December 3, 2023
Not a Run-up to Christmas
Mark 13:24-37
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 the[a] 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[b] 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,[c] 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.”
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
So, the culture around us is getting into the Christmas spirit, and many of us are doing the same thing. The Christmas trees went up this week here at church, and your family has probably put up some decorations at home. We are making our lists, and purchasing gifts (personally, I’m behind) and finalizing our plans for Christmas.
But this reading from Mark doesn’t sound like Christmas, and that’s because it is an Advent text. Today is the first Sunday of Advent. And even though we are getting ready for Christmas, the church goes through Advent on the way. Advent is not simply the run-up to Christmas.
You may have heard the news story on NPR last week that some pastors would like to extend the Advent season from four weeks to six or seven. The pastors and professors they interviewed found that leaning into Advent themes, even extending the season, resonates with people of all ages and faith-perspectives as a timely message for our world. Advent is about God’s justice arriving to a world convulsed by injustice. God’s peace coming to a world torn by violence. God’s light dawning on people who stumble in the dark. Advent is not simply the run-up to Christmas.
The Episcopal scholar and preacher Fleming Rutledge, who is a wonderful writer and apostle of Advent, published an excellent book on Advent, in which she writes that, “Of all the seasons of the church year, Advent most closely mirrors the daily lives of Christians, presents the most accurate picture of the human condition, and above all, orients us to the future of the God who will come again.”[1] Advent is not just the run-up to Christmas.
This congregation has leaned into this season for decades now because we too have found that Advent resonates deeply with our spiritual lives. However, we are a diverse congregation, many of us are new here, from different places and traditions, so some of us may not be that familiar with Advent and its themes. Even though some Christians have marked this season for centuries, most Reformed Christians – like Presbyterians – didn’t celebrate Advent until recently. If you, like me, did not grow up with a Advent, you’re not alone. If you’ve been thinking this season was the run-up to Christmas, you’re not alone. But Advent is not just the run-up to Christmas.
One of the important themes of Advent is taking honest stock of the world, facing into the darkness. Our text today from Mark is a speech by Jesus to his followers about the end of the world, and he describes for them the end of their specific world. The Temple will come down. The center of their national, political, religious and social life will be pulled apart, not one stone left on top of another. People will flee their homes, families be torn apart. And the whole universe will shake. “The sun will be darkened and the stars will fall from heaven.”
This week, I came across a review of the book Prophet Song, the winner of the Booker Prize for literature awarded last week, and learned that the novel is also about the end of the world, but in contemporary terms – the end of our world. The author, Paul Lynch, tells a fictional story of the modern-day ascent of fascism in Ireland, from the perspective of Eilish Stack, a micro-biologist, wife, and mother, who is struggling to keep her family safe in Dublin.
The state police are looking for her husband, a union leader, in the middle of a vague but dire national emergency. As the things in her family begin to unravel, Mrs. Stack’s children and her efforts to protect them are on center stage. You see, the novel is in some way a story of the toxic effects of stress on young people, who cannot be sustained on a diet of lies, evasion, and brittle cheeriness. The Stacks’ eldest son is filled with rage. Their 14-year-old daughter stops eating. And despite all of this, the Stacks refuse to do what Jesus tells his disciples they should do when the end of the world comes for them. The Stacks refuse to run, believing naively that somehow things will probably work out.
Near the conclusion of his apocalyptic book, Paul Lynch writes, “The end of the world is always a local event. It comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.”[2]
The season of Advent begins with a description of the end of the world because the season of Advent calls us to face into the darkness of the world with courage. We in the Northern Hemisphere celebrate this season when the nights are longest, and the season asks us to look into the long night of the human life. Not to say that everything is dark, or that there is nothing we can do to bring light to the world; there are many things we can do to make the world better and brighter. But this season reminds us, in case we have forgotten, that there is a tragic dimension to life that we cannot fix. There are children we cannot protect. There are loved ones we cannot save. There are wrongs we cannot make right. There are tragedies we cannot redeem. There are wounds we cannot heal. Advent begins in darkness.
But darkness is not the only theme of Advent. In Advent we face into the darkness, but we look beyond it. To what do we look? We look to the future judgment of God on sin, death, and evil and to the joyful completion of God’s new creation. This is other dynamic of our reading from Mark, the “Son of Man coming on a cloud, with great power and glory.” Christian theology calls this the second coming of Christ. That is the hopeful theme of Advent.
Now, some of you are saying, wait a second. I know Jesus came the first time, but what’s this about him coming back? That might be news for some of us. We don’t talk about it very often because this is a strange belief, and hard to fathom, and supernatural beyond our wildest imaginations. Yet the hope of the Christian faith is not only that Christ was born, lived, died, and rose again. The hope of our faith is also that Christ will return.
That is the end of the Christian story. He will return, as this text says, with “great power and glory.” When Christ returns, he will destroy the powers of evil, destruction, and death. Christ will reign in a new world where there is no suffering or sadness. And we, and those from every time and place, will be gathered into this new age. This is the future hope that lies at the heart of the Christian faith.
