"Every big & little apocalypse"

Sermon ~ Pastor Annette
Mark 13:24-37

For the First Sunday of Advent, the lectionaries always have a text like "Wake Up!" or "Get Ready!" or "Prepare Ye!" – like Mark 13, where Jesus tells his listeners, "Keep awake!"

Mark 13 is called The Little Apocalypse, for how much it reads like Daniel and Revelation, that other apocalyptic literature in the Bible.

I think Little Apocalypse sounds like a band name, but turns out it isn't. It is, however, an
album title for a Bob-Dylan-sounding alt-country band called The Schramms.

. . . 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. 26 Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great
power and glory. 27 Then 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.

---

Therefore, 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,
(I know you hear all this forshadowing of the crucifixion story)

 36 or else he may find you asleep (more foreshadowing) when he comes suddenly. 37
And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”
 
  Jesus describes the end of the world. At least that's how it was taught to me growing up . . . .
Or - it’s what I learned . . . In that particular blend of Christian faith that was  white, Baptist, American, small town, conservative and middle class.

 The world was going to collapse into flames ignited by the sins of bad people:
Russians and criminals mostly, and post-Christian Europeans, And Ivy League radicals,  California hippies and black panthers and feminists. But that wasn’t to say that a 13-year-old girl child couldn’t be bad enough to fall in with them - If she didn’t say her prayers and witness to her friends . . .

Good Christians would escape, but barely with our clothes and hair singed.
(It was the 70's . . . We were pre-millinials.)
 
 But then somewhere around age eighteen or 19  it occurred to me that when Jesus' world went up in flames - HE didn't escape. He got arrested and tortured and executed.  
 
 
Which made this particular passage in Mark 13 both MORE sensible and scarier.

It seemed like Jesus is saying that whatever this coming disaster is - It  is going to get everyone . . . .

That it was going to be especially terrible for the weakest and the slowest
 
Women - go figure . . . .  

Jesus seems to pity them most:  
Verse 17:
 Woe to those who are pregnant  and to those who are nursing infants in those days! 
Pray that it may not be in winter. 

For in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation 
that God created until now, no, and never will be. 
  
Except I couldn't get anyone in my college bible study group to talk to me about this. My college minister, bless his heart,  the one who told me I think too much, Said of course Jesus wasn’t like THAT. 
 
That guy is in charge of parking operations at a state college. I sometimes wonder if  he left ministry because of me. I don't feel as badly about that as I probably should.
 
But I read and I prayed and I read some more. And I went to seminary and read and prayed and read some more and as best I can tell, friends -
 
 Jesus was and is EXACTLY like that!
Jesuswas  in smack dab in the middle 
of the tragedy and suffering of a world 
that is always bursting into flames 
somewhere.

Jesus doesn't escape the fire.
He walks straight towards it -
 looking for the ones for whom the suffering will be worst . . .

And not so much to snatch them back ~
But to show us how to live . . . . 
And how to die . . . .
How to be human in every circumstance that comes along . . . .
 
In the first beginning of the bible 
God made human beings.
 The crown of creation . . .
God's very favorite animal in the zoo 

The one with which God imagined having . . . . 
A friendship of sorts. 

God could have made us like golden retrievers -
They can’t choose who they love.
Mine are devoted to me.
But if you opened your car door -
they’d go home with you and never look back. 
 
But God made humans with power to choose - 
 to love God 
To be God’s friends -
or not.

Pretty risky.  
It went bad fast.
 And stayed that way 
moreso than not.
 
The do-over we call incarnation.
What we celebrate at Advent . . .

is the second beginning of the bible -
God became 
a human being.
 
We needed closer instruction 
Not only on how to be
 the friends of God . . .

We needed help to learned 
 what it even means to be a human being
What we are supposed to do 
with these minds and hearts and bodies of ours.

Because there are lots of choices - aren't there? 
 
Read any  news this week?
I watched a program about child hunger in America.
 They interviews a kid, about 11-years old I suspect,
 who told about another kid out a kid he knows at school.
 "He has worse clothes than me but his family has their own place," he said, "so he can go get something to eat out of the refrigerator at his house any time he wants. 
We don't have food at our house - 
only at the place where we stand in line 
then eat with a thousand other people,
Whether I am hungry then or not."
 
I read about human slave markets of Libya.
I felt ashamed because the story got too hard to read 
so I bookmarked it to finish later.
 
During the Civil War, there were battles where as many as 20,000 men died in one day.
In the Civil War novel Cold Mountain, 
my favorite character, Ruby Thewes finds her friend, Sally Swanger,
tortured nearly to death by Home Guard soldiers 
who killed her husband and sons.
 
"This world cain't stand long. The Lord won't let is stand like this!"  Ruby cries.
 
In his book about the Holocaust, Night,
 Eli Wiesel tells nearly the same story. 
 
