Advent
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
November 27, 2005
Isaiah 64:1-9; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37
Isaiah 64 1 ¶ O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence — 2 as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil — to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence! 3 When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence. 4 From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him. 5 You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed. 6 We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. 7 There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity. 8 Yet, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. 9 Do not be exceedingly angry, O LORD, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people.
1 Corinthians 1 3 ¶ Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
4 ¶ I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, 5 for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind — 6 just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you — 7 so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. 8 He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.Mark 13 24 ¶ “But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, 25 and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. 26 Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. 27 Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.
28 ¶ “From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. 29 So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. 30 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. 31 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
32 ¶ “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 33 Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. 34 It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. 35 Therefore, keep awake — for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, 36 or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. 37 And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”
I. BEGINNING
There are six seasons of the Christian year, which make up two cycles. The first is the Christmas cycle, that consists of Advent, Christmas (all 12 days), and Epiphany. The second is the Easter cycle: Lent, Easter (all 50 days), and Pentecost. All the days of the year fall into one of those seasons.
Today, is the first day of the Christian year—the first Sunday in Advent. What is Advent, exactly? Other than the time when retailers make most of their profits? Other than a time for holiday parties and Christmas specials on TV?
Advent, like Lent, is a time of preparation. It is also a time of expectation and waiting.
II. THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART
Tom Petty was right: the waiting is the hardest part. I can’t stand waiting. I am not a patient person when it comes to things I am expecting. If I get an idea about something I’d like—for the home or for the office—I usually go out and purchase it right away. What’s the sense in waiting? Sure I could order something from Staples and it will be here tomorrow, but why not drive to Staples and get it today? Often when I get some kind of project in my head, I become impatient with waiting for it to start and usually go out and buy what I need for the project as soon as possible.
As a culture, we’ve all gotten terrible at waiting. It used to be that if you wanted information from someone, you wrote them a letter and then you waited. Days. Maybe weeks. As a kid I once wrote a letter to the Navy, asking them for information about submarines. Weeks went by. But finally I got an envelope in the mail with a letter from the navy, a copy of the naval encyclopedia entry on submarines, and a whole stack of glossy black and white declassified photos of submarines. It was really cool.
We’d never put up with that kind of delay today. We’d expect our e-mail to be responded to right away, and in fact, I probably would never have taken the time to write anyone asking for information, I’d have just gone online and downloaded all the photographs of submarines I wanted. No, as a culture, we’re not very good at waiting.
And so here we are in Advent: a time of waiting. A time of year that runs almost 180 degrees opposite of everything our culture tells us. Our culture tells us to go faster and faster: not dialup, but DSL. Not DSL, but cable. And Advent tells us: slow down. Wait. Be patient.
III. HOW LONG?
And worse yet: we are not even told how long we should be waiting for.
“But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 33 Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.
We are waiting. But we don’t know how long. That’s another thing we’re not good at. I don’t know about you, but I love those new crosswalk signs with the countdown, telling you how many seconds you have to wait for the light to change. I don’t like waiting an indeterminate amount of time. And yet, the teaching of Jesus is that we do not know the time so we are to wait and keep awake.
IV. EXPECTATION: ISAIAH
But what is it we’re waiting for, exactly? The writer of Isaiah writes:
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence — 2 as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil — to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
Long have the people waited for God to make himself manifest. When will God show herself to the nations—so that the faith of Israel might be vindicated among the nations who inflict Israel with pain? Tear open the very heavens themselves, O God!
5 You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed. 6 We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. 7 There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
The people sinned against God. Everything we counted as righteousness has been as a filthy cloth because of our unrighteousness. Because of the sin of the people, we have been carried into exile, blown away like leaves, carried off into Babylon as a result of our injustice, as a result of our idolatry.
8 Yet, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. 9 Do not be exceedingly angry, O LORD, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people.
And finally, a plea: Remember, O God, that you are our Father—you are our potter, the one who shapes us and makes us. Forgive us, we are you people. Redeem us.
This was the hope of the people in the 6th Century BC, when these words were penned following the return of the Exiles, when the land was still in a state of devastation and decay. When the sins of the previous generations were still having their effect on the people dwelling in the land.
This was the hope of the people in Jesus’ day, who were suffering under the tyranny of another Babylon: the Roman Empire—exiled in their own land. Awaiting God’s triumphant appearance, and the manifestation of God’s reign among them.