Even though we rarely talk about it explicitly, we remind ourselves of this when we gather at this table for communion, when a minister says, “Each time we take this bread and this wine, we proclaim the saving death of our risen Lord until he comes again.” We sing about it in our songs, like in today’s opening hymn “Lo, he comes with clouds descending.” Or in the final verse of my favorite hymn, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”: “Finish then thy new creation/pure and spotless let us be/Let us see thy great salvation/perfectly restored in thee.” We confess it when we say the Apostles’ Creed, “He will come to judge the living and the dead.” And in the season of Advent, we remind ourselves of this future hope.
You see, Advent reminds us that God is the most important active agent of the Christian hope, and this text is warning to us that we should never expect too little from God. Our Christian hope is grounded in what God will do.
God has not left us to take the future into our own hands, or stumble along in the hope that things will gradually improve. Only five minutes with the news will remind us that is naïve. Our ultimate hope that is that God will intervene and put the world right.
The hope of Christian faith is not that eventually we will make everything better; the hope of Christian is not that if we try hard enough, even with God’s help, we will fix the world; the hope of the Christian faith is not that God will rescue a few people into heaven and leave the rest of the world to travel on its miserable way. The hope of the Christian faith is that when Christ comes again, God will finish a new creation, and all flesh shall see it together.
As, again, Fleming Rutledge writes, “God is the subject of the verb. God doesn’t need us to help him make his ‘dream’ come true; God is on the march far ahead of us, bringing his purposes to pass.” God is the most important active agent on the stage of history. When we say that Christ will come again, we mean that one day God will put everything right that is wrong. God will make everything whole that is broken. God will deliver us into a new world.
There is no predicting when it will happen. No matter what anyone tells you, or what you see on late-night TV, there is no way to read the signs of the “end times.” Jesus tells us that no one knows, and his return will catch us by surprise. And there is no explaining why it has not happened yet, after all these years. We must be honest about this mystery. Why does God delay? Indeed, the delay of Christ’s return is one of the deepest and hardest mysteries of the Christian faith.
Yet, still, there is no diminishing the importance of Christ’s return in the story of the Christian hope. To put it academically, the eschatological dimension of our faith cannot be reduced without remainder to the existential dimension. To put it in the language of scripture, as Saint Paul said, if we hope for this life only, we are among all people, most to be pitied. To put it in the language of everyday life, this ain’t all there is. This ain’t the end of the story. There is another chapter, a final chapter, that includes all of us and all creation.
If you think Easter is hard to believe, Advent will rock your world. In fact, if we find this hard to believe, then I submit to you that we are wrestling faithfully with the breadth of the Christian faith, the expansive horizon of our hope. And if this seems this is too good to be true, then I submit to you that we are beginning to grasp the immensity of God’s promises to us.
At the end of each of our stories, and at the end of the story of the world, there is not a scene of chaos and suffering. There will be suffering on the way, and there will be chaos, but that is not the end. At the end, at the very end, there is a loving God who gathers us into God’s own life, a loving God who banishes the darkness forever, a loving God who will himself be our forever home.
The Christian philosopher James K. A. Smith compares this grand hope to closing on a house and waiting to move in. He says that Advent time, the anticipation of the consummation of Christ’s new creation, is like when his daughter and son-in-law finally bought a house they loved, their “meant-to-be house,” but then they had to wait. He writes (and it’s a long quote but worth it),
“But then that vexing season of waiting. The offer is accepted, your new reality has dawned. Wait for the inspection. Wait for the appraisal. Then that curious season of escrow in which “your” house is occupied by hangers-on who seem to be squatting in your future. You’re buying curtains and stockpiling paint swatches and already planning your first party. But you have to wait. You have to dwell in what W. H. Auden calls “the Time Being.” The Christian life is like living in escrow: the Creator has taken possession, but we’re waiting for closing.”[3]
And what do we do while we wait, in this Time Being? Our work, in this time, in this Advent time, in our time, is to live as those who know how the story ends.
You see, the promise of Christ coming again does not minimize the time in which we live; it fills our time with possibility and hope. You see, the promise of Christ coming again does not limit the significance of our lives; it redeems our lives, in their totality, both our joys and our sorrows. You see, the promise of Christ coming again does not reduce the importance of the world in which we live, it makes our world even more precious to us because this is the creation that God will make new.
Our work in this present time, this Advent time, is to live as those who know how the story ends. To discern where the Spirit of God’s future is moving in the present. To open our eyes and hearts to the people and events where God’s purposes are coming to pass. To find places in the darkness where the light of new creation is shining and camp out there. And work there. And love there. And serve there. And dream there. And light candles in the darkness for one another there. And wait with faith there.
And remind one another there, that even if the stars begin to fall and the end of the world comes knocking on your door, it is not the end. Christ will come again. Even so, Lord quickly come! Amen.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina
[1] Fleming Rutledge, “Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ,” p. 1.
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/11/27/booker-winner-prophet-song/
[3] James K. A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time, p. 146.
[i] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/what-did-jesus-have-against-goats/
[ii] https://sermons.martinluther.us/Luther_Lenker_Vol_5.pdf p. 338.