Mark 13:24-37
First Sunday of Advent: November 27, 2011
Friday night, the day after Thanksgiving, downtown Cedar Falls, had a huge festival to celebrate the start of the Christmas season – it was called, “Christmas palooza,” or some such thing. We took Lydia down – and it was magical…at least in her eyes. There were lights and music, Santa arrived by helicopter and then led a parade down to the river where the big tree was lit and fireworks burst into the air over the river.
We got to go from Thanksgiving to Christmas in 24 hours. It was great!
Then we come to church this morning and what happens: No Santa, no fireworks. We sing no Christmas carols. Worse, we come and have to sit through Mark’s little passage about the apocalypse, because some kind of apocalyptic text always kicks off the season of Advent. We come and hear about suffering. We have to listen to a prediction of the end of the world, when the sun will darken, and presumably Jesus comes again to take those who are ready, and leave those of us who didn’t do or say the right things behind to live in the hell the apocalypse brings.
Not necessarily what we want to hear when the rest of the world is fully immersed in the Christmas season. Or ever, really. But our church – along with many others – tries to practice Advent every year. People understandably might ask, “Why do you have to ruin the Christmas season by insisting we focus on such negative things?” All over the world, people in churches that observe Advent are wondering why we can’t sing Christmas carols, why we have to listen to such dreary things, why we have to be so different from the world around us. Are we masochists? Are we just holding on to an ancient, outdated tradition that doesn’t make sense anymore? Isn’t our faith about joy, good news, and Jesus coming as a baby in the manger?
In fact Advent is so hard to practice, many churches skip it altogether, and even those of us who do acknowledge the season often skip the apocalyptic texts that focus on darkness. Advent means “coming” and we tell ourselves that’s the coming of Jesus as a baby, ignoring it also points to the coming of a new world order when Christ comes again.
We justify this by relegating the apocalyptic texts to the bin of bad theology or chalking them up to sci fi, made-up stories of people who didn’t understand how the world really works. We happily explain these texts away because they are predictions that never came true. There’s no reason this apocalyptic vision needs to intrude on our Christmas joy.
Meanwhile… we have apocalypse all around us. Not literally, of course. But then again, neither was the author of the gospel of Mark being literal. Nor was he predicting the future. Dismissing this text as either too far-fetched or too archaic in theology is possible only when we read these texts literally. And I can tell you, the scripture writers would be as upset with us reading this literally as a parent would be if we took them literally when they say to their child, “I could just eat you up!”
Mark did not think Jesus was actually going to hop on a cloud and descend into our midst. He didn’t think the sun would all of a sudden become black. He didn’t think stars were going to start falling like rain from the sky. If he did, we should think he was silly. But he didn’t believe those things were literally going to happen. He was talking about serious things that we would do well to pay attention to. And we do a disservice to our author, as well as miss the importance of Advent, when we make the mistake of reading these texts literally and writing them off.
This is poetry – full of exaggeration, metaphor, and symbolism. And the author’s not just writing poetry to show off his creative literary skills. The scripture writers often wrote in poetry because sometimes poetry is all that will suffice in getting your message across. It’s far more effective to talk about the sun darkening and the earth shaking than to say, “hey folks – it’s really getting bad out there, and we need to do something.”
Which is pretty much what Mark was trying to say; and he was saying it to a very particular group of people – people living their own apocalypse. It was bad out there. Around 70 AD, the Jews rebelled against the Roman kingdom. And Rome had enough. They made an example out of these folks; they came into Jerusalem to wipe out the Jews and destroy their sacred house of worship – the place the people believed God lived. The Romans demanded loyalty to the Emperor, not this god the Jews called Yahweh. They were forcing Jews to renounce their faith, or be killed. And in the end, even those who lived lost the physical center of their religion.
For the Jews, it was as if their world had come to an end. The sun ceased to shine on them, their lives were shattered, and all those other great metaphors we use when the rug has been pulled out from underneath us. None of this happened literally – the sun still rose each morning, and they didn’t break into a million pieces – but they needed words that could describe the depth of what they felt..the depth of what had happened.
Poetry has the power to describe reality in a way literal prose does not. So when we read Mark, the poetry helps us know what it feels like for people who live in constant suffering. We are supposed to emotionally connect to what it’s like for people when they feel like their lives are over. Emotional connection is essential if we are to be awakened from our numb lives that often ignore the suffering of those around us because it’s so hard to look at – and poetry is in the business of emotional connection.
