1st Sunday in
Advent (Year B) – Sunday, November 27, 2011
Christ Evangelical
Lutheran Church, Lancaster, PA
Texts: Isaiah 64:1-9; Mark
13:24-37
“<static>
Attention Walmart shoppers. Attention Walmart shoppers! We promise
you we have lots of stuff, lots and lots of stuff for you to buy!!
We have ooodles of Xboxes, pallets of plasma-screen televisions and
cartons of cheap clothing. Trust us – you really don't need to
come packin' heat to our store! Even without firearms, pepper spray
and knives, we promise you can run up your credit card in nothing
flat!”
Apparently
Walmart shoppers did not heed this advice, and felt compelled during
this year's Black Friday weekend to shoot, stab and pepper spray
their fellow shoppers (that's three separate incidents), and police
chimed in by knocking down a 54 year-old grandfather who, depending
how you look at it, was either shoplifting or helping protect his
grandson. The grandfather was arrested and needed four stitches.
After hearing this news, I can understand how some people think
society is unraveling and the world is coming to a rapid demise. And
here we have it in the scripture readings for the First Sunday in
Advent, just when we wanted to hear about the gentle baby Jesus, meek
and mild, we have the end of the world! It's jarring, surprising.
Not what we wanted to hear.
Combining
our greed and violent tendencies with global warming, catastrophic
earthquakes, tsunamis, flooding, tornadoes and hurricanes, the
failure of the Congressional supercommittee, government brutality in
Syria and Egypt, the unending conflict in the Holy Land, the imminent
failure of the euro and governments across Europe, and persistent
unemployment at home, and, well, you can see how those preachers of
the end times can persuade a few people. Every time somebody stands
up and proposes a date for the end of it all, somehow a decent group
of people follows along, only to have the date projected forward,
again and again. Why do these people have such a following? Well,
they have learned how to capitalize on the most destructive human
emotion – FEAR. Fear is powerful. Fear has been known to get in
the way of God's love.
The
original hearers of our texts today from Isaiah and Mark had ample
reason to be afraid. In both cases, about 600 years apart, foreign
armies had or were about to destroy the Temple of the LORD, the God
of Israel. The Temple was the house of God – it was where God's
presence actually dwelled, among God's people. It was the literal,
physical location of God in their midst and the concrete sign that
God had chosen them to be his people. That anything could or would
happen to the Temple - let alone that it would be violated by the
sacrilege of foreign invaders, its treasures carted off and the
structure razed to the ground – was utterly unthinkable. It would
be for them the end of the world as they knew it.
And it
was. In Isaiah 64, the people of Israel have actually returned from
exile in Babylon to find the Temple in ruins, and no matter how they
rebuild it, it is only a shadow of its former glory. With his people
Isaiah cries, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come
down!” He recalls that there was a time when God “did awesome
deeds that we did not expect” like when he created a nation from a
old couple named Abraham and Sarah. Or the time when he led them out
of slavery in Egypt. Isaiah cries for the mountains to quake and the
nations to tremble once again!
Mark
13 begins with the disciples looking up to the Second Temple, saying,
“Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” And
Jesus replies, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone
will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” This was
the Messiah of the LORD, who was to restore Israel to glory,
proclaiming that the Temple of the same LORD would be destroyed. But
his words rang true for those who heard Mark's gospel between 68 and
70 AD. At this time the Jews were in revolt against Rome, while at
the same time a struggle for imperial succession was raging among
Rome's generals. The general Vespasian decided that he could make a
case to be emperor by putting down the Jewish revolt. And he did.
In this chapter Jesus goes on to describe what these days would be
like, speaking of brothers betraying brothers, wars, famines, false
prophets, and warning of the horror for those raising children in
those days. Again, for Mark's hearers, these words were all too
real, as the Roman armies burned Jerusalem, sacked the temple and
killed every last man, woman and child. They had reason to be
afraid.
They
had reason to cry out to God from the depths of their souls to DO
something! They cried for God to come and be God! They were faced
with problems that only God could solve. And the same is true for
us. We face problems and challenges that we cannot solve on our own.
If you can bring peace in the Middle East, stop earthquakes and
tsunamis, get politicians to work together or keep people from being
abnoxious in Walmart, please let me know! Otherwise, we must turn to
God. We live in a fallen world, and none of us can shake ourselves
free of the sin that infects it.
Only
God can save us from sin, just like God saved his people from both of
these apocalyptic situations in the past. In Isaiah's time, the loss
of the first Temple was not the end, but rather a new beginning.
Rather than being focused on temple sacrifices, Israel's worship
changed and became centered on the reading and interpretation of
scripture by teachers who would be called rabbis. This worship could
happen anywhere. God did something new. In Mark's time, the
destruction of the Second Temple led, eventually, both to Judaism and
Christianity as we know them today. God worked with that
unbelievable tragedy to do something new.
In the
birth of Jesus in a backwater hamlet in Judea, God did the most
surprising, new thing of all. By entering the world as a helpless
infant, by leading his people as a servant, by crossing all the
boundaries, reinterpreting all the rules and, in the end, by dying on
a Roman cross, Jesus Christ was completely unexpected and unlike what
anyone thought God was or should be like. Through the Son, the
Father completely changed his people's image of their God. It was
the end of one experience of God and the beginning of another. This
is how God works – by doing new things and challenging our
expectations. In fact, you could say that, for God, doing new things
is the way things have always been done.
This
is not to say that God is
changing. God is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
God's love for us, and God's purpose to save us, is always the same.
But God has shown us an incredible ability to adapt to new
circumstances. Whenever our sin gets in the way of God's
relationship with us, God finds a new way to reach our hearts. In
Christ, God reached out to us in the closest and most intimate way,
by taking on our flesh and living in our broken world. But this was
to do what God has always done – to love us, to bless us, to create
a faith in our hearts that leads us to put him at the very center of
our lives.
Advent
is the time when we cry out to God that we need him to come and be
God. It is the time of waiting expectantly for God to come and do
something new, which is what God has always done. We are waiting for
the end of one experience of God and the beginning of another. So
when Jesus speaks of the sun and moon darkening, the stars falling
from heaven, the powers in the heavens shaking, and the angels
gathering us for the Son of Man who is coming in the clouds, our
proper response is not fear but hope and celebration! The Son of Man
is coming? Hooray! This is the One who will save us from the sin
and deliver us into a new life, a new relationship with his Father,
our Father!
When
Jesus invites us to “keep awake,” he invites us to expect his
return, and that's not something to fear, it's something to get
excited about! We know that the One who's in charge is the One who
gave his life for us. As we look forward to Christ's return, we just
can't predict how events will play out, and, frankly, it doesn't
matter. What does matter is who
is returning, and because it is our crucified and risen Lord Jesus,
there is nothing to fear. We can trust that his return will be for
the same purpose as his birth in Bethlehem – to draw us ever closer
to him.
With
our future wrapped up in God's love, we are free to embrace the
present. We are free to keep awake and to see God's kingdom breaking
in all around us. We are invited to be heralds of this ever-emerging
kingdom and the new things God is doing in our lives. Even as the
world changes around us, and the way we have always been church seems
not always to work as it once did, the same Christ who calls us
together is calling us to live out the same gospel, perhaps in
different ways. Brothers and sisters, we are living in an Advent
time. Let us keep awake, by living in expectation of our surprising
God. Surely he is coming soon. Amen, Come Lord Jesus!
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