old superstitions and traditions to usher 2020 out and timidly welcome 2021 in. Maybe it’s the living-in-glass-houses nature of social media, but I noticed a huge uptick in the sharing of the different ways people celebrate the new year. Maybe it was something stirring in our collective subconscious that we needed to find the right combination of actions in order to make the new year more survivable. A nod to the sobering fact that many did not make it.

Some of the traditions I learned about this year are regional. I had never hear that one should eat black eyed peas on the first of the year for good luck. Apparently this is a Texas thing. I also read that one friend chooses a word (or rather, lets a word choose her, as she is a poet) and she likes to see how that word plays out each year. Another tradition I heard about for the first time is that you shouldn’t do any laundry on the first of the year or you’ll wash a year of good fortune down the drain. Another friend likes to make sure she does something on New Year’s Day that sets an intention for the rest of the year, so say if she wants to be outdoors more, she’ll have already arranged to go hiking on January 1.

If you’re hearing this list and thinking, “Oh no, I really messed this one up!” I’ll just say this—you’re not alone. With no black eyed peas in my pantry, a load of towels already in the wash, and last year’s word stinging in the back of my mind—mine was “resilient” and I found myself midway through the year wondering why I chose something with so much implied hardship, I really was not equipped to begin the year on the right foot. As for spending the first day of the year in a way that sets an intention, man, I really blew it there. I woke up to a phone call on January 1^st telling me that a member of my household had a positive covid test. So this is our fresh new start, eh?

But still, beginnings are refreshing, especially when things are hard. I think it was tempting for many of us to hope that with a new calendar year, the problems we’ve been mired in would just disappear. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out that way, at least not from what I can tell. We continue to have little to no room in our hospitals, we miss our loved ones, or worse, in some cases we cannot find common ground any longer with loved ones because we live in a highly polarized political climate. That’s a different kind of missing.

Our readings today all speak to our current state of affairs, but none so boldly as our Gospel. In our reading from John, we are offered beginnings, or to be specific, THE beginning.

In poetry that echoes the poetic verse of the creation in Genesis, John describes the beginning of all things. This is no “new year, new me” kind of beginning, this is much bigger than that. In our reading, we hear and read that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Words are powerful things, but can also be used cheaply, hurtfully, or in deliberately falsified ways. When we think of words in our context, this kind of use is rampant. Even though “fake news” has reached a point of no return when it comes to eyerolling-overuse, it is unfortunately part of our relationship to words. In this way, in our world, it is easy to assume words cannot be trusted.  

And then I think about my friend, the poet, who allows a new word to find her each year as part of her New Year’s ritual. Poets rely on words to bring their messages to life. Words must be trusted if we are to allow ourselves to experience the lush landscape of poetic verse. Verse like what we read in John.

We are not confronted with mere words, but with The Word, capital W. The Word is beyond a string of letters with spaces and punctuation. The Word is this expansive before and after, the Word is Jesus, but in a more nuanced and flowing way than we can reach by just slapping a nametag on it and moving on. And there is interplay with God, the Word, and the light. Our words take on more meaning than something typewritten and something to illuminate the text.

God, the Word, and the light are co-creators of the world, they are different and yet the same, the newness they bring defies all neat and tidy classification. You know who has trouble with things that messily refuse to be divided into classes or put into boxes? Huuuuuumanssssssss. That’s right, the same humans who hope that if we just eat enough legumes and ignore the growing hamper of laundry we can plop our circumstances into neat and tidy bins, much easier to deal with. We don’t deal well with ambiguity or duality at all.

This isn’t a new thing, it hasn’t just cropped up as a result of a two party system and all the us vs them thinking that goes along with it. The book of John was written in about 90 CE, and it was written for a community that was struggling with the differing ways that they viewed Jesus. There were rifts in this community that felt impossible to resolve, some believed that Jesus was divine, the messiah, and therefore not fully human, others believed that he was fully human, a teacher without divinity. John aims to puncture this binaried thinking, this either/or, and show people that this is a “yes, and” situation, where thinking in these rigid, divided ways are not just an impediment to full communal life, but also keep us from the abundant, expansive nature of God. The Word.