But poetry doesn’t stop with describing current reality. It can also describe our yearnings and proclaim an almost irrational hope in the midst of our times of apocalypse – and again, in a way literal prose cannot. We see this throughout our scriptures. This morning we hear the yearning in Isaiah. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!!”. It is lament. Again, they don’t actually think a rip is going to appear in the sky and God is going to squeeze through and jump onto the ground next to us. The notion of wanting God to tear open the heavens indicates how distant they feel from God – how much they long for a dramatic turn around – how dramatic it would feel if God were to become present with them. Poetic lament is always powerful – and it’s always full of hyperbole. But this passage from Isaiah is more than lament: the yearning for God to come – to tear open the heavens and be in our midst – implies a hope, a belief in a God who can act in our world.
Poetry in scripture offers hope. It breaks through our feeble attempts to offer the same old responses over and over again, and taps our imagination and stirs our hearts by reminding us that God is at work. You are the potter, Isaiah says about God. When we fall into your hands, you work with us, and shape us into tools of redemption.
Even Mark, in his dark poetry is offering hope. Mark draws on the imagery of the Hebrew bible in order to encourage his community to hold fast to Jesus Christ – the crucified and risen Son of Humanity. It is a message of heroic faith. It gives people who were probably hopeless a way forward without their nation and without their center of worship. By all appearances Jesus was rejected by his own people, abandoned by his own disciples, and defeated on the cross by Rome’s imperial power. Mark’s message proclaims that the crucified one is the one who will gather the people together in the absence of the now destroyed temple. That is the message that Mark invites his community to believe, even in their present crisis of faith.
We’d like to go from Thanksgiving to Christmas in one day. But even though I hate to be seen as a kill joy, I feel like it’s my job to point out the cost of skipping over Advent. We miss the hope – maybe not the happiness or hoopla – but the hope the world needs – the hope that can rise out of apocalypse and lament. If we skip Advent, when Dec. 25th rolls around, we miss the radical message of Christmas…the world is not all happy-go-lucky gather around the manger, sweet baby Jesus. If we skip Advent we have nothing more to say to our world than “enjoy Christmas, feel good, even though the world around you is burning down.” In other words, we concede that Christmas has no good news for those who suffer today.
We do have something more to say to our world…something more to offer. We have HOPE…Advent hope. We have essential things to speak into the world. This is our work during the Christmas season, and it’s more important than shopping, more important than the Christmas parties and family meals, more important than making sure it is a magical time for our kids. If we pause to hear the cries of humanity today – the poems that describe the suffering people feel all over the world and in our back yard, and if we join in the hymns of lament, we can tap into authentic hope and share that with those who are suffering.
The world needs hope. Hope grounded in reality. Hope that can speak to a suffering world. Hope that gives you something to hang on to even in a crises; something not bound by our temporal world, but capable of turning that world upside down. And hope often comes in poetry – poetry can hold the tension of lament and trust. Poetry can break through cycles bound by logical prose. And our poetry is written and spoken with our lives which have been shaped by the poetry of scripture.
The apocalyptic texts should be read every year, if only to help us pause and remember reality that we would rather ignore. The advent texts give us space in which to remember why we need God to be born among us again. They require us to name the things from which we and the earth are waiting redemption. Pastor Will Willamon puts it this way:
“We dare not rush to greet the Redeemer prematurely until we pause here, in darkened church, to admit that we do need redemption. That nothing within can save us. No thing can save us. No president, no bomb, no new car, no bottle, no white Christmas can save. So “No” to all false consolation, we say. No! to the empty, contrived merriment of a terminal world. No thank you, we shall wait here, in yearning and silence, in darkness and penitence for the One that can save.”
Mark, with his poetry about the reality of his world, invites us to write poetry about the reality of our world. We need to capture the pain in this world with the hyperbole and metaphor it deserves in order to awaken people and move them emotionally toward compassion.
In our culture, we often don’t get the power of Christmas, because we generally skip advent. Jesus was born into an apocalypse, not a mall. Jesus came to people living in the dark shadow of Roman oppression, not people sitting around a tree in pjs opening gifts. If our Christmas stories ignore these realities, we are not speaking the truth, and Christmas is only a secular celebration, no matter how many baby Jesus’ we see and how many Christmas carols we sing.
Jesus saves not because he’s sweet – but because he offers hope of a whole new world that breaks the chains of oppression and upsets the systems that destroy. When he comes, whenever we manifest God in our lives, it is the end of the world as we know it…and thank God. Thank God for the radical possibilities in the midst of our modern day apocalypses. Thank God for poetry – that can imagine those possibilities and move people to live into them and make the real in our world today. Amen.
