November 27, 2011 – I Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37
I Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37
He is Near, He is Here, He is With Us
First Sunday of Advent – November 27, 2011
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Okay: let’s face it: we’re not sure this is “Good News” – “Gospel” – right?
But like I said a few weeks ago, Martin Luther said sometimes you have to
wring the Gospel with both hands to produce a single drop of grace. So we’ll do that.
It’s kinda funny to come to church on the First Sunday of Advent, first day of the church year,
looking forward to Christmas and then you hear . . . this! It’s weird every year.
It’s placed here because even as Christmas remembers Jesus’s first coming as a child among us,
this reading looks toward when Jesus will come and be born among us again.
Near the end of Mark’s Gospel, just before he is arrested, tried, and executed,
Jesus has all this seemingly crazy stuff to say to his disciples.
This chapter in Mark – chapter 13! – is sometimes called Mark’s “little apocalypse.”
Apocalypse means “uncovering,” or unveiling, or revealing.
Apocalypse pulls back the curtain on what’s really going on.
It reveals or uncovers the true state of worldly affairs, including who is really in charge.
The book of Revelation is also apocalyptic literature: it uncovers the truth about the world.
You want to see a little apocalypse? Have a little demonstration?
Underneath all this stuff I’m wearing – okay, no jokes please about
what pastors really wear underneath their albs! – if we uncover what’s under all this –
ha! Who knew: who knew I was . . . a Jets fan! This is an apocalypse!
I didn’t even know that about myself! This has been uncovered over the last couple of months.
Life is kind of a slow revealing of things, about oneself, about the world, about God.
Jesus today reveals or uncovers that some bad things are about to happen,
although I don’t think this is a huge surprise to anyone listening to him.
He himself is on a collision course with the Romans and the religious authorities:
he’s about to be arrested and tried and executed. His world is about to end.
His audience is already living a disaster right? Many of them live in poverty,
taxed almost literally to death, occupied by a foreign power.
By the time Mark writes his Gospel 40 years after Jesus’ death,
things will have become even worse: Mark writes on the eve of a Roman invasion of
Jerusalem in 70 A.D. that will leave the city in ruins and
that will raze its Temple to the ground and scatter its people abroad.
But Jesus, knows, too, all about the other endings that people live with.
Jesus has come in order to know us intimately and well. He is God in the flesh, God undercover,
who has come to uncover the stress and strain and
sin and death that human beings live with:
the medical diagnoses that are not welcome, the surprising ways that family relationships can
careen out of control, the jobs that are lost, the relationships that end
the health that deteriorates, the addiction that sucks life out of everything,
the meaning and hope that evaporates.
Jesus knows all this well: he knows that these things feel like worlds ending,
like the sun darkening, like a moonless night when even the stars seem to have fallen and
so cannot give what little light they have: as if these great heavenly powers of
light – sun, moon and stars – lose all their ability to shed any light at all.
Night was scary enough in the ancient world without the means of artificial illumination:
candles were for the wealthy only.
Imagine night without any light whatsoever: it’s disorienting and disheartening and discouraging.
At Confirmation Camp last summer at Luther Village we did the night hike on a dark,
Moonless night with thick thick clouds: it was dark out there.
Normally I like the night hike, but this year, in such utter and complete darkness,
I have to admit I really didn’t like it at all: it reminded me what grief feels like,
and it reminded me of the clinical depression I suffer from.
That kind of night, Jesus knows, is what it’s like when relationships are strained,
when health deteriorates, when meaning and hope are lost.
But this, Jesus says, is actually not the end. This is not what God intends.
Despite what Hollywood tells you, destruction is not the end or ultimate fate of things.
Rather, it’s precisely at this moment that looks like the end that “the Son of Man” comes,
the one sent from God who will set things right.
Jesus understands himself to be this person.
It’s when these bad things happen that he comes, and gathers us together into a new family,
to be present with us and so that we can be present with one another.
Jesus and his saving Spirit are present always, of course, but is particularly and
especially and spectacularly present when it seems like all is lost,
when it seems like the end,
when everything appears to be careening out of control.
Oh no, says Jesus: that is when I will come.
It seems as if I have gone away and left my servants in charge, he says.
