November 29, 2020 | The First Sunday of Advent | Worship

            <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.