Text used – Mark 13:24-37

• Let me ask you a question this morning: Does time move in one single direction – forward – or is it more fluid … more overlapping … more cyclical?
  • Don’t worry → not a question I expect you to answer definitively
  • Western world: we have a very linear, one-way view of time → There was yesterday. There is today. There will be tomorrow. But all the things that did happen, are happening, or will happen are singular events. They occur once and then never again. We can learn from past events and hope for future events, but they only come around once.
  • Many other worldviews (Australian Aboriginal culture, Native Americans, Buddhism, Hinduism, Aztecs, ancient Greeks, many African cultures, etc.[1]): time is more cyclical
    • Scholar Howard Morphy at Australian National University describes cyclical time: Some events, like eating food, happen each day. Some changes, like the Sun rising above the horizon, are visible in minutes. Other events, such as major ceremonial gatherings, occur after months or years of preparation and some changes, such as human aging, occur over a lifetime. All these can be nested within cycles of repetition in which the uniqueness of each individual event is lost. … While different events have their own durations and are caught up in independent rhythms associated with seasonality, with cycles of reproduction and growth, and with celestial movements, the very fact that the one event can be used as a sign of the other (or as a metaphor or analogy for the other) brings them together.[2] → Following this worldview, time is more a spiral than anything with various events coming around and around again, and the echoes of those events from previous years and previous generations tie them all together. To use a holiday example, the act of putting up the Christmas tree this year recalls Christmas trees we’ve put up in the past and connects us to each of those times.
  • Particularly drawn to the part of Morphy’s description that links past, present, and future through the use of signs and metaphors: event A in the past was a sign that event B would happen in the future, so those two events are linked together in the spiral of time → Nowadays, we have a thoroughly Westernized grip on time – an understanding of time as a commodity more than anything. We spend We bank time. We earn time. And we admonish those who waste time. And yet in the life of the church, the way we follow the ebbs and flows of the liturgical season is a much more cyclical view. Each December, we reconnect to the story of Advent and prepare ourselves for the birth of the Messiah. Each Lent, we reconnect ourselves with the story of that same Messiah’s last weeks and days and hours. Each Easter, we rejoice anew in the story of the Messiah’s escape from death and the tomb into eternal life. Each Pentecost, we celebrate the birth of the church through the burning fire and powerful wind of the Holy Spirit. We share in the same stories year after year because they connect us to Christians throughout the ages.
  • Cyclical view of time = prevalent throughout Scripture as well
    • Time and again, God refers to Godself using some variation on the formula “God of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”
    • Entire work of the prophets = speak God’s words into a particular time but to connect that to a time to come
    • Paul’s entire ministry is built on conveying meaning and faith through the past actions and teachings, life and death and resurrection of Jesus
    • Jesus spends much of his ministry interpreting First Testament Scriptures for the day
      • Also times when Jesus speaks to the future
• Today’s text falls into that last category. It is a text embedded deep in cyclical time.
  • Not exactly the cheerful, Christmas-is-coming text we’re expecting on this 1^st of Advent: In those days, after the suffering of that time, the sun will become dark, and the moon won’t give its light. The stars will fall from the sky, and the planets and other heavenly bodies will be shaken.[3]
    • Unexpected because of the apocalyptic nature → Most people don’t tend to put much stock in the whole “the end is near” idea.
      • Mock it in popular culture – films, etc.
      • Makes for a snappy rock lyrics – R.E.M: “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine!”
      • Becomes a distressing preoccupation for some – those solely focused on reading the prophecies of Scripture (esp. Revelation) as a word-for-word predictor of world events
      • And yet, when we read these words of Jesus – words about “the Human One coming in the clouds with great power and splendor” – we have to think about the context into which these words were spoken.
        • Jesus’ time: Jews were under the imperial thumb of the Roman Empire
          • Occupied
          • Taxed → insult of their own hard-earned wages being handed over to their oppressors added to the injury of that occupation
          • The Jews – and all the other cultures and nations subsumed into the Roman Empire – were given a modicum of freedom … but make no mistake, friends. They weren’t free.
        • Time when Mk’s gospel was written = chaotic, dangerous, and ugly
          • Roman’s had just destroyed the Temple for the 2^nd (and final) time → swift, harsh, total reaction to a Jewish revolt in 66 CE (roughly 30 yrs. after Jesus’ death/resurrection) that led to the first Roman-Jewish war[4]
          • Christians were facing persecution
          • I can imagine it would have felt like the end of the world to anyone living through those times.
    • Text is also unexpected because it seems to begin at the end → We’re beginning the season of Advent … with this passage from the end of Jesus’ life and pointing to the 2^nd coming of the Messiah? What? Ah, but that’s our linear view of time showing again.
