RVCC Pastor's Sermon

Sermon - November 30, 2008

“Backward and Forward”

By Rev. Nancy Foran
Mark 13:24-37

Happy New Year! You may not realize it, but today is the first day of a new church year. And as you do know, it is also the first Sunday in the liturgical season of Advent.

I love these four weeks before Christmas. You see, Advent is this brief but wonderful season in the church that reminds us all to stop, just stop. Even though Christmas carols may fill the airwaves and the mall will undoubtedly send out its siren song of sales and bargains, even though Santa in his sleigh may pop up all over town and our “to do” list will most certainly get longer and longer while time gets shorter and shorter, in Advent, the church calls us to breath in the cold air of winter and take all the time necessary to look both backward and forward.

In Advent, we send our minds reeling to centuries ago to the joy of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem and at the same time rocket them into the future to that place, that dimension, that experience that we call God’s Kingdom where regardless of what else will happen, the world will be indelibly imprinted with the eternal image of God, something that began over 2000 years ago with the groan of a woman in labor and the cry of a newborn baby.

James Love writes, however, that, “according to Mark, we can forget the stable, the star, the shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night. When Mark looks into the sky, what he sees are cosmic fireworks: a darkened sun, a dim moon, stars falling from the sky like sparks from a sparkler - and there, in the center of the smoke, the Son of God coming in clouds with great power and glory.”

For Mark, there is no looking back. There is no past or long ago. After all, he has no “birth of Jesus” story in his gospel. For Mark and the ancient community to whom he wrote, there is only the future and the eventual coming of God’s realm.

And so in deference to this forward looking Gospel writer on this first Sunday in Advent, this morning we take seriously his words imploring us to prepare for what Jesus would have called the end times, the end of the world as we know it, the great paradigm shift when somehow in ways we can not begin to imagine the world will finally bear the stamp of God’s love and abundance.

Mark reminds us that even Jesus did not know when this great and universal dislocation would occur - only that it would – and so our Savior urges and beseeches us to be watchful. "Therefore, keep awake," Jesus says, for we – each one of us - live in a world in which nothing should be taken for granted.

Jesus says it is like waiting for a fig tree to bloom in the summer. You think the buds will never change and then you wake up one morning to glorious blooms and leaves in abundance.

It is like a man about to leave on a journey who puts his slaves in charge and hires a doorkeeper to keep watch and the whole lot of them know that they need to remain constantly awake and alert until the master comes home – because they do not know the whys and wherefores. They do not know if the trains will run on schedule, and they do not want to mess up this time.

Advent is such an in-between time – looking backward, looking forward – and about the time that our heads start spinning we are called to stop and simply feel the ways that this short and complex season pulls and tugs at our hearts and souls.

When all is said and done, Advent is a season of waiting – waiting both in fear and in hope. It is a season of understanding time in a new way even as we wait for time to pass. It is a season of wondering if the best really is yet to come – and preparing ourselves should that be true.

OK - how can this busy, joyful time, you may ask, harbor anything remotely like fear? But surely, as Richard Fairchild writes, there is fear deeply embedded in this season: fear that the road will not be straight, that the valleys will not be lifted up and the mountains and hills made low, fear that the way – with a capital “W”, that the way will be lost, fear that we will forget God’s Way, fear that the time of peace will never come.

Maybe that is why we so compliantly wrap ourselves in the trappings of red and green and bury ourselves among shopping bags and figure that if we can get close enough to a perfect Christmas Day then maybe we will not feel the fear gnawing away inside of us.

But Advent is also about hope. It is about hope for that sacred change, that holy shift, that dislocation when the world, like Mary before it, will also groan its way to a new birth, and we will know that the Kingdom in all its richness, fullness, peace, and beauty is here – and our fear will subside. Advent is about hope that, as Richard Fairchild reminds us, “the wrongs of this world will be righted…the evil of this world will perish…(and) justice will be done.”

And out of that hope comes a new way to understand time – and that is Advent too. What I mean is that Advent is about seeing the world and God’s plan through linear rather than circular time. It is about trusting that history will not keeping repeating itself over and over and over again. Someday there will be lasting peace after war. There will be feasting after famine. There will be healing and wholeness after brokenness and loss.

In his book, Clowns of God, Morris West tells a story about “the pope who has a revelation that Christ is returning for the final judgment. He shares this with the cardinals, and they decide that it is best to say he is senile, so they exile him to the monastery at Monte Cassino.

However, he gets the message out to some people in Europe and tells them to start forming cell groups of Christians all over the world. As time passes and these cell groups begin to form, Christmas Eve approaches…and one cell group meets in the hills of Bavaria to share the celebration of Christ’s birth.

An interesting Middle Eastern type joins them for the celebration and when he is asked if he is a believer, he says: “I am not a believer; I am he.”

“Give us a sign,” they say. “If you were really he, you would say, ‘Ask and it shall be given.”

“Ask,” he said.

“Time,” they said. “Enough time to change a world, to beautify it, to cleanse it, to prepare it for you.”

“I accept,” he said.

“How much time do we have,” they asked.

“I won’t say,” he said. “Not much—but enough!” (David Zerson)

And so for us, it needs to be enough to simply stop and trust in the season of Advent. It needs to be enough for us to be in this in-between time of “not much – but enough”, to simply wait and be watchful.

A minister once wandered through a shopping mall shortly after Thanksgiving determined to find even the slightest evidence that those around her had caught the Advent spirit. The Christmas spirit – oh, yes, that was everywhere – in abundance. She saw women tugging their children along with the bags of Christmas gifts. Christmas music filled the air. Lights were flashing, and the line was long for photos with Santa.

She had about given up finding any sense of the Advent season when she saw a small sign in the window of the Ground Round Restaurant. "Waiters Wanted,” it said. “Ah, Advent,” she whispered.

Advent is about waiting, sometimes in fear but mostly with hope. Advent is about watching and being prepared. As William Loader wrote, "Watchful living has less to do with speculation about the end of the world…and more to do with carrying out our trust, as Mark illustrates it, in a way that finally makes the date of the end a matter of irrelevance. Readiness has as much to do with being ready for life as it has to do with its end." Our whole lives – even now - are about getting ready for the end, for that time when we will dwell in God’s Kingdom. Our whole lives are about living fully in this world by touching the lives of those all around us (as Beth Quick wrote), “seeking to let God into the deepest corners of our hearts.

Mark was right. Advent is indeed about looking forward, but in my opinion it is much more than that. It is also about looking backward, falling back into Bethlehem and letting ourselves be awash in the joy of childbirth, all the while trusting that even now and until the end Jesus comes to us to comfort, strengthen, give wisdom, guide, and walk with us as we go through the darkness to the light of God’s Kingdom.

Sermon - November 30, 2008

“Backward and Forward”

By Rev. Nancy Foran Mark 13:24-37

By Rev. Nancy Foran
Mark 13:24-37