V. WAITING AND ADVENT: MARK
These are the hopes that help us to understand what it is we are waiting for. The hopes for the vindication of God form the framework of what it is we expect at Advent.
A. Christmas
And we might ask: what does this all have to do with Christmas? That is, why are we reading this stuff during advent and not “Behold a virgin shall conceive… and they shall name him Immanuel”? Why are we not reading the sections of Isaiah that say things like “For unto us a child is born…”? Why are we reading this stuff?
We are so used to thinking of advent as the time before Christmas that we have a hard time understanding what is going on. In fact, everything is conspiring against us when it comes to understanding what Advent is all about.
Since we have Advent calendars that count down the days to Christmas, and Advent wreaths that mark the Sundays until Christmas, and of course holiday displays at the CVS that go up sometime before Halloween, and the easy listening radio stations that start playing Christmas music sometime around mid-November, and let’s not forget Macy’s, telling us that the Christmas season has begun at noon on Thanksgiving by bringing Santa Claus to Herald Square; since we have all those things, it’s easy to get confused. It’s easy to think that everything in Advent has to do with Christmas.
But it doesn’t. Not really.
B. Apocalypse
When we talk about expectation at Advent, when we talk about hope, we are not talking only about hopes that were fulfilled with the birth of a baby in a manger in Bethlehem. We are talking about the hope of God’s people being finally consummated by the in-breaking reign of God.
The text we read from the Gospel of Mark makes that clear:
“But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, 25 and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. 26 Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. 27 Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.
This passage is from what Biblical Scholars call “The Little Apocalypse”—a brief bit of apocalyptic literature right in the middle of the Gospel of Mark and contains traditional apocalyptic symbols: darkening of the sun and moon, the ‘Son of Man’ coming in the clouds, the gathering of the elect. And like all apocalyptic, the message is ultimately one of hope.
But it is a hope in God’s final victory, a victory which we still await. It something we have been awaiting for a very long time—and the reason why Advent is all about preparation, and waiting.
C. Telling Stories Backward
Advent comes from the Latin word adventus that means “arrival”. When we as Christians talk during Advent about the coming of Christ, we are referring to the Second Coming, the return of Christ, and the coming of the Kingdom of God.
This Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent. As I said, it is the first Sunday in the Church year (so, happy new year). That doesn’t mean that we’re going to start at the beginning of the story. Christians have never really done that. In fact, Christians usually start at the end of the story.
Central to our message is that Christ was raised from the dead, as a sign and foretaste of the victory over death that God would bring to all of us. That is the starting point. The resurrection.
From there, we move backwards to Jesus’ life and teachings—to the ethics that make up a life framed by the grace of the Resurrection. And from there we move backwards: to describe the birth of the one in whom we would see the vindication of our hopes—the one who was raised and who will come again to raise us all to new life.
It is likely that the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke, the nativity stories, were among the last traditions to be fully developed. The last part of the gospels to take final form. Those stories are meant to tell us something of who Jesus was, that Jesus was from God, that Jesus’ whole life was part of God’s plan for us—from beginning to end. We don’t celebrate Christmas because of what happened at Christmas alone. We celebrate Christmas because of what happened at Easter. We celebrate Christmas because of what will happen when Christ comes again.
VI. END: HOPE AND THE COMING OF THE LORD
This is the hope we embrace at Advent. This is the coming we look forward to. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of the Christmas season. It is easy to get stuck in the trap of thinking that Christmas is about the birth of a baby. Christmas is about the Incarnation of the One who was Raised from the dead. Advent is about preparation: preparation for a retelling of that ancient story, and preparation for the eventual return of that One. It will be at a day and hour that no one knows. Like a thief in the night or a master returning from a long trip, it will happen at any time.
It certainly seems like we’ve been awaiting this final victory for a long time. Perhaps that is why advent is so helpful—it’s good training for waiting.
And yet, advent is also about expectation: the expectation that our hopes will be vindicated, that the Kingdom of God is breaking in upon us, and will break in fully, that we will see the ‘Son of Man coming in the clouds’ and with great power and glory. We may not know the day or the hour. We may not know when the time will come. But we do know that the day will arrive. The time will come when God will save the people. When we will see peace and justice in our midst. When there will be no mourning, or crying, and death will be no more, when God himself will be with us.
And that is something worth waiting for.