On Thursday afternoon Wanda and I sat drinking Turkish tea downtown talking very highbrow theology.
A child hardly older than my Emy walked by our window -
Drugged out and dirty, 
raggedy and  barefoot as she could be.
"Where in the world is her mama?"  I thought.
 
 
My childhood preachers said Jesus is talking about the rapture in this passage -
a day that may be today or another day a thousand years off - 
when Jesus comes to take the church to heaven. 
 
I grew up believing Jesus wanted me awake and watching
so I didn't miss the get-away bus when he pulled up
to rescue us all out of this mess.

In addition to watching and waiting - 
my job was to warn other folks about the pending danger
By telling them how much God wanted them to escape too -
Because God loved them so much.  
 
The whole story was laced with fear and anxiety -
But I thought that was because I was a child.
That grown-ups didn't get afraid.
 
I got older -
 but no less afraid of being, 
as they say, left behind.
 
At the same time -
 I couldn't get over the simple fact
that none of what I thought these preachers 
were saying Jesus meant

Matched how Jesus himself lived 
when he walked around the gospels
 in his own heart mind and body.
 
He never seemed afraid.
He was never freaking out about how many people 
he'd warned about the apocalypse.

He was forever eating and hanging out and going for walks
 and getting into arguments with other bible study teachers.

His world was as mean and stupid 
and full of fear as our own . . .

It was as partisan to the rich
 and as hateful toward the poor . . .

As unjust and corrupt and racist 
and degenerate and lascivious  
as any culture before or since . . . .
 
And when his world did burst into flames - 
at his last Passover holiday -
He certainly DID NOT take the first bus out of town.

Partly because there were no buses . . . . obviously . .

But mostly because he was God incarnate.

His JOB was to show us how to live HERE
when life bursts into flames. . 

He walked straight into that fire 
with eyes set and his chin firm 
and however afraid he was . . .
He kept going . . . 

Through all the fire and all the smoke  . . . .
The torture, suffering death and grave . . . .

Through the worst that humans do to one another  . . .
So that no human ever can say that
 God doesn't know what it's like to be me.

Because God does know.
 
So I grew out of believing Jesus was talking only about the rapture.

Then I went to seminary and learned from the bookish ones 
that Mark 13 is actually about 
the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple 
by the Romans in 70 ad.

That this is, quote - 
"crisis literature written in the voice of Jesus 
forty years after his resurrection." 
 
"Oh," I said, "Of course." 
I mean, I get it in the literary studies sort of way - 
but how can that really work?
That's a use of the passage - but really ~
How can Jesus speak in crisis literature written 40 years later? 
 
And then I grew up even more 
and fell into a line of work that has me 
visiting jails and hospitals  . . . .
and parents whose kids have been taken away  . . . .
And a refugee whose wife and four daughters were hacked to death in Rwanda . . . .
 
And, for now at least, 
I’ve  resigned myself to the possibility 
that this passage is about
every big and little apocalypse 
that is happening somewhere in the world 
all the time.
 
 We know from the prophets and from history ever since
that when the world goes up on the flames
 people on the right side of history don't escape ~
just for being right.
They suffer and they die with everyone else.
 
We don't choose righteousness and justice 
because it is the safer course -
But because it's right=
Right where God meant for us to be 
from the beginning of creation -
Right where we are most truly and most fully human.
 
 We only get this one heart and mind and body and voice . . .
This one human ensemble, if you will . . . .
And this one speck of time in which to be a human being . . .
We take ourselves out of the box 
and we decide 
what the world shall receive
by virtue of us having lived?

And make no mistake - we decide!
OUR lives are OURS to do with as we please . . . .
And we answer to God for that decision. 
 
Did we ~ keep awake ~ for no better reason than to stay safe?
 
What does safe mean anyway?
Simply not to die?
If one must sacrifice one's humanity to stay alive . . . .
Is one still a human being?
 
If so ~ one can't possibly know anything of Christ.
To be a human being finds its full expression there.
 
In knowing my self  as God's own -
Born of God's creative self -
Of God's desire to relate to the creation intimately.
 
To do so
God became one of us -

A further trip no 
human  has ever taken . . .

A wider border no human 
has ever crossed.
 
To become like the most distant stranger
in order that the stranger know 
he or she is loved beyond all measure.

That is the call
that incarnation puts upon those
who would follow Jesus. 
 
Once I didn't have to pretend the world was better than it is -
  
the good news of Jesus Christ 
no longer scared the daylights out of me.

I could see how much God loved the world
 by sending Jesus to us.

 Mean and hateful as it is sometimes - 
God loves it . . . . Loves us.

Advent's when we start that story over.
So we can remember and do our best
 to love this world  too

With as much peace and joy and hope and courage 
as we can muster

In our lives
And in our life together.

Would you pray with me?