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Advent Cycle b November 27, 2011
Is.
64:1-9 Psalm 80:1-7
1 Cor.1:1-9 Mark
13:24-37
When does your house get really cleaned? Well,
my house usually gets cleaned the best when we know that someone is coming for
a visit, when someone is coming for dinner.
Horror of horrors….we don’t want people to
know the conditions that we tolerate on a daily basis. And a drop in visitor exposes the scam that
prevails regarding having the house in order.
I think that every family needs an eccentric
aunt or uncle who is a constant threat to drop in at anytime for a visit. Just the threat of such a visit would help to
keep the house perpetually clean and that would be cheaper than hiring a
cleaning service.
Imagine that the greatest guest of all, God,
might be the surprise visitor who could drop in at anytime for a visit to our
earthly home. What sort of conditions
would our surprise Visitor find in a visit to our earthly home?
If that Visitor were to come now, what would
be found? A country and world in
economic woes…A world with wars…A world with terrorists who believe the
developed countries are an Empire that must be struck at by targeting innocent
people…a world that has genocide, starvation and the pervasive presence of disease,
a world of people protesting crooked governments and economic structures. A world that could use all of its energy
fighting natural disasters and human caused environmental disasters but
fearfully over- invests in weaponry.
Do we really want our divine Visitor to make
a sudden visit to our greatly disordered house?
The salvation history contained in the
biblical writings is a history of God’s people trying to make sense and purpose
in a world that often experienced disorder.
Natural disasters were so great and so
difficult to explain that the ancient people often attributed them to God’s
wrath. That tradition continues today
with certain preachers. The problem is
this: How can anyone be certain about whom the wrath is directed towards? Some preachers are so sure that they know who
the bad guys are. The problem is that
natural disasters are not accurate smart bombs; lots of children and innocent
people get harmed in the “collateral” damage.
One does not see pin point accuracy towards the bad guys in natural
disasters. And we, as merely human, make
our judgments about who is good and who is bad and sometimes we are very biased
in our judgments.
The Old Testament explanation of disaster
and suffering was to posit that such disaster was an expression the wrath of
God. If God indeed is such a powerful God
and one who is always interfering in the affairs of the world through such
disasters, then the wrath of God is a logical interpretation of why bad things
happen to us.
But it is a mistake to use events in nature
as a sign of God’s wrathful power; It is better to acknowledge the significant
freedom that is abroad in the created order.
It is a mistake to underestimate the significant freedom that humanity
has to cause pain and to relieve pain.
Scholars think that the church that wrote the
last version of Mark’s Gospel was a church of believers who faced martyrdom in
time of the