The creation we read about today is one that invites God closer to us. It moves the nature of God—which is impossible to completely know or fully understand—out of the ether and into a tangible form. The world did not know its creator. The world was too busy looking for one thing or the other, couldn’t see God, the Word, and the light in everything around them. Even after Jesus lived among people, it was still so hard for people to grasp the many natures of God. It is not a thing to be grasped. While words have definitions we can look up in the dictionary, The Word is not so easily defined.

Knowing what we know about the community that it was written for, I think I understand why John started from the beginning—the very beginning. When we get so stuck in our thinking that we cannot accept multiple truths that can coexist at once, it is helpful to go back to beginning. To start from scratch. John brings his community around by setting them up for a complicated, complex savior that has been inviting us into new life from the beginning of time. To remind us that along with God, we have the promise of the light that shines and not only illuminates the darkness, but cannot be overcome by the darkness ever.

It can be helpful for us to return to these beginnings as well. To know that even though we forgot to add black eye peas to our shopping lists ahead of new years day, or even if we receive difficult news in the first waking moments of the new year, the true light, a light that enlightens everyone, came into the world. A light that doesn’t care if we did a load of wash, but does fret over whether we are living abundantly, giving the love we have received from God, the Word, and the light, back to the world.  Today’s readings help us to understand that Jesus isn’t calling us into a hyper-individualistic new year, new me way of living, but instead we are invited into a poetically created new life in relationship with the complex Divine and by extension of God’s love, one another.

This week’s guest preacher is Christopher WiIlliams, a Member in DIscernment in the Northern California Nevada Conference of the United Church of Christ. Christopher is a first-year student at Pacific School of Religion, where he is working on his MDiv with hopes of becoming a chaplain. He is currently serving in the California National Guard on a fire-fighting mission, but has a background in social work and healthcare. He is a father of four, has a menagerie of animals, including a potbelly pig named Slippy, and he lives in Hanford, CA. Oh, and did we mention? Chris is also Pastor Kim’s husband.

This week our message is coming from our children! Please enjoy the Christmas presentation from last year!

Do not quench the Spirit.

We heard that in this morning’s readings from First Thessalonians, and the word “quench” really caught my attention.

Some translations say “Do not suppress the spirit,” but that doesn’t have the same physical, visceral reaction as the word quench. When I hear quench, I think about the hottest summer day, and I’m probably hiking up at Sequoia, and the way it feels to go from parched to taking that long (and let’s be real, desperate) draw of cool water from my camelback, and the way that feels to go from thirsty to…quenched.

And that’s a good thing, right? We hear quench, and we imagine firefighters working round the clock to quench a blaze that has threatened acres and acres of wilderness, homes, and land. We want things to be quenched. To be unquenched is, at mildest, to be irritated and :::smacks lips::: dry, and at most extreme, to be desperate and consumed.

And yet, as we read this early letter—and believed to be the earliest of Paul’s letters—we hear his advice to those in Thessaloniki to not quench the Spirit.

The Spirit, this holy fire, this wind that sweeps through and tugs and pulls at us, is not to be tamed. It is not to be controlled, it is not to have tractors come in and dig cut lines around our property to protect us from it, we are not to create defensible space from the Spirit!

And yet, we have a tendency to do just that. We have tried over the years to find ways to re-create the exact situation where we last felt the Spirit moving, to find the magic order of songs, prayers, and scriptures, in order to entice it to come into our spaces, but please, Spirit, not at a violent, whipping-thrashing-burning pace, just you know, tiptoe through, tap us on the head like a game of duck duck goose, and head out through the narthex like the rest of us. Don’t cause a scene, or at the very least, don’t cause us to stand up!

But the Spirit needs to be able to move freely. The world is the Spirit’s playground, and in trying to capture the exact ways to predict, call on, and invoke it, we are quenching in ourselves a little bit of the way that we allow ourselves to interact with the Holy Spirit. If we are expecting only to feel the presence of the divine within certain confines—within the church, at a spot in nature where we were overcome by the Spirit once, then we may not be looking for or receptive to the other ways that the Holy Spirit comes to us.

