Sermon - 1st Sunday of Advent (11/29/2020)

Is. 64:1-9; Ps. 80:1-7, 17-19; 1 Cor. 1:3-9; Mk. 13:24-37

“And what I say to you, I say to all: Keep awake.”

With the First Sunday of Advent, we have now concluded our year of taking our gospel readings mostly from the gospel of Matthew, and today we begin a year following mostly the gospel of Mark. Mark seems to be the earliest of the gospels to be written. We don’t know exactly when and where Mark was written, although it seems that it was definitely in a time of stress and conflict. Mark tells the story of Jesus in order to make clear that following Jesus is the answer to resolving the stress and conflict people were experiencing – and that following Jesus is an alternative to both the religious and the political answers people were hearing in their time.

Mark is a carefully constructed narrative – Mark writes in a way to make allusions back and forth to different stories within the gospel, and to many passages of the Old Testament. In some ways Mark makes for a better Bible study than a Sunday sermon. I’ll do my best not to get too far down in the weeds, but sometimes the Old Testament references are the key to understanding the point Mark is trying to make.

One Old Testament text that Mark references is our first reading today from Isaiah. It also comes from a time of stress and conflict, when people felt that nothing was going right, that God wasn’t listening to their prayers, that maybe God had forgotten about them. And so the prophet prays: O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!

Notice that the prophet does not pray: O that you would tear open the heavens and let us in! That you would take us out of this mess that we find ourselves in. No, the prophet prays that God will tear open the heavens and come down and fix things here on earth. As Jesus would later teach us to pray, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. In Isaiah the prophet calls upon God: you’ve done dramatic things in the past, “awesome deeds that we did not expect,” fire and earthquake and all kinds of earth-shattering deeds. We need some of that shaking up now, the prophet says. But why is God silent?

The prophet tries to come up with an answer – perhaps God is angry with us because we’ve sinned. But even still, the prophet prays, God, you’re still the potter, we’re still the clay, we’re still your people, so for your sake – if not for ours – please, tear open the heavens and come down and help us.

This prayer of Isaiah is justifiably famous – we can all relate to that feeling of wanting God to just tear open the heavens and come down fast – don’t worry about all the proper protocols and niceties, just get down here and do something! Because, God knows, there’s a lot that we could use God to fix right now. There is Covid, of course. There is political conflict and threats even to our democracy. There is growing inequality and unevenly distributed hardships, and we know there are other people praying even most insistently than we are that God will hurry up and come down – and we know God hears their prayers too.

Each of us wants God to come down and fix things in our own way. Some of us are at the breaking point, with kids not going to school for so long, with an unbearable amount of stressful work in hospitals and similar places, for others a lack of work and the financial strains that come from that. Others are lessed stressed but just bored out of our minds already, for so many months not able to do things that gave life meaning and purpose and joy. And where is God in all of this? Why won’t God tear open the heavens already and come down?

Mark refers to this passage from Isaiah when he tells of the baptism of Jesus – Mark says that, when Jesus came up out of the water of the River Jordan, he saw the heavens torn open, and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. In other words, Mark says, the person and the mission of Jesus is God’s answer to Isaiah’s prayer. In Jesus God comes down into our world and fixes things – not simply as Jesus heals the sick, expels demons, and makes the blind to see, but even more in the way that Jesus does these things.

Today’s gospel passage comes from the end of Mark’s gospel – like the parables we’ve been reading from Matthew the last few weeks, they come from the words of Jesus to his disciples just before the Last Supper.  In this passage Mark tells of Jesus quoting another Old Testament passage, from the book of Daniel. In the seventh chapter of the book, Daniel has a dream of a series of beasts, each one more terrifying than the last. These animals represent the different empires that colonized the land of Israel in the centuries before Jesus. Each was experienced by the Jewish people as beastly, inhuman, a source of injustice and terror and fear. But then, Daniel dreamed, he saw into heaven. He saw the Ancient One take the throne, and before him came “one like a Son of Man, coming on the clouds of heaven.” And to this Son of Man God gave dominion over the whole world, to make the world right. This is what Daniel saw in his dream.

A Son of Man – a poet’s way of saying a human being. So different from the beasts that had come before – Daniel’s dream is of a world set right by God, a human king at last, ruling over a humane kingdom, where God’s will truly will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  And Mark says in today’s gospel passage that Jesus quoted Daniel’s dream to his disciples: Soon the sun will be darkened, and there will be great signs of distress, and then people will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory.” The time is coming, Jesus says, that Daniel’s dream will come to pass, very soon. Exactly when, no one knows – so keep awake. Watch!

And indeed it will be only days, or hours, before Jesus quotes this same verse of Daniel at his trial before the high priest – You will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds. It won’t be long before the sun is darkened and the powers of heaven are shaken. It won’t be long before the disciples are asked to stay awake and watch with Jesus in the garden.

And what did the disciples do, when the time came for them to stay awake and watch? You know the story. They fell asleep. This is a theme you will see often in Mark, the disciples of Jesus keep failing and keep getting things wrong. But it’s easy to see how they missed it.

We pray O God open the heavens and come down, and indeed Mark is right – Jesus is God’s answer to that prayer.  But when he came, it was not in fire and dramatic power. He came in a manger, he came on a cross. These are not the places most people think God will come, and so if we’re not looking and watching for it we will miss it.  Just like the disciples did.

And what I said to the disciples, Jesus says, I say to all: Keep awake!  We may be praying for God to tear open the heavens and come down, but in truth God is already here right now, God has already come into the world and is already present now, wherever two or three are gathered. The humane kingdom is here, taking shape all around us, if only we would have the eyes to see. Do you see it? Don’t look for it coming with fire and trumpet blast, even the most obtuse of the disciples would have seen that. Look for the humane kingdom of God in mangers and on crosses, in places where God becomes vulnerable with us. The kingdom is everywhere around us, but we have to stay awake, and watch, and look for it.