Sermon – November 27, 2011
Mark 13.24-35
Advent 1 – November 27, 2011
stay awake! be alert! pay attention!
Listen to This Sermon | Download MP3
The Advent season that begins today may be the most demanding of all the seasons, yet it also the one that dazzles the most. The great themes of the season demand our imaginations to be fully engaged, summoning us to glimpse what is visible only to the inner eye. As the daylight decreases and darkness descends, we sing hymns of light dawning on the horizon that will be radiant light for all the nations. We heart the ancient stories of prophets foretelling a future that is at once both fulfilled and still coming, a vision that boggles the mind while stirring the heart. Our texts encourage us to imagine a new world coming into being and invite us to be alert for its presence. When all is frantically busy and filled with nostalgia, if not depression masked as holiday cheer at the office parties, we are given the gift of a season to listen long enough and honestly enough to sense the yearning in our aching hearts for the glad tidings of Jesus Christ visible once again. The world is broken and we know it, but Advent calls us to remember the great gift around of the incarnation of God in Jesus that has been given and still being given to make us whole. It’s a demanding season and a dazzling, joyous one for those who choose to enter it fully with heart and mind, allowing the twinkling candle lights that deck our homes and windows during these dark days remind us of the one Light that enlightens all things.
If all of this demanding, dazzling, joyous invitation were not enough, we have little apocalypse of Mark’s gospel to add to the mix. It’s a mostly frightening scenario that contains very little that we can easily comprehend other than the repeated summons to stay awake and be alert for you know not the hour when God shall appear. Frankly, if I were to choose a spiritual discipline as the most important it would be this call to be alert, stay awake, pay attention. Living mindfully is a way of being fully alive to the present moment. Out of the cacophony of images in Mark’s vision of the coming of the Son of Man, this is what I believe we can take away for the living of these days – be mindful, pay attention and be alert.
Which is to say that in this season of Advent there is much to distract you from what matters most, particularly the opening of your heart to the presence of God in subtle disguise. It is this opening of the heart to God’s subtle disguises that is the most important thing. There will be many distractions some of your own choosing and most of the culture that is ramped up for consumption. For instance, the first thing I noticed in my stack of mail when I returned from Haiti was the cover of the December issue of Washingtonian magazine. On it is an attractive young women, fully naked, with her arms crossed to cover most of her breasts and her legs provocatively position to suggest what is hidden. The cover said, “December – Christmas – is the perfect time for a little nip and tuck.” Really.
This is only one example of what can distract us this season. So the gospel says watch out, stay alert, pay attention. After all, we are preparing to celebrate the coming of God in the strangest disguise of all – a child born a Jew in poverty to a young mother who opened her womb with a simple confession of faith.
Some years ago, the band REM famously sang “it’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” In between that refrain were images of all the changes occurring the world that signaled the end of one and the beginning of another still unknown. It’s that ironic “I feel fine” that puzzles me. What does that mean? I don’t know if the Michel Stipe consulted Mark’s gospel when he wrote that song, but I don’t believe that “feeling fine” is the best way to describe the transformation that must occur when worlds end and a new one begins. I don’t believe the new world that we await with hope and faith is simply more of the same. It is a truly a new world.
For instance, in Haiti where I have been with our team for the last week, the earthquake of January 12, 2010 marked the end of the world as they knew it. And nobody was feeling fine; nobody is feeling fine now either. In fact, walking through the tent city on the central plaza nearly two years later is what I imagine Christ faced when he descended into hell.
If anyone knows what it means actually to live on the edge of the Advent tension of hope and fulfillment it is the people of Haiti. Karl Barth once said that the world is filled with parables and we must train our minds to perceive the presence of God in these ordinary human parables. Let me give you a few that I perceived while in Haiti.
At Wings of Hope, the home for severely disabled children with whom we are in missional partnership, we met Lazarod standing erect strapped to a board that supported him. It was disturbing until we learned he could not stand at all were it not for this board supporting him upright. This boy, whose name echoes that of Lazaurus, is severely afflicted with cerebral palsy. Though they love him dearly, his impoverished parents could not care for him, so they brought him to Wings of Hope. I stood next to him with his occupational therapist as Lazarod strained to control his spasms to touch just the right key on the keyboard. The therapist restrained himself from doing it for him. The courage and hope on Lazarod’s face broke my heart. When he completed his sentence on that keyboard with a delightful shriek and a twisted smile, I wanted to cry. I witnessed him experiencing the sharp borderline of hope and fulfillment. In this respect his is my mentor. He is a parable of hope pressing on beyond what anyone considers possible. And this is our calling too.
At St. Joseph’s Home for boys in Petionville, we spend several days hauling away rubble from the site of the new building. Ours was a bucket brigade, receiving the rubble from those digging it out. It was unglamorous work in the hot sun, yet absolutely necessary. At one point it occurred to me that this is the resurrection from the rubble, one bucket at a time. We all laughed at that thought, then I realized that it was true: on January 28, 2012 the new St. Joseph’s Home for Boys and Leadership Center will be dedicated! This is how the resurrection occurs in ordinary life – not glamorous or heroic, but one bucket at a time. Much of life, including the spiritual life, is lived one bucket at a time.
We pay attention to these moments with Lazarod and with each another day by day carrying our buckets in one large bucket brigade. This is how life is lived as the old world falls away while a new one is coming into being. God’s way is always hidden in one disguise or another.
There is much to distract us this Advent season. Much that will keep us from entering deeply into what matters most. So brothers and sisters, let us encourage one another to Stay awake, be alert, pay attention.
Amen.
View more Sermons in the archive.
