The Rev. Dr. Austin Leininger
Sermon of the 1st Sunday of Advent
3 December 2017
Readings:
Isaiah 64:1-9
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Mark 13:24-37
Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
[One full minute of silence after Gospellor sits down…]
How does it feel to wait for something?
The return of a loved one… the birth of a child… a well deserved vacation, graduation, or retirement … or even Christmas break! We each have experiences with waiting for something so great and so precious that the passage of time is quite simply unbearable and the world around us practically stands still.
This first Sunday of Advent, our readings invite us into the spirit of this four-week season of anticipation. The language of expectation, of promise, of the not-yet-but-hoped for are thick in the words of Isaiah’s prophecy—seeking God to literally rip open the heavens and reveal God’self to God’s people again. Something is coming. “Something is coming soon, and it will change our lives and the world forever.” “Something our ancestors lived to see and which we’ve been hoping for and awaiting for generations is coming—please let it be soon! Echoing the same sentiment, in Mark’s Gospel Jesus tells his disciples of the imminence of God’s kingdom, the signs of which were as surely present in their own day as they are in ours. Prepare yourselves, he tells them, stay alert and focused on the work we started together! The signs are all around you—the Kingdom of God is near enough for you to reach out and touch it—no one knows when that day will come, so keep awake!
How does it feel to wait for something we desperately desire?
In an age of instant gratification, global travel in less than a day, microwave meals, Internet shopping that, at the simple touch of a button, can fulfill the wildest fancy of our whims at any hour of the night or day, global wireless communication at the perpetual convenience of our own pockets, and music, movies, books, and even musical scores available by instant download—have we forgotten the priceless feelings of anticipation that bring depth and insight to the dearest desires of our hearts?
Yes, we’re still subject to waiting for things like the release of an eagerly anticipated blockbuster or video game, a birthday, Christmas vacation, or the arrival of a much anticipated person. But how much time do we actually spend in quiet contemplation of something that is so meaningful to us that it will change our lives and the course of the world forever?
Time itself has been commercialized to the point that the time we are encouraged to believe we are “wasting” in waiting for something—no matter how good it is—must today be weighed against the productivity we’re losing, the income we could be making, and the opportunities we are missing.
We have moved back to a six- or seven-day work-week with 60-70 hours of work being considered normal for any ambitious professional, and 80-90 being considered promotion-worthy.
And yet, we find ourselves faced, again, with this church season that encourages us to step back, to sit in quiet contemplation and expectation—to act in a way our culture tells us is lazy, but which was once called sacred rest… or even Sabbath.
Our readings today call us back from the endless rush of our world, into a deep and refreshing breathing space. That sacred space between, where the collective sigh of the already and the not yet join in both completion and anticipation. Here is where we join our readings today, which beg of us to consider a time in our lives characterized purely by the “what is to come” of the unknown future. It is truly a marvelous season of preparation considering the journey Calvary has undertaken together as we look back over the past seasons and look forward to the exciting time of renewal and growth ahead.
Waiting, for the people of ancient Israel, was characteristic of their entire state of being. From the time Abraham left Ur for the land promised to him by God and went on the journey of over a hundred years, the experience of waiting has characterized God’s people. The children of Joseph cried out for generations in Egypt and then spent forty years in the desert, wandering in search of the Promised Land. The descendants of those wanderers finally crossed the Jordan with Joshua only to wait for God to deliver them from the inhabitants of the Promised Land. Bored of waiting, the people raised-up gods for themselves and turned to the lures of the cultures surrounding them only to find themselves back in the desert as exiles, now awaiting God’s return as lamented in Isaiah, and the time of the coming of Messiah when all would once again be well.
Seven hundred years after Isaiah’s time, we finally arrive at the time of Cesar’s census. A young woman, probably between thirteen and fifteen years old has been told by an angel that she has been chosen to carry and give birth to the long awaited messiah—God’s own self born into the world in human flesh. Her husband to be, a carpenter named Joseph, has also received a vision from angels encouraging him to still take Mary as his wife. That the child she has been found to be carrying is of the Holy Spirit… and that he should name him Jesus.
Three decades later, in the events captured in today’s gospel, Jesus—himself the answer to countless generations of waiting for his followers—insists that the long time of waiting is coming rapidly to a close and that the kingdom of God is at hand. He tells his disciples of the signs—already familiar—of the imminent coming of God’s kingdom—a kingdom in which they themselves are to participate.
Mark’s telling of Jesus’ words present us with a hauntingly familiar picture of what has frequently been hailed as the signs of the end times. Whatever else we may believe about this reading and its prophetic tone, we might at least agree that Christ’s words point us toward a mystery. Yet looking at his words as we enter this season of preparation for the mystery of the incarnation, I was captivated this week by the imminence of Christ’s words. “Be on the watch… keep awake,” “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.” So often Jesus speaks of the kingdom of God as an already that is at the same time a not yet, and I believe he is speaking in the same way in Mark’s gospel from this morning. We may recall that at the hour of Christ’s death on the cross, the sun was darkened, the heavens shook, and the barrier between the holy of holies and the profane in the temple was rent. Already there was distress among the nations as Persia, then Assyria, then Macedonia, then Rome held the Jewish people under their power. These signs were not unfamiliar to the disciples, who, like us today, would have recognized just how close to home Christ’s words already were in their own time.
So what is this already and not yet that seems to point to a timeless mystery?
Christ was speaking from scriptures also known to the disciples when he spoke of the “Son of Man coming in a Cloud.” We find Christ’s reference in Daniel 7, where Daniel speaks of his visions, “I saw one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him. To him was given dominion and glory…” This portion of Daniel’s vision talks about the four kingdoms—likely those of Persia, Assyria, Macedonia, and Rome—the last of which Daniel predicts will come to control all of the known world before its fall. The portion Jesus referenced is expanded upon as he prophesies God’s gathering of all of God’s people together from all over the world to bring God’s kingdom into being.