It certainly seemed like that to his earliest disciples and it seems like that to us.
But watch for me, says Jesus: you don’t know when I will come into the darkness and
bear the summer light to you: you don’t know whether it will be
in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn.
He is not far off: literally, I think he is saying, he is not far off.
In this text he’s not talking about the seeming end of the whole world, at least not exclusively.
To his disciples I think he’s talking about that very night.
I mean, in Mark’s Gospel what will happen in the evening of this very day with his disciples?
In the evening,
he gathers his disciples and shares his life-giving, love-giving Last Supper with them:
so: he is with them and he is with us in our fearfulness and foreboding: he is near.
What will happen at midnight? The disciples will sleep and fail to stay awake with him,
but he will not abandon them: he will wake them and encourage them:
so: he is with them and he is with us in our faithlessness and failings: he is near.
What will happen at cockcrow? Peter will betray him and deny him three times,
but he will not give up on Peter: he will ultimately forgive him and call him to lead:
so: he is with us and will not give up on us in our betrayal and denial of him:
he is near.
And what will happen at dawn? The religious authorities plot together and take Jesus to Pilate to
be put on trial, but he will die even for love of them.
so: he is with us in injustice and corruption: when human beings are at their worst.
(David Lose at http://www.workingpreacher.org/dear_wp.aspx?article_id=529)
He is near.
So: when will Jesus return? When things are darkest.
When there is fear, he is present giving hope.
When there is failure, he is there giving encouragement.
When there is betrayal, he is there giving forgiveness.
When there is injustice, he is there right in the middle of it dying for love, for love of everyone,
looking, searching, hoping for transformation, hoping for new loving hearts to be born,
hoping that door can remain open for relationships to be healed.
When he is crucified at noon, the sun will be darkened and that is where we should look for him:
that is where he will be revealed in all his glory: on the cross,
right in the middle of darkness, betrayal, confusion, despair, sinfulness, and death.
That is where God is revealed to be most fully present. That is what we are to watch for.
We are to watch for him.
In the midst of illness and the unwelcome diagnosis and grief watch for how love can be present:
don’t be distracted by other things. Watch for how love between people can grow and
even flourish in such circumstances: he will come.
In the midst of strife and disagreement and animosity with family and friends watch for him:
don’t let others’ behaviour determine how you will respond:
Jesus never responds in kind: rather, watch for how he is present in you,
seeking reconciliation with all people and all things: he will come.
In the midst of confusion and despair and addiction and mental illness:
don’t be distracted by meaninglessness:
these things are not the end: they are not final: Jesus’s love is final:
the love of the triune God is final:
love, the basis upon which the entire universe rests: love is final, love is ultimate.
Love is what we have been made for: watch for that.
It is born and grows in the soil of affliction, like the tree of the cross in a landscape of despair.
He is near, he is present: in these paltry failing words that have a hard time this morning
communicating the mystery and depth and breadth of love’s activity among us.
In this broken bread we will shortly share. In the wine of love’s blood poured out.
This is where love works.
At our Food Bank where we fed a record number of people this week,
in our Kids Klub free drop-in for neighbourhood children,
in our Caregivers Ministry to the elderly and shut-in: that is where love works:
among the sick, among the hungry, among the hurting, among the almost destroyed.
In darkness, when the sun seems darkened, when it’s like a moonless night where there
even seem to be no stars to give any light: that is where love chooses to come.
Because that is where the love in Jesus needs to come.
In a few weeks, on the darkest night of the year, he will be born. So let us watch for him.
It must be night – it must be night – when the Messiah is born, says Kierkegaard,
because that is where love needs to come. And it will.
So let us watch together. Let us see how he is revealed, uncovered, unveiled for us in
the midst of all that would harm us.
Let us hear him and of his love for and for this world in these
poor few words of mine this morning.
Let us taste him and his love for us in this morsel of bread and in this sip of wine.
Let us see him and his love for us in one another’s imperfect and hurting bodies this morning.
Let us know we have wrung this Gospel with both hands, and have found a drop of grace.
And in thanksgiving, let us acknowledge that that is enough. And let us bear him to darkness.
He is near: and that is enough. He is here: that is enough. So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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