Advent Dissonance

November 27, 2011
Advent 1B
Mark 13:24-37

It’s happened once again, we’ve survived a weekend of Turkey and football and parades and door-buster deals and have run straight into the Christmas season or, as Johnny Mathis refers to it, “the most wonderful time of the year”. The Christmas trees and lights have been illuminated, Christmas music is now playing 24/7 in stores, Christmas movies have been dominating the television… punctuated by the oh so clever holiday commercials…and the holiday flavors are selling like hot cakes at Starbucks. Yes, the Christmas season is in full swing. Soon calendars will be filled with parties and get togethers, counters will be filled with baked goods, mailboxes will be filled with Christmas cards and Christmas trees loaded with lights. Yes, Johnny Mathis, a most wonderful time of the year, indeed. But wait, aren’t we missing something?
As the Black Friday deals fade into Cyber Monday and the Christmas season swings into action, we in the church begin our observation of Advent. It is a time of preparation and active waiting and watching for the coming of our Lord, whose birth we celebrate on Christmas. And while the world around us is singing “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” we sing hymns like “Savior of the Nations, Come” and “Wake, Awake”…hymns played in keys that cause a bit of eerie dissonance when heard. And while the world is reading stories like “Twas the Night before Christmas” and “Frosty the Snow Man,” we hear different tales from the Bible…tales that cause the same dissonance when heard as our Advent hymns. We hear uncomfortable tales about suffering and wars and stars falling from the heavens, the sun being darkened and the moon failing to give light…about prophets praying that God would tear open the heavens and come down so that mountains would quake. Doesn’t really fit next to “Have a Holly, Jolly, Christmas,” now does it?
And yet, as the year grows older, the hours of daylight reach their shortest, and the earth becomes dormant, we break from our cheery secular traditions and take a step back to hear reminders to keep awake, to watch and to hope.
We start Advent off this year in the year of Mark, the shortest of the Gospels. And our Gospel text for this morning puts us smack dab in the middle of a discourse of Jesus that consumes the entire thirteenth chapter of Mark and is called “the little apocalypse.” Exciting huh?
In the first half of the chapter, we hear Jesus speaking with the disciples about things that are to come. He tells of the destruction of the temple, about persecutions and false messiahs, about wars and rumors of wars, nations rising up against nations, peoples against peoples, earthquakes, famines…and I quote “great suffering such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now, no, and never will be.” (Mk 13:18). Fa La La La La, La La La La.
“But after those things, after that suffering, the sun will go dark, the moon will not shine, the stars will fall from the heavens and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. 27Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.”
Some, like the writers of the Left Behind series, have co-opted Mark’s Little Apocalypse and have turned it into a prediction of what is to come with the rapture…likewise, when we look at this text, the temptation for us is to think about what is to come, to look at the signs around us and speak about the end being near. But here is the thing, Mark was writing to a people who were living in the midst of the dust that was the temple of Jerusalem. They were living in the midst of the desolating sacrilege that Jesus described in this text…and that’s part of what makes this text apocalyptic, it speaks to what was going on in the world using the language of the faithful.
For Mark’s audience, the end of the world as they knew it had come. The temple had been destroyed, they were being persecuted, false prophets where abundantly present. And yet, even at the heightened state of alertness that comes when the world seems to be falling apart around you, they were charged with the task of keeping alert, keeping awake. Keep awake for signs of God around you, know that in the incarnation, the temple is no longer God’s dwelling place…it is no longer the center of wisdom. In God’s coming into the world in Christ, God made his dwelling place amongst humans, and the center of wisdom is found in the wilderness. In the incarnation, God reminds us that God’s preferred mode of operation is in the unexpected places.
One of the most awesome things that the confirmation students have told me they have learned so far this year in studying the Old Testament ancestors is that God is present and works in unexpected places and people. One of the temptations of being people who live in the world and in sin is that we want to see God in people and places that we expect to see God…and we use human standards by which to frame our expectations of our God become human. And so we have a tendency to put God in a box, assign him or her attributes and stick a picture of God into our pocket so that we have a reference point for when we think we see God at work in the world. But we are Advent people, and as such, we need reminders like the one we have from Mark this morning. Reminders to keep awake and be alert to God’s work in the world where we least expect it. But also, keep alert for ways in which we think that we have figured God out.
In the next few weeks we will be preparing to celebrate the birth of a King who was born in a barn, not in a royal palace. He was a king who exercised his power by going outside of the social norms and boundaries and reaching out to the outcast, the sick, the unclean, the prostitutes. He was a king who showed the world his glory by dying on a cross, a crown of thorns on his head. The king we look for and celebrate a king who doesn’t rule in the way that we expect him to…there are no conventional tactics used by Jesus. And that is why Jesus asks us to keep awake…not just now, in this advent season, but always. Keep awake for the signs of God that you normally would not expect. Be alert and keep watch for a God who has brought an end to the world as we know it, and a beginning to a better world.
As Advent people in a Christmas world, let us live fully into the dissonance, let us look for the fullness of the incarnation around us and let us look for the presence of God in the unexpected places…it’s a greater gift than dreams of a White Christmas.
Wishing you a blessed and dissonant Advent. Amen