Even
though a largely peaceful Thanksgiving intervened, the recent weeks have been
hard for anyone who follows current events. In the midst of all the bad news, I
found solace in a fake front page of The
New York Times (created by someone with the questionable name Joe Velx) circulating
among my friends on Facebook. Like all good satire, it’s really funny and
somewhat painful to read. Under a banner proclaiming just how awful everything
is, the main headlines (hilarious but, I’m sorry to say, unrepeatable in the
pulpit) mocked the Ferguson Grand Jury verdict and the Bill Cosby
situation. But some of the lesser
headlines were almost as good:
“Study: Pizza Causes Cancer”;
“Obama Found Crying Alone in Bathroom Stall”; and my favorite: “Weather Alert: Entire Sky to Catch Fire”. For some of us who have lived through the
past several weeks, everything does seem at times simply awful. There are days
when I, too, feel like crying alone in a bathroom stall. What is this world
coming to?
Today
is the First Sunday of Advent, the first of four Sundays leading to
Christmas. Advent only looks toward
Christmas itself near the end of the season; here, at the beginning, our focus
is paradoxically on the last things. So here, today, the Advent season speaks
to our apocalyptic dreads. Whenever we sense that the world is ending, it’s
good to recall that we’re not the first generation in history to feel this way.
In today’s Gospel (Mark 13:24-37) Jesus depicts an apocalyptic moment—the sun
darkened, the moon dimming, stars falling from heaven. The people to whom Jesus
spoke would soon feel, with the impending destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, that
their world would be ending. Cataclysmic
change rarely feels good when we are standing in it. When we have become used
to and invested in the way things are, change can indeed feel like the end of
the world.
In
the last month we have witnessed a string of events that feel apocalyptic: the spread of the Ebola virus; the continued
beheadings of Americans by ISIS; the Ferguson Grand Jury’s failure to indict a
police officer in the shooting death of a young black man and the outrage which
resulted from that decision; the dismissal of charges against former Egyptian
President Mubarak for the deaths of hundreds of non-violent Arab Spring
protesters; and just yesterday, yet another shooting spree, this time in
Austin, Texas. Both abroad and at home,
it seems that an established order is ending, bringing with it nothing but bad
news. How are we to make sense of all
this change?
One
way to begin might be to think back to Jesus and his contemporaries. The world
they inhabited was changing rapidly, too.
The Roman Empire, seemingly at its height under Augustus, was beginning
its slow slide into ruin and decay. In a
few decades, the Jewish nation state, organized around the king and the Temple,
would be totally destroyed and dispersed by that same empire in its desperate
flailing attempts to exert control.
Jesus’s followers would soon experience the arrest, trial, and
crucifixion of their leader.
Everything’s awful, indeed.
When
Jesus tells his companions, “this generation will not pass away until all these
things have taken place”, he is not predicting the end of the world. He is predicting the end of their world. The order that they have
lived with and grown used to, as unjust and oppressive as it might be, is on
its way out. A new order will replace
it, and it’s into that new reality that his followers will go when they gather and
go forth after Jesus’s resurrection. Even though that old world was marked by
suffering and oppression, it was still their world, the reality they had come
to accept. A new world was on its
way. What would it look like? How could
they prepare?
The only way
they could prepare, says Jesus, was by watching and waiting to see what God
might be up to. “Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the
time will come.” “And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” Faced with
historical events beyond their control, Jesus’s friends are counseled to watch
and wait for signs of how they are to read and adjust to the changes that are
coming their way.
Watching and waiting were just as hard then
as they are today. What do you mean, watch and wait? Can’t we at least do something? We want to be
doers, yet Jesus tells us to be watchers.
How can we live with all the dread and anxiety if all we’re going to do
is watch and wait?
Last week I came upon this quotation from
the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and resistance leader
imprisoned by the Nazis and executed by them in World War II. Reflecting on the season of Advent from his
prison cell, he wrote this:
“By the way, a prison cell like this is a good analogy for
Advent: one waits, hopes, does this or that—ultimately negligible things—the
door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.”—Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from
Prison (November 21, 1943, pp. 188-89).
We
wait and hope and watch for the door of our prison cell to be opened from the
outside. Bonhoeffer was a lifelong
activist. He risked his life to resist
oppression. And yet even such a doer as Dietrich
Bonhoeffer realized that there were some forces and trends that he was
powerless to control. All he could do,
in a seemingly endless prison cell Advent, was watch and wait, keeping awake to
signs of God’s hopeful, liberating activity.
The
world wasn’t ending in the first century;
their world was ending. The world
wasn’t ending even in the Nazi prison camp:
their world was ending. The
world isn’t ending now. But our world is ending. Even as they desperately try to exert
themselves, certain kinds of violence and privilege are coming to an end. Whether they like it or not, ISIS represents
a kind of intolerance and brutality that the world will always reject. Whether we like it or not, the privilege that
white people, straight people, and men have always counted on is also passing
away. The world isn’t ending. But our
world is. What will come to replace
it? Will it be better than what we know
now? We can only watch and wait.
Let’s
remember, though, that watching and waiting are not passive verbs. Jesus tells
us to “keep awake”. Though we hope for the new world as an act of God, we can
begin even now to live as if that world was our present reality. Jesus dealt
with the oppression and injustice of his day by gathering a community in which
life could be lived even now as God intended that it be. You and I can keep awake for God’s new world
today by living life on God’s terms now. We can renounce violence and hatred
now. We can give up our unearned
privilege now. We can empathize and make
common cause with those who are marginalized, oppressed, and degraded by the
structures of a world on its way out the door, and we can do that now. Our
waiting can be active, not passive. We can make common cause with others and
strive with them to realize God’s reign of love, justice, and peace now.
On this first Sunday of Advent, we begin our
shared four-week vigil, watching in Bonhoeffer’s words for the prison door of
the present moment to be opened from the outside. Christmas is coming, but let us not get ahead
of ourselves. We live, for now, in an
Advent world. The old world is ending,
the new one dawns. We await the coming of one who will set us free not to shore
up the old reality but to inhabit the new.
Our world may be ending, but as followers of Jesus we hope and wait for
the new one that will replace it—a world more just, more loving, more
compassionate. This new world dawns on
us even now. There are signs of it
everywhere. In the words of today’s
collect, let us “cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light”.
Let us reach out to each other and all creation to help God bring that world to
birth. Let us remember the words of Jesus: “And what I say to you I say to all:
Keep awake.” Amen.
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