I joke a lot about almost falling asleep and nearly driving off the I-5 while listening to the audiobook version of the theological tome “I and Thou” by Martin Buber, but for as difficult as it was to hear in monotone on my was to class (where it would be discussed that morning!) the thing that really stuck in my brain was that “The Thou meets me through grace – it is not found by seeking” and without unpacking a really wordy theological text in it’s entirety, the Thou is that part of God that we cannot quite put our fingers down on. As soon as we think we know Thou, Thou is already entirely unknowable. However, when we open ourselves up to the possibility of Thou without trying to pin Thou to an entomologist’s board like a coveted specimen of butterfly, we are so much more likely to have an encounter. But even to try and write about this encounter in order to experience it a second time is to dilute the power of it, to quench it.

This can be said of the Spirit.

Okay, so what do we do then? How do we keep from giving Gatorade to the Divine?

The letter to the Thessalonians was written to a people who were not living their best Instagram lives. They weren’t able to move freely because they were not a popular group of people, these early followers of Christ, in a world that was not yet ready for the radical Gospel that threatened to upend everyone’s way of life. They were kind of, like, sheltering in place. They were persecuted, but in a very real way. Not in the fake martyrdom way that people are claiming today because we cannot meet in churches. There were real repercussions for meeting publicly. I mean, yes, it could be argued that if we meet publicly, there are real repercussions as well, but it’s not the same argument. If we meet in person we could likely quench the spirit of those in our company by unknowlingly passing a virus that would harm our beloved community. So it’s not the same, in the OPEN OUR CHURCH way. What we DO have in common with our early ancestors of the church is that we stay home and worship God in small groups in order to protect and care for our beloved community. But it’s so hard, we can empathize with these early Christians because we too know how difficult it is to be cut off from our community, to be doing the things we would like to do as a collective from our own living spaces. To have trouble even knowing how to access the Spirit in these alternate spaces, let alone to let it burn unquenched in us.

So Paul offers to them, and to us, to, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

And just as it must have been for those who received this letter for the first time from Paul, it feels counter-intuitive to us to rejoice always. We are missing family, we have lost loved ones, we are worried about how much longer this will continue to rage on, we are filled with despair when we read firsthand accounts from overwhelmed hospital staff, and we are grieving many, many losses, some physical, some that we cannot even name, we just know that there is something that we have missed out on in our months of careful movement, facial coverings, hand sanitizer, and worshipping from home.

However, Dutch theologian Henry Nouwen said, “Joy is hidden in compassion. The word compassion literally means “to suffer with.” It seems quite unlikely that suffering with another person would bring joy. Yet being with a person in pain, offering simple presence to someone in despair, sharing with a friend times of confusion and uncertainty … such experiences can bring us deep joy. Not happiness, not excitement, not great satisfaction, but the quiet joy of being there for someone else and living in deep solidarity with our brothers and sisters in this human family. Often this is a solidarity in weakness, in brokenness, in woundedness, but it leads us to the center of joy, which is sharing our humanity with others.”

In this light, compassion in this crisis, in sharing and helping others to carry their burdens often lightens our own. It creates community. The opportunities for rejoicing are endless in a time of crisis, as long as we allow ourself to rejoice in the bonds between us, even when things are so difficult that they feel unspeakable.

As we pray without ceasing, we realize that our every action can be a prayer. Prayer is not limited to the times we are able to clasp our hands and bow our heads, but prayer can be active. As we fold the mountain of laundry (I talk about laundry a lot, but when you have a house full of kids, this is the reality!) but as I fold that laundry, my prayer is one of thanksgiving for the people who wear those garments and use those towels. So many towels. As I drive to the office, I am flooded with gratitude that God has given me such a beautiful scenic commute from Hanford to North Fork. Every moment can be a prayer.

And this leads to “Give thanks in all circumstances.” We pray for many things, but our prayers of thanksgiving should always be included. Even when things really really stink. To give thanks in all circumstances is to open a little window for joy to infiltrate into our lives. Even if it’s the worst day ever, we can always find something to give thanks for. We always have our loving God, who cared so much about us that God’s only son was sent to guide us home to God.

