a Sermon for Advent 1B
Text: Mark 13:24-37

The down ending

Jesus and his buddies walk out of the Temple. It’s late Tuesday afternoon of Holy Week and Jesus has been teaching thousands of people, revealing the hypocrisy of the church leaders. Jesus has, as they say, arrived. He’s a rock star. People are chanting his name: “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” and the disciples are riding high. They have never felt this way before. They have never felt so important.

So they look back at this monstrous structure, the Temple, in total awe. It is bigger, stronger, more indestructible than anything on earth and they say

“Just look at that!”

And Jesus says:

“It’ll be dust soon.”

The disciples stumble, then pick their jaws out of the dirt only to hear Jesus make it even worse:

False prophets, wars, earthquakes, famines, trials, persecutions, and to cap it off: parents killing children and children killing parents.

Run away, he says, because it will be awful.

Then the Son of Man will come, so be ready. You won’t know when. Keep awake.

Our New Year

This is the church’s way of saying “Happy New Year!”

Today is the Christian New Year, the beginning of our calendar and the beginning of Advent. We kick it off with a horrible image of destruction.

We don’t want to hear this. We want Christmas carols, Rudolph and Charlie Brown specials. We want “The Happiest Time of the Year” not “wars and rumors of wars”. Aren’t we supposed to be happy?

Then we look at the purple and we think of Lent and we say “Man! Do we have to be depressed? Seriously!”

We don’t actually want Advent at all. We want Christmas. We want the birth story and the Halleluiah Chorus. We want an excuse to act the way we wish we would normally act: happy, generous, joy-full. Let’s just fast-forward the opening scenes of every gospel and get to Jesus already.

But it really is worse than that. We start at the end. We start with death and destruction.

The End isn’t just the End

I don’t think Jesus is trying to scare his disciples straight. Not really. I don’t think that this is some dark days proclamation to get them to behave any more than I believe that this is Jesus describing some time of the Rapture, perhaps at Harold Camping’s choosing. Or even John Hagee. This isn’t some horrible tail of evil and devastation caused by G-d to only have G-d turn around and save us like some divine child abuser. Jesus isn’t foretelling an evil time in the future exactly. He is using prophetic language, to be sure, but his interest is some place else.

What Jesus is describing is the end that leads to a new beginning.

The end isn’t just the end: it is the beginning.

Each of our gospels begins before Jesus and depicts a near future in which what we know will be changed. Our Messiah, our liberator and redeemer will be here. We will see him “coming in the clouds” and we will be gathered together. And this gathering will be good.

The apocalyptic language challenges us to see the goodness in it, especially those of us that have it pretty good in this world. It is hard for us to want what we’ve got now to end. In this way, even discussing an end to the world as we know it is horrendous and frightening. But for those with very little, it is something completely different. It is liberation.

We’re at the beginning

Let’s celebrate what today is: our New Year’s Day. Today is the day in which Christians celebrate a brand new year. Tradition has made this a penitential season, like a little Lent. I think that’s a mistake. We should revel in the fact that we get another year to get it right.

For many of us, this past year was pretty lousy. But this year can be different. And this only happens through ending. Through saying goodbye to that previous year. Saying goodbye to all that didn’t live up to our hopes and dreams. The parts that were good and will live on in our memories. But it is over. And we are different.

We are at the beginning. A beginning that only comes through ending. Through an ending that may seem traumatizing, we wake up reborn by G-d’s grace. This is the promise of transformation. This is what we are offered. In death, we are offered birth. In life, we are offered the promise of death. Through Jesus we are offered new life.

Beginnings only come from endings.

Jesus has offered us all an ending, so what will we do with this new beginning?

Let’s start with praise.

 

© 2011 Drew Downs.  All rights reserved