Keep Awake, Hope Beyond Imagination Abounds Isaiah 64:1-9a, Psalm 80:1-7, 1 Corinthians 1:1-9, Mark 13:24-37 November 27, 2005, Year B, Advent 1 The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi My first Holy Week as a priest included funerals on Tuesday and Maundy Thursday. On Easter Sunday between the two morning services, I received a call that a parishioner had been admitted to University Medical Center and lapsed into a coma. Then, during the Easter liturgy I baptized the newest infant in our parish. As soon as the service ended, I drove to UMC where the family and I discussed removing life support, and I prayed by the bed as the family and I watched the husband, the father journey from one kingdom to the next. As I drove home, I realized that day had defined the priesthood for me far more than 3 years of seminary had come close to doing. On that day I understood why we place the Paschal Candle in the middle of our worship on three occasions: during the 50 days of Easter, at Holy Baptism and at burials. That day defined Christianity for me more than a lifetime experience up to that point. It defined Christianity as sure and certain hope even in the darkest nights of our souls. We find that same hope today as we begin Advent, the birth of a new Christian year. The last few weeks our lectionary texts have offered images of the final judgment: emphasizing destruction, separation of sheep and goats and those who will be thrown into outer darkness. At the surface level, today’s texts don’t sound much different. However, in Advent we make a barely noticeable but profound shift. In the midst of that judgment, in the midst of that outer darkness, there is the eternal promise of hope. It sneaks in quite subtly. We hear in today’s collect: “give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.” We hear the same message in today’s sequence hymn: “cast away the works of darkness, o ye children of the day.” As we stand to present our offering, we will experience the sense of hope in the words, “comfort those who sit in darkness mourning ‘neath their sorrow’ load. Speak ye to Jerusalem of the peace that waits for them tell her that her sins I cover and her warfare now is over.” After we are fed with the bread and wine of new life, we will sing, “Bring to our troubled minds, uncertain and afraid, the quiet of a steadfast calm of a call obeyed.” Finally, even in our shortcomings, our own betrayals of Christ’s love, we shall proclaim as we go into the world, “those who set at nought and sold him, pierced, and nailed him to the tree, deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing, shall the true Messiah see.” Over the next few weeks in the Old Testament readings we’ll hear it in the hope expressed by Isaiah. Writing during the exile, when for Israel all seemed hopeless, in sure in certain hope Isaiah will proclaim even in those darkest of times, God will make all things new. We want peace, even though much of the world clamors for war. We want justice, even though many tell us to take advantage of every opportunity to get more, though often it means others will have less. Instead Advent calls us to an abundant life that is more spiritual and less material. It invites us to put our faith and trust in God's mercy and divine intervention. It compels us to have a heart for truth, mercy, and justice, and to find ways and time to work for those things because they are the things God cares most about. Here on the first day of the new church year, we do not focus on the past, but we anticipate the future where Christ promises to meet us. Allow me to divert briefly from sermon to teaching. Our Sunday lectionary is a three year cycle, with each cycle focusing on one of the Gospels. Today, we begin Year B, and for the next 12 months we will hear the markan narrative, the first Gospel written, possibly derived from Peter’s remembrances. Each Gospel author writes to a specific community with specific needs and offers the story of Jesus in a way that speaks to those needs. Mark's entire gospel proposes a theology of the Crucified Loser to a community perplexed and tempted to apostasy by virtue of their own experience of suffering and their own profiles as losers, not winners. Mark’s hearers would have known about oppression, the horrendous consequences of the Jewish revolt which in 70 CE ended with the Romans starving out Jerusalem before breaking through and destroying the Temple. They would have been able to relate to warnings about false messiahs and false prophets. Thus a Messiah for losers is the good news of Mark's gospel. It builds to the cross. Only in offering himself on the cross is Jesus truly Son of God. For Mark the scandal of the cross is that Jesus’ death on the cross does not end the story of salvation, it is the story of salvation. So, how do you hear today’s text? It depends on your perspective. It depends whether your life is going along relatively trouble free or whether you know what it means to have things going so badly that your only hope may be found in the end of the world. However, even for those who may not experience such hopeless right now, almost all of us at times have faced our trials: general living, economic stress, job stress, family stress, in our own way experienced the poetry of pain and despair, the fantasies of escape and resolution. Those who know such desperation, having exhausted all possible human alternatives, having given up on polite, respectfully restrained prayers to God, can identify with Isaiah’s plea, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!.” If only someone, something, would come from outside of our troubled world and focus our attention and give us a sense of hope! It is for those times, today’s Gospel challenges us to silence, to listening, to action. For most of us, God is not going to shout in a booming voice from heaven, yanking us from either our despair nor our contentedness. God just doesn’t seem to work that way. Perhaps it’s the same as if you look directly into the sun, you will only be blinded. You must see the sun indirectly, in the sun’s reflection. Maybe it is mostly that way between us and God. So if God is most often known in a whisper rather than in earthquake and fire, then it must be easy to miss God’s voice when it comes to us. If God stands aside in the shadows, flirting with us, appearing among us only indirectly, then it must be easy not to see God’s appearances among us. If ever a Gospel had a wake up call it is today's. Wake up, Jesus tells us as Advent ushers in a new liturgical year. Good things are about to happen. Don't miss it. Shake off your lethargy, get rid of your moods, drop your attitude, forget about your reasons to sulk. Don't let the holidays interfere with Christmas. There is truly hope beyond imagination. So, stay “awake” is an alarm sounding on the first Sunday of Advent. It means many different things, the most important of which is to seize the opportunities of the present moment, prepare for Christmas, prepare for the second coming, prepare for death, yes, surely. But also, and more important, prepare for life, prepare for the kingdom of God whenever it explodes into your life. In Jesus’s view of the kingdom, it is always near, ready to break through the barriers of every day and seize us, impel us, embrace us, challenge us – and especially in Jesus’s view of things of the kingdom as it appears with God’s sweeping love in ordinary daily events: a confused child, a discouraged spouse, a troublesome person on the phone, a demand that seems unfair but where we can do much good with little effort, an Easter Day in the ICU, a gathering at Coast Episcopal School on Thanksgiving Day of those who have lost everything and those there to serve them together celebrating that Advent hope reigns eternal. These are the places to look for God’s loving power to break in upon us but go unnoticed if we are walking in our sleep or so diverted by our self-focus that we miss them. Mark tells us Jesus reversed the understanding of who the Messiah was and reversed the norms of the world. In Advent God promises to reverse our world as we understand it. The wake up call of Advent invites us when we look forward to the end, when we anticipate the future, that we not treat this conclusion as some distant, far-off event but near at hand: as close as the next second. So imminent is it, in fact, that the future comes and takes up residence in the present. The Christ who will arrive with power and great glory at the end of time comes to us also before the end of time, for Christ does not wait until the end of the world, or even until our death, in order to approach us. Keep alert, keep awake! Jesus is always appearing; he is the lord of a million disguises, and he offers us hope beyond imagination.