Advent 1 - 2011

Well, we’ve made it through Thanksgiving and survived the insanity of Black Friday. The world outside is now preaching a message of deep discounts on wide screen TVs, the “perfect gift” for Christmas, “every kiss begins with Kay,” buy this or buy that and life will be complete … and then you come to church and hear about stars falling from heaven, the sun and moon darkened … essentially the End of All Things. Sounds like “Captain BuzzKill” just reported for duty with a message of doom and gloom for all! Either Christians are the most dour and depressing people on the face of the earth, or perhaps … just perhaps … something else is going on – and I’m putting my money on the second option.

The first Sunday in Advent always … ALWAYS … begins with the end – the END of all things. This is a reminder that God is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end, and it points to the paradox of our faith where the first is last and the last is first. Our Lectionary Year B which features the Gospel of Mark is no exception to this pattern. I think it’s unfortunate that narratives about the end of all things have been co-opted by elements of the religious right best known for rapture theology and the “Left Behind” series of books. They seem to have hijacked the whole message about the apocalypse to the point where it makes most Episcopalians shudder to think about it. Let me put it on the record that the rapture, also known as dispensational theology, is a creative and selective reworking of Scripture. It essentially teaches that the second coming of Christ will snatch up and take to heaven all the true believers and all children under 12, because evidently your twelfth birthday is when you start on the Road to Perdition. Then Christ will leave and there will be a 1,000 year reign of the anti-Christ – a time of terrible tribulation for those left behind. Then, after 1,000 years, Christ will come again and take up the survivors of the ordeal who now believe in Jesus – and for those who don’t … well there’s always eternal damnation. Now if you pick up your Bibles, I dare you to find anything in them which indicates there will be a “third coming” of Christ – it’s not there. We declare in our Eucharistic Prayer A that “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again” – not “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again … and then leave and then come again.” Rapture theology sounds like some kind of celestial escape plan which frankly is pure, unadulterated heresy. There … I’m on the record ... it's heresy.

We do need to take apocalyptic literature like Daniel, Isaiah, and Revelation seriously but we need to put it into some perspective. First, the word apocalypse is one that carries a sense of foreboding – and for those of us old enough to remember the movie, you’re probably envisioning helicopters and hearing the strains of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries in your heads right now. It’s a scary word … right? But is it really? Apocalypse comes from the Greek word apocalypsos – which means “revelation.” Hmmm … yes, the name of the last book in the Bible is Apocalypsos tou Ioannou – the “Revelation of John.” It means that which is hidden is revealed. In fact, we could say that Jesus himself is an apocalypsos – a revelation of God’s self to a hurting human world. When we think of its real meaning, apocalypse loses some of its frightening connotations.

The second thing which can be troubling about apocalyptic literature is the certainty of those who adhere to rapture/dispensationalism that the images contained in these books are 100% speaking to our place, time and culture. As if these writers were somehow clairvoyant in their ability to predict the future and speak to it. I remember being in a youth group with a young man who attended a conservative evangelical college and he had the whole Book of Revelation figured out! All of the allusions and images were totally explainable in terms of current geopolitical realities … and the number of the Beast – “666” – was, in fact, representing ... the Soviet Union. I always wanted to ask him how that works now that the Soviet Union is no more.

You see, the writers of apocalyptic literature, and even Jesus, were not magically able to predict the future. These writers were not writing for us sitting here in the 21st century. They didn’t predict the European debt crisis, the Arab Spring, or the Green Bay Packers being 11 and 0 for the season (who could have predicted that?). These writers were writing for their own people, place and time – and addressing their current social situation. So what was going on when Mark wrote his gospel?

From its structure and word usage, it is very likely this gospel was written between 66 and 70 AD – during the time of the Jewish-Roman War. During this conflict, the Jewish rebels tried very hard to get the Jewish Christians to take up arms with them and fight the Romans – but the Jewish Christians refused. This refusal became a wedge between the early Christians and Jews. The Romans were expelled from Jerusalem and Galilee by the rebel forces until Emperor Tiberius ordered General Vespasian to put the rebellion down and put Jerusalem to the torch. Tiberius ordered the Temple destroyed – except for one wall for the Jews to grieve over (this is the Western Wall – or Wailing Wall – still standing today). Estimates are that up to a half-million people living in Jerusalem were killed by the Roman army and when the army was finished, Jerusalem lay in ashes and would be uninhabited for 40 years thereafter.

Why did the Christians not take up arms and fight alongside the Jewish rebels? Perhaps it was because the teachings of Jesus had warned them of false messiahs, false messages, and the danger of misplaced trust which we call Sin. Early Jewish Christians were not centering their worship in a place - they centered it in a person, Jesus Christ. And this serves as a warning to us today.

We humans have a tendency to project God’s favor or wrath into our own earthly causes quite liberally. And yet Jesus' life and ministry show that the divisions cause by earthly causes are not sign of the kingdom of God. We live in an increasingly polarized culture where people want to believe they are doing “God’s will” even when their very actions spread division, discord, and even hatred of anyone opposing their beliefs. Jesus’ ominous message tells us that war and division are not where we are to look for God among us.

Rather than viewing this Scripture as “doom and gloom,” I think we can view its message as one of hope – hope because it reminds us that the powers of this world do not have the final word. Jesus’ admonitions to “be alert” and “keep awake” are a call for us to be more keenly aware of the presence of God among us right now – often in places and people we don’t expect and certainly not in human conflicts. My daughters have spent the last few summers going on mission trips with Group Workcamps and the kids are advised to be alert for “God sightings” – those places where we see God’s presence or even those times where we’ve been Christ for another. As we prepare this Advent for the coming of Christ – Emmanuel, God with us, let us keep awake and be alert to where Christ is showing up right now, right here, right in our midst – and especially where we least expect it.