Rev. Victoria Millar
Mark 13:24-37, Rev 22:20b
“The Language of Advent”
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Covenant
Presbyterian Church,
On this the 1st Sunday of Advent,
the lectionary leads us toward the coming of Jesus,
but the season begins meditating not about his birth about his second coming.
Today’s reading has three distinct sections and our Bibles help by giving us three separate headings.
Mark 13:24-37 Listen for the word of the Lord to us.
The Coming of the
Son of Man
[Jesus said:]
24 ‘But in those
days, after that suffering,
the sun will be darkened, and the
moon will not give its light,
25 and the stars will be falling
from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
26Then they will see “the Son
of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory.
27Then he will send out the angels,
and gather his elect from the four winds,
from the ends of the earth to the
ends of heaven.
The Lesson of the
Fig Tree
28 ‘From the fig
tree learn its lesson:
as soon as its branch becomes tender and
puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.
29So also, when you see these things
taking place, you know that he* is near, at
the very gates.
30Truly I tell you, this generation will
not pass away until all these things have taken place.
31Heaven and earth will pass away,
but my words will not pass away.
The Necessity for
Watchfulness
32 ‘But about
that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son,
but only the Father.
33Beware, keep alert;* for you do not know when the time will come.
34It is like a man going on a journey,
when he leaves home and puts his slaves
in charge, each with his work,
and commands the doorkeeper to be on
the watch.
35Therefore, keep awake—for you do not
know when the master of the house will come,
in the evening, or at midnight, or at
cockcrow, or at dawn,
36or else he may find you asleep when
he comes suddenly.
37And what I say to you I say to
all: Keep awake.’
-------
Revelation 22:20b [The
last words in the last book of the New Testament] Come, Lord Jesus!
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks
be to God.
This story is excerpted from science writer Dennis Overbye of The New York Times.
“In the fall of 1915, six years before he would win the Nobel Prize for Physics,
Albert Einstein
lived amid bachelor clutter on coffee, tobacco and loneliness in
where he had been pursuing a new mathematical theory of gravity for nearly a decade.
When his freshly scrawled general theory of relativity
accurately calculated a planetary orbit that had defied all previous formulas,
Einstein’s heart literally palpitated and his life changed.
The experience went a long way toward convincing Einstein
that mathematics could be a telegraph line to God.
And he spent the rest of his life
in an increasingly abstract pursuit
of a unified theory of physics.”[1]
For you and me, everyday math is simply calculating how many apples do I have
or how much is left in my checking account.
But at Einstein’s level of giftedness, mathematical equations were a language to describe
the bending of starlight by gravity or a tiny shift in the orbit of the planet Mercury.[2]
To Einstein, mathematics seemed to be the language of God,
the way of trying to comprehend God what God was expressing,
the way of engaging with God.
But take heart if math is not your gift, if math is not your language.
Surely God must be multi-lingual.
There must be more than one language of God.
In today’s scripture, what I see are multiple languages—
multiple ways of trying to comprehend what God is expressing,
multiple ways of trying to engage with God.
Today’s text from Mark for the first Sunday of Advent gives us three clear sections stacked together,
each of which speak similar truth but in different languages of God.
The first section is called “The Coming of the Son of Man”
it is a vision very similar to one from the prophet Daniel in the Old Testament.
In Daniel, the dream introduces a mysterious, larger-than-life king figure called the Son of Man
to whom God gives all dominion.
Jesus frequently uses the “Son of Man” title to refer to himself.
These visions describe the end-of-time[3] and convey the same story.
Amid suffering,
when even nature is unreliable and unhinged,
when the sun and the moon will not give light and the stars are falling
into the chaos, the Son of Man will come in great power and glory,
and will gather his elect forever.
It is a vision of the saving intervention of God’s chosen One.
Now if a math person calculated when the sun would finally extinguish,
he’d be in the dark, so to speak, about the dream’s central point—
that when all appears lost, God intervenes in glory no one could miss.
The dream is a different language.
Especially for the prophets, one of the languages of God is visions.
The second section is called “The Lesson of the Fig Tree”
which says summer is near when a fig branch puts forth its leaves.
Likewise, when you see these things—suffering, darkness and chaos—you know he is very near.
This is a metaphor, a figure of speech, an attempt to describe the abstract
by comparing it to the concrete.
The metaphor is this: New leaves unfolding herald summer arriving.
Cataclysmic events unfolding herald God arriving.
This also is its own language--one of the languages of God is metaphor.
The third section is called “The Necessity for Watchfulness”
claiming no one, not even the Son, knows the day or the hour of intervention, only the Father.
No one solves this calculation except the Father.
The imperative is to live spiritually awake now.
And the story sounds like a snippet of so many of the parables.
Servants, let’s call them disciples,
are in charge until the master, let’s call him Jesus, returns from a journey.
Therefore, keep awake lest he find you asleep at the switch.
This also is its own language--throughout the gospels, God speaks in parables.
There is one more language speaking in today’s text.
And it’s the one I find the most helpful and the most confounding.
Few places outside the church help us to speak this.
It is the language of paradox.
You know paradox—the claim truth can exist simultaneously in two opposites, in two contradictions.
Paradox is when Charles Dickens writes:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
And your logical, analytical self says: Well, which was it?
And if you—in Christian theological language—
let your mind settle into your heart you say: It was both, at the same time.
Paradox is so freeing.
You don’t have to keep trying to decide how to elevate the one truth and erase the other truth.
You know paradox.
Paradox is when you blurt out “I love my friend and my friend drives me crazy.”
And your logical, analytical self says: Well, which is it?
And if you let your mind settle into your heart you say: It’s both, at the same time.
There are many personal paradoxes.
The huge paradox is when you admit: “I am a good person and I am a significant sinner.”
But if you let your mind settle into your heart you can say: I am good and a big sinner, at the same time.
You can quit trying to say, I am not so good or my sins are not so large.
It’s both at the same time.
And if you accurately acknowledge you yourself are a paradox inside, at the deepest level,
then it’s easier to accept life’s other paradoxes.
The Bible abounds in paradoxes.
· Losing is finding—Jesus said to lose one’s life in God is to find one’s life.
· First is last—Jesus said whoever wants to be first must be the servant of all.
· The Lamb is the Shepherd—Jesus was the Lamb of God and the Good Shepherd.
· Freedom is bondage—Paul said the only true freedom is dependence upon God.
· Weakness is strength—Paul said our weakness makes space for God’s strength.
And so this is the first Sunday of Advent.
And the central paradox of Advent is the incarnation, that God became flesh.
The God who is divine, immortal and infinite, became for us, human, moral, and finite.
This also is a paradox of Advent.
The Jesus who is coming is already here.
For us, these are not equations and problems to be solved,
but instead the challenge of languages to be learned—
languages like vision, metaphor, parable and paradox—
which are the means to an end,
ways to try to comprehend what God is expressing and to engage with God.
Since each of us acquired language as toddlers,
none of us can remember firsthand what it feels like to begin to converse,
what it feels like to be liberated by language.
But one famous liberation story involved a 6 year old, one old enough to remember the event.
The child was Helen Keller, the only pupil of a young teacher named Annie Sullivan.
At age 6, Helen was a bright, uncontrollable and isolated child.
Helen threw the entire household upside down.
She knew how to lock her mother in the closet.
She often dumped her baby sister out of her rocker.
One of her first acts upon meeting Annie was to knock out the teacher’s front teeth.
“But Annie Sullivan’s teaching method was simple.
In sign language, she wrote and wrote and wrote, all day long:
words, phrases, sentences, lines of poetry, descriptions of animals, trees, flowers, weather, skies,
clouds, concepts—whatever lay before her or came usefully to mind.
She wrote not on paper with pen but with fingers, spelling rapidly into the child’s alert palm.
Mimicking the configurations,
going through the motions,
Helen spelled the same letters back without comprehension.
There was, of course, the fabled incident at the well pump, when the child suddenly understood
that the pecking in one hand was related to the cold water gushing over the other.
“Somehow,” the adult Helen Keller recollected, “the mystery of language was revealed to me.”
In the course of a single month,
from Annie’s arrival to her breakthrough at the well,
the thrashing Helen had grown calm, affectionate and tirelessly intent on learning.
Her mind and soul were fiercely engaged.
And when language began to flood, she rode it like a salvational ark of words.[4]
This Advent may we do more than just go through the motions without comprehension.
May God reveal to each of us in the language we can understand
the message of salvation and hope
to lead us out of despair and isolation
into joy and aliveness.
In the language of Advent calling over the millennia:
Come, Lord Jesus, the One who is coming and is already here.
In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The Father who sent the Son to show us a life overflowing with the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
[1]
[2] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/relativity-and-the-cosmos.html
[3] Daniel 8:17
[4] Ozick, Cynthia “What Helen Keller Saw” The New Yorker, June 16, 2003.