If we find that we are regularly rejoicing, praying, and giving thanks, even in the struggle, even in a pandemic, even with a stay at home order, even when all we want is to satiate our own thirst for connection to one another, when we do these things,  then we have done everything in our power to let the Spirit remain wild, magnificent, unbridled, and unquenched.

This week, with papers due and projects to present and new state and county guidelines to read up on and make sense of, I will admit right up front, it has been a hard week for carving out any space that closely resembles “peace.” I think I thought that since this year December is canceled, life would be less hectic, there would be more time to pause and pray, a natural lull would settle over the land offering more introspection, more time for the Holy Spirit to flit about the house, pinging off the walls and furniture and probably the cats before bouncing off of me as I sit, tranquil, a product of the best parts of social distancing during a pandemic. I mean, if there ever was a time to try out the monastic lifestyle, it would be now, right?

But that’s not how it is, not for me anyway. Instead there are kids to keep fed (how do they eat so much????) and there’s the ever-growing pile of laundry, of dishes, of BILLS. There’s the constant track of worry in the back of my mind asking if I’m doing too much, was yesterday’s outing into *gasp* public too risky? Are we currently asymptomatic? Are my family members okay? Is my congregation okay? Are we doing enough to keep a sense of community? Have we done too much, grown too comfortable with maneuvering public spaces during this time?

And yet, groceries have to be bought. And as I pass everyone else in the store with their masks on and we do that weird little 6’ distance but we’re both reaching for the same coffee creamer at the same time dance—you know the one—and Christmas music blares on the store PA system, I laugh to myself at the concept of “Tidings of Comfort and Joy” right now. Can we get more comfort and joy and less, I dunno, doom and gloom?

But that’s where we are, physically in the world, and metaphorically in this liturgical season of Advent. We’re in these spaces of waiting, and probably waiting on big “social distancing dots” at the checkout, at that. It isn’t super comfortable, and yet, we know that if we do this, there is hope and promise at the end. Or at least a glob of hand sanitizer and the ripping off of the mask once you get into your own airspace in the car.

Today we have lit Advent candles of peace, and with all of this swirling around us in the world, it is a candle that we desperately need, and yet it can feel so deeply unattainable at the same time. How do we grasp at peace through grief? How do we find our true center when we’ve been off-balance for 10 months?

I mean, I’m asking for myself, too. These are anxious times. And then we are given three readings today that are prophetic and yeah, here it is again, apocalyptic, and even though our Isaiah text starts with “Comfort, O Comfort my people,” God’s people are not yet there, they are still exiled as these words are being said. They have had everything stripped of them that was getting in the way of their relationship with God. They are away from home, from the promised land. These words are looking forward, but they are not yet the reality—however they are words meant to instill hope and patience in a people displaced.

In true Advent fashion, we are then catapulted way forward by the other readings. We aren’t quite to the birth narratives yet, so we’re still in the wilds of the early Sundays of Advent, which is fitting as we read about this wild man who lives off of locusts and honey wearing camel hair and showing up in the wilderness to proclaim that someone much more powerful is on the way. In Mark, there is no birth narrative, no nativity scene set up with cows and sheep and angels. We start here, with John the Baptist, setting the stage for what is to come, and quite literally acting out the words from Isaiah 40 as a voice in the wilderness, preparing the way of the Lord.

Advent is a time of waiting, but it is also a time of straddling, a time of standing with one foot firmly planted in the past and another just as firmly in the future. Time travel is possible here in this season! We are asked to be present with our spiritual ancestors and to prepare the way for the coming of a savior of all, we are tasked with tenderly holding onto the age-old promises, histories, prophecies, missteps, and struggles in one hand and extending the other hand forward for however long it takes. ANd it could be a while. The epistle reading today makes that pretty clear. It also makes clear that this wait is, in part, because God isn’t interested in only caring for a select few, this great salvation is for everyone, however long it takes for us all to stop being terrible and start acting like we are all of our great Creator. This is not on our timetable, as we are always reminded throughout Advent, and in second peter we hear it again, “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.”

But what does all of this waiting and locust eating and development of patience have to do with peace?

I mean, if we wanna get technical, the lectionary reading themes and the candles in our Advent wreaths don’t necessarily have to have anything in common because they are completely separate, but I think we can bring it all home, so stick with me for a moment or two longer.

There is a great steadiness in this stretching we have to do this season as we manage the past and the future all in one container of Advent. It keeps us tied to our richer traditions, to things that dig deeper than just the past few hundred years, that dip deeper in the well than our current bucket-on-a-rope of pandemic, systemic racism, capitalism and greed, and everything else that we’re working with right now. It also looks ahead, there are good things coming. There are promises. We cannot predict the day (so please, put down your end-of-times countdowns!) so the anxiety of figuring this out is not ours to carry. Our burden is a light one because we are given this buoyant hope to move us forward, and the wisdom and experience of those who came before us to keep us from floating away. There in that tension of the two, there is the peace of being held without being held down. Of being part of something bigger, of promises that will be kept.

I offer to you, on this second Sunday of Advent, this peace. This peace that is so firmly rooted in a lineage of God’s goodness pulling people through their world-ending-as-we-know-it events, and bringing us into this present moment. This peace that knows that God will do it again, that humanity is cared for, that God is once again moving us closer, to a better, and stronger relationship with the divine. We don’t need this new stay at home order to be a sustained yoga retreat in order to access the peace that we are promised—even though it would be awesome if we could work that kind of spiritual practice in. But it doesn’t have to be big, flashy or fancy. We just need a few moments to revel in the wonder of the past and future happening at the same time that we are given in Advent. Breathe in and marvel at the goodness of God through the ages, even through all the exiles and tough lessons we’ve had to learn, and when we breathe out, send that breath to the future that God has promised, a future of justice and of peace. And as you continue breathing, become aware of your body here in the present, but not the present two minutes from now when you have to get up and sort laundry. Just in this one, this moment where all time is God’s time and you can be both in the past and in the future. Settle into this exact moment in the middle of all of God’s non-linear, I’ll get there when I get there time, and know the deep peace of promise.

Blessings to you, beloved people of God.

            <Sing “Stay With Me” Taize hymn>

Stay with me, remain here with me;
Watch and pray, watch and pray.

Happy Apocalyptic Advent!

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never so well appreciated apocalyptic scripture as I do these days. There’s something about the sun being darkened and stars falling out of heaven that fits really nicely into the 2020 chaos that we’ve been living through this year. I do have to say ahead of time that I have had the privilege of a UCC upbringing, so my encounters with apocalypse can be less loaded than the experience of many. And when it came to these more apocalyptic pieces in the Bible, I’ve had to familiarize myself and become comfortable with them because our denomination does not spend a lot of time on the second coming. I realize that many have not had the luxury of coming to this genre of Biblical literature from this angle of appreciation, however. Apocalyptic, second coming, end-times theology has often been wielded as a weapon to instill fear into believers, and if hearing about this sets you on edge, I am truly sorry. That is not the purpose of the apocalyptic genre, and that’s what we’re going to dive in and explore a bit today.

Before we get into what it is, we’ll talk first about what apocalyptic Biblical literature is not. Apocalyptic scripture is NOT a fortune telling device. It’s super fun and it fits the Sherlock Holmes side of us that wants to solve every puzzle and have a neat explanation for every clue, however, we should remember that writings like what we have just read in Mark, or what can be found in places like the Revelation to John are not puzzle pieces. We understand from our selection from Mark that not even Jesus himself knows the details of the time when Christ will return, it says, “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” The time of the return is to be a complete surprise, so what sense would it make if we think we can identify that a particular day where the sun is blotted out—by smoke perhaps, that’s an image we have all become uncomfortably familiar with this year—and look at that red sun and think it is a box to check off in our apocalypse countdown. It is clear that this will take us by surprise, ALL of us. Even the ones who are playing apocalypse bingo. We cannot give this a DaVinci Code or Left Behind treatment.

So if what we’re reading in Mark is not part of a divine scavenger hunt, then what is it?

This passage in Mark is difficult, and for this to be the text we read on the first Sunday of Advent, it feels super weird. I mean, this is the season of merriment and joy, right? What are we doing with warnings here at this time? This season doesn’t start out immediately with eggnog and Mariah Carey “All I Want for Christmas is You” and lights. We have to work ourselves up to that. Actually, if we look at the progression, we begin this liturgical season, and if we’re following the Revised Common Lectionary, this new liturgical year in the depths of despair. This isn’t a big stretch for us, well, for me anyway. We ended our liturgical cycle for “Year A” last Sunday and I’ve spent much of the week between praying, worrying, and grieving the pandemic. If you’ve been feeling similarly, I offer this: coming into this first day of Advent with a heavy heart is liturgically sound. We lit the candle of Hope today because we acknowledge that we are in a place where we are in need of the kind of Hope that comes to us through God, and through Jesus Christ. But we’re not quite there yet.

There is a sense of urgency in today’s reading. In it Jesus says that within a generation this return will come to pass. Now, sitting here in 2020, we can look at this and wonder what happened, since we know it has been many generations and this has not unfolded, or at least not in ways we have been expecting. We can read this and become discouraged that this will never come to pass, or we can take a very literal view and say that this disproves everything because, obviously, it’s wrong. In order to understand this definite indefinite, we have to step back from our calendars. The imperative is to remain awake. Whether or not this happens within a generation or not for many more, we are told, and sternly, to stay awake!

From a literary point of view, the instruction to stay awake comes around full circle when the apostles literally cannot stay awake with Jesus when he is waiting on the night he was betrayed by Judas. From a metaphoric standpoint, this imperative pulls us, the still-waiting people of a few millenia later, into the text. The wait is still happening, and no matter what we do to try and entice Jesus to make a return trip, we are still here. But are we awake? What is the busyness of our day to day doing to keep us in a semi-dozed autopilot? Is there enough coffee in the world with the way we live to keep us awake at the level that we are told to remain in this reading in Mark?

Since no one actually knows when the day will come, it isn’t up to us to figure it out. Instead, it is up to us to make sure we follow the instruction to stay awake. What does this spiritual No-Doz looks like, according to Mark? As we work our way through this Gospel, we see that justice is and important theme. The way that we manifest God’s Kin-dom on earth is through acts of love toward one another, in seeking peace, in practicing abundance. The call to stay awake is to remember that we are not to become complacent when it comes to any of those goals.

Mark Allen Powell of Working preacher says, ”we need to live as though the end is at hand and we need to dig-in for the long haul because the eschatological timetable is known only to God.”

We cannot assume we have another two thousand years to reach those goals and do what Christ asks of us, we cannot assume we even have another day for it. Instead, staying awake is an urgent call to live in a way that amplifies and magnifies God’s love, Jesus’s wide-open understanding of community. In the meanwhile, as we wait, we love, we tend the sick and feed the poor, we lift one another up. We may start Advent from a place of deep despair, but as people of God we do not remain there.

Though we know it popularly to mean things like “tanks and zombies and living in makeshift tents against a backdrop of a burning city,” an apocalypse is not a tool to produce or induce fear. Instead, it is the end of one era and the ushering in of a new one. Apocalypse is an uncovering, The Greek root for apocalypse [αποκαλυπτω | αποκαλυψισ] is a verb meaning to uncover, reveal, lay bare, or disclose. There is great hope in an apocalypse, especially for those who have been despairing, living with grief, have been oppressed, or you know, living through a global pandemic for 10 months. The apocalyptic nature of today’s reading is a perfect beginning to Advent, as we learn to hope for a newness, for an uncovering, for the tension of the previous year to be lifted and new light to shine onto us.

We can live into this apocalyptic sense of hope in the way we put aside our December to-do lists and find the ways we can remain awake. We are co-creators, co-actors in this bringing of a Kin-dom of God to earth. We stay vigilant by loving into the change, by making a difference, by caring for one another. This week, as we head into Advent, may we find hope in the uncovering of Apocalypse, in the unmasking of systems of oppression, in the undoing of injustice. May we begin the work of faith. Go forth, and be filled by the hope that begins to blossom within us this Advent season.