The whole of Christ’s ministry centers on exactly this Kingdom of God, which Jesus placed squarely into the hands of his disciples and followers as a gift of inexhaustible abundance in God’s love, forgiveness, and compassion. It is a kingdom that can never be possessed, yet is accessible to anyone seeking to give it away, and in this sense, it is always and everywhere both present and not yet. It is a kingdom in potential that is brought to life in the world every time we reach out to another in need to bring the abundance of God’s love to them. It is a kingdom that is brought to life from the four winds, which means throughout the whole world, by those of us gathered together in our faith and experience of God’s abundance by whatever name we know it, and brought to life as we share it with those around us. A kingdom in potential that is both perpetually revealed and yet not yet come in its fullness.
Be on watch, keep awake, the kingdom of God is at hand—literally at the end of our hands stretched out in love to lift up the oppressed, draw in the outcast, heal the sick and broken hearted, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and bring the freedom of hope to captives of body, mind, and spirit. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away before all of this has taken place.
These words are as true to us nearly two-thousand years later as they were in Christ’s lifetime. We are the inheritors of this same kingdom, along with the rest of the children of Israel, through that same Jesus—the messiah, the Christ, the son of God, the son of Mary, the son of Man—whom this season we are preparing to welcome into the world again in the timeless mystery of the incarnation.
How does it feel to wait for something so profound that it has already been in a state of becoming for over four thousand years?
That is the question of Advent. That is the question that we are given to contemplate from our place of modern cynicism as we look on the coming of another year of consumerism—the question that begs us to stop amidst the misplaced month and a half of pre-Christmas marketing that demands we give up the precious few weeks of time we have in spiritual preparation for something, the cosmic and spiritual magnitude of which we don’t have time to really grasp. That is the question we are given over to as we scramble to get our decorations up, our tree standing up straight for the neighbors and family to see, and our gifts purchased to remind the people who we don’t have enough time to spend with that we really do love and value them. It is the question that brings us, year after year, back to this place and to this community to try again and again to reorder ourselves toward the kingdom mentality where God’s abundance—lavished so freely upon the world in the coming of Christ—becomes the abundance of our own lives flowing over into every encounter we have with the world as we become Christ’s hands and heart in the world.
Half of her lifetime ago, when my oldest daughter Marie was five years old, she threw me a surprise birthday party. She came up with the idea herself, sat down and wrote out a list of supplies she would need, asked me – hypothetically – who I would want to come to my birthday party if I were to have one, hand-wrote invitations to her invited guests, and then asked Jane to take her to the store and to deliver her invitations. She picked up the items on her modest list, passing over some of her own favorite items to pick out things she knew papa would like instead, delivered her invitations, and let me know I couldn’t come home until after 1pm – for an undisclosed reason. She voluntarily swept the kitchen floor, helped do the dishes, and then with Jane’s help she decorated the upstairs and downstairs. She selected music, drew a huge pig for pin the tail on the piggy, and for the last ten minutes before I was supposed to arrive at home, she insisted that she and Jane hide so they could jump out and yell surprise when I got home.
Aside from being the best gift she could have ever given her papa for his birthday, it strikes me just how much my precocious little girl, even then, got the heart of what this season represents. The waiting with bated breath for a carefully planned labor of love to come to fruition.
I find that watching the approach of Christmas through my children’s eyes, every year, gives me a refreshing look at this season of anticipation. My youngest, Luke, who himself is now 7 ½ runs around the house singing Christmas carols – my middle son, Anthony, (at 9) offers him correction on some of the words that he doesn’t have quite right either. Marie, whose friends in fifth grade have a Christmas list as long as their forearms, just asked Santa for a few articles of clothing. And all of them—even my nephew Brandon, who is coming home for his winter break from Colorado State University to spend the month with us—are talking eagerly, not about the toys, but in anticipation of the time we’ll spend together as an extended family as we celebrate God’s own birth into the world.
Advent is our time. It is a time where, even if it’s only once per week for a couple of hours, we, as Christians, demand that the world stop long enough for us to look for the coming of God’s kingdom as a community that has been a part of the waiting game and the faith journey of over four thousand years.
It is a time for us to look with renewed anticipation upon the scriptures that foretold the coming of Christ, of the promises of peace, abundance, and love surrounding the coming of God into our very midst, of the reality of the coming of God in human flesh to live with us, to teach us, and to ultimately die for us—all so that we could finally understand God’s promise to us from the beginning of time.
“Don’t just pay this journey lip service,” Jesus warns his disciples in today’s gospel. “The kingdom of heaven is at your very fingertips, but it is ultimately your responsibility to bring it to life in this world after I am gone. Don’t be lulled into the temptation to respond to the distractions of this world out of worry, fear, envy, and a sense of scarcity. All the abundance of God’s kingdom is at your disposal—keep this knowledge in your hearts and never pass up an opportunity to make it a reality in your life and ministry in the world.” How does it feel to wait countless lifetimes for something that has been with us from the very beginning?
Each of us holds the answer within us. And while it may be that each of us will eventually come to the same answer, it is, nonetheless, something that we cannot be told, taught, forced or coerced into believing, or convinced of. It is something to which only the journey of a lifetime of faith and anticipation can bring us.
May we each find in this Advent season the opportunity to enter into a sacred breathing space of rest and reflection as we prepare for the coming of Christ.
The promised one is coming. The kingdom of God is at hand. The long wait is almost over.
Are you ready?
Amen.