      • Scholar: It can seem strange, at first, to begin our anticipation of the birth of Jesus by being exhorted to wait for his coming again. After all, this talk of Jesus’ return seems out of sequence because, in the context of the liturgical year, we are still awaiting his birth. In one important respect, however, it is entirely fitting, because it places us squarely with those who awaited the birth of the Messiah. Neither those who awaited the first coming of the Messiah, nor those who now await his return, know when he will appear.[5] → And there it is, friends. There’s the point: the waiting.
        • Cyclical waiting that keeps us grounded in the full story of Christ and his purpose
          • Jesus’ beginning = end of the separation btwn God and humanity
          • Jesus’ ending = beginning of a new life in which death has lost its eternal hold on us
• As we read the Scriptures that lead up to Jesus’ birth on Christmas Eve and wander our way through another Advent season, we are reading texts of waiting. We are enfolding ourselves once again in God’s story in one of the in-between chapters – a chapter that pauses and anticipates, a chapter that holds its breath and hovers on the edges … waiting.
  • Waiting with a pregnant Mary
  • Waiting with a pregnant Elizabeth
  • Waiting with Joseph in all his multi-faceted anxiousness
  • Waiting with prophet Isaiah for the One who is to come
  • Waiting with Anna and Simeon in the Temple
  • We inhabit each of those stories of waiting whenever we read them. We let the cycle of those stories wash into our own story as God’s time circles around again.
• But we’re also in the midst of our own waiting – waiting for Christ to return to join heaven and earth in eternal joy and rejoicing. → rest of today’s Scripture reading speaks to this 2^nd kind of waiting
  • Speaks of the unpredictability of that time: But nobody knows when that day or hour will come, not the angels in heaven and not the Son. Only the Father knows.[6]
  • Most importantly, speaks of the kind of waiting we should be doing – active, intentional, attentive
    • Parable of the fig tree: tender branches + new leaves = summer[7] → So watch for signs and be cognizant of what they might mean.
    • Example of someone leaving their house and making sure their servants and doorkeeper remained ready for their return[8]
    • Jesus: Watch out! Stay alert! You don’t know when the time is coming. … Therefore, stay alert! You don’t know when the head of the household will come, whether in the evening or at midnight, or when the rooster crows in the early morning or at daybreak. Don’t let him show up when you weren’t expecting and find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to all: Stay alert![9]
      • Lillian Daniel, UCC pastor and author, sheds light on where/how Jesus’ call to alertness clashes with the Christmas culture that surrounded us this time of year: With all there is to get ready for the holidays, secularly and sacredly, nobody needs to tell us to “keep awake.” … But let us be clear that while the world’s busyness may seem to be pointed toward Christmas, it is seldom pointed toward the coming Christ child. … These days we are startled into extra hours of wakefulness in a liturgical season that annoyingly presumes we might be asleep. No wonder we tune it out, like teenagers hearing a parent’s repetitive lecture and knowing that mom simply does not understand. But of course, God does understand. In this way, the Scripture from long ago reads us, not the other way around. In Advent, we are indeed asleep to much of what matters. … Amidst the holiday parties and late-night shopping trips, the gospel reminds us to be awake to God in the world. This is a way of being awake that might actually be restful, and give us peace.[10]
• This, friends, is how we are to wait for Christ, both as we enter again into the ancient stories of that first waiting and as we contemplate our own 2^nd-coming waiting. It’s not a calculating kind of waiting – a waiting in which we are called to go through mental acrobatics to try to discern the exact date and time. Jesus specifically says, “Don’t do that! You can’t ” It’s a wide-awake kind of waiting – a waiting that looks for God active in the world around us, the people around us.
  • Central element to that waiting = HOPE
    • Reason we’ve switched to blue as our liturgical color for advent
      • Color of anticipating/preparing
      • BUT also color of hope
      • And it’s critical that we remember hope this season.
    • Keeps waiting tinged/twinkling with possibility and God’s goodness
    • Keeps a sense of anticipation and expectation in the waiting → When we are hoping to see God and expecting to see God, it’s easier to find God working in the world around us. Think of it this way: it’s the kind of waiting that lifts our eyes to our surroundings as we walk, noticing what’s going on around us, instead of focusing our eyes on our feet. It’s the kind of hope that finds ends in beginnings … the kind of hope that finds beginnings in endings … the kind of hope that finds God working through it all: past, present, and future together. Amen.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/science/time/Cyclic-view-of-time-in-the-philosophy-of-history.

[2] Howard Morphy. “Australian Aboriginal Concepts of Time” in The Story of Time. (Santa Fe: Merrel Holberton, 1999), 264, 265. Found at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282818866_Australian_Aboriginal_Concepts_of_Time.

[3] Mk 13:24-25.

[4] https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/faq/destruction-second-temple-70-ce.

[5] Martin B. Copenhaver. “First Sunday of Advent – Mark 13:24-37, Homiletical Perspective” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary – Year B, vol. 1. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 21, 23.

[6] Mk 13:32.

[7] Mk 13:28-29.

[8] Mk 13:34.

[9] Mk 13:33, 35-37.

[10] Lillian Daniel, “First Sunday of Advent – Mark 13:24-37, Pastoral Perspective” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary – Year B, vol. 1. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 20, 22, 24.