The End is the Begining

12-3-17

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our Lord and savior Jesus the Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! The craziness of Black Friday and Cyber Monday is behind us and yet stores all over are advertising deal after deal while playing music with jingle bells and “ho-ho-ho”s. Chubby men with white beards in red suits pop up wherever you look, and the smell of evergreens and cinnamon wafts over everything like a blanket of snow we don’t – yet - have. It gets darker earlier during the evenings now, but that’s ok – nearly every house is beautifully lit with twinkling lights. Look at all the signs – it must be nearly Christmas!

There were signs for the very first Christmas too, when Jesus was born in the city of Bethlehem over two thousand years ago. I’m sure you all know them already. There were shepherds. There was a very pregnant woman about to give birth and her very worried fiancé. There was hay and perhaps some animals. And, of course, there was a manger to place the baby Jesus in when he was born. And much, much later, a bright star, there were wise men from the East who brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

In our Gospel reading for today, however, Jesus is all grown up. What happened? Where is Mary, Joseph, shepherds, and the rest of our familiar nativity scene that we’re expecting? This is NOT the kind of beginning that we were expecting. In fact, it seems much more like the end. Like someone didn’t rewind Mark from the last time we used him three years ago… you know - like a cassette tape that someone forgot to rewind. We seem to have traded one scary Gospel for another, and are stuck in a sort of Apocalypse loop, or something.

At the beginning of Advent this year, we don’t find ourselves Jesus in the manger, but instead, with Jesus at the Temple, describing a catastrophe that feels like the end of time. 

At this point in Mark, grown-up Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem for the celebration of the Passover – Peter and John and the rest of them are doing the typical touristy thing and admiring the Temple mount and the trappings of the establishment. Probably like the first time I was in New York City, rubber-necking like a tourist.  And I bet the disciples could easily have been thinking that soon THEY and not the ROMANS would be in charge…. That is, once Jesus took power, kicked out the oppressors, and set up shop as full-fledged king and messiah. Soon, THEY rule from all these impressive buildings.

But Jesus is not impressed. Not one bit. Instead of joining in the rubber-necking, Jesus describes their destruction. Before our Gospel lesson begins, Jesus has gone on and on about wars and destruction and suffering, of trials and false messiahs. Then, as described in verse 24, the very fabric of the cosmos itself will begin to unravel. All this what Jesus’ final coming will look like. Not exactly the rosy picture the disciples imagined or expected.

This is probably because Jesus has other things on his mind: This is, after all, Jesus’ last Passover. In fact, Jesus only has a few days yet to live in Mark’s Gospel, and here too he is filled, not with the kind of cheer surrounding Christmas (his birth), but instead with more of a “Good Friday” tone.

And the writer of Mark had others thing on his mind as well. This author is writing to an audience of early Christians neck-deep in life-altering and unsettling upheaval. Forty years or so after the events of Good Friday, the very buildings the disciples had been admiring lay in a smoking ruin, destroyed by foreign armies. The center of how they had worshiped God for centuries was gone. It’s no wonder that, to them, the future looked dark with no way forward.

Which left the early followers of Jesus wondering, can God still show up, even after all the temple is gone?  Is God’s kingdom still near, even when everything looks so bleak? Will God be able to break into the hopelessness that seems so thick and heavy? Why did this happen… and why does God delay in coming? Why do we have to wait? “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down…” God, so that you can get to the business of saving us!

Advent, the season of the church year that we have now started, is a time of waiting for the promised hope of Christmas to arrive. I think that most of us have experienced living a kind of “Advent time” waiting and wondering when – and if – God is going to show up. We, as we read Mark’s words from two thousand Advents ago – and Isaiah’s words from thousands of years before that – can easily wonder the same things. What does hope look like when so much seems hopeless and beak?

Perhaps for you the catastrophe to be lamented is less of a cosmic one and is much more personal. Perhaps this Advent brings the loss of a job or … or the stress of crazy work hours. Perhaps it brings deteriorating health…. News of a terminal illness…. Maybe it’s the first year of holidays after a loved one has died, and facing the grief of an empty chair at the family table. … or an addiction that immobilizes an entire family…. marriages that fall apart…. Or waiting for good news after yet another IVF treatment…. Our lives can fall apart in ways big and small that can certainly feel like the end of the world.

We wonder right along with the people of faith for centuries before us… in THIS Advent… Where is Jesus? What’s the delay? Why does he always compare himself so much to someone who ups and leaves all the time?

If Jesus is the one arriving at an unknown time, and we are these slaves, given tasks to do in the dark… while struggling to stay awake while keeping discouragement at bay while waiting for Jesus to show up… at least we are in good company.

Mary and Joseph spent a long night waiting for Jesus to be born – not in an inn, but in a shelter or cave where animals were kept, with only a manger to put the baby Jesus in.

Shepherds watching their flock in field by night were waiting too… not exactly to be serenaded by the heavenly host… but they WERE waiting for daybreak and the light of the coming dawn. They were just not expecting it to appear in the form of a baby, born as the savior of the world.

And much later on, the wise men from far away followed the leading of a bright star… which, I’m assuming, they would only be able to see at night. They traveled miles and miles… in the dark… to a land they have never been… All to honor a king they had never met.

Much, much later, when this king grew up, fed and healed some people, preached about God’s love, he made the wrong people angry… and the faithful women disciples stood watch, wept, and waited while darkness fell over the whole land.

And then as some of those same women crept to the tomb to anoint Jesus’s body with spices in the dim light of the early morning hours… they found that the stone had been rolled away, and only darkness had taken up residence.

Barbara Brown Taylor – writer, theologian, and former Episcopalian priest wrote a book called “Learning to Walk in the Dark.” In this book she does something that none of us I think are eager to do – explore how God is actively at work in “the dark.”

Because, as she concludes, God is just as active the dark places we find ourselves in… where the way forward is obscured & unknown… when life has left us in a dim fog, not able to see what comes next, waiting for something, or some ONE, to break through and show us the way. Or at least show us that we are not alone.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “Even when light fades and darkness falls--as it does every single day, in every single life…  darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.” … For with God, “...new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.” 

A prayer that I have prayed many times, that has gotten ME through stumbling along shadowy paths plenty of times, is called the “Servants Prayer.” Perhaps the slaves in the story Jesus told may have even prayed some version of it during the night they waited for their master. The prayers goes: O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us.

From St. John's Abbey artists

During the season of Advent, God is in both the light and in the darkness. In Advent, Jesus comes to us as a baby and as a grown man. He is on a cross and he is raised. He came, he is here, and he will come again, but we don’t know just when and how until he shows up. His kingdom will come, and at the same time his kingdom IS ALREADY HERE among us. Jesus shows up all the time. Even when it’s too dim to see beyond our own world ending… Jesus shows up. That’s what Advent is all about.

In the tinseled and bright “Christmas” fakery all around us, Jesus gives us some real joy and peace to hang on to. And that is the promise that he has come…. Is coming to us… and will come to us again. Especially now. Especially in the dark. Thanks be to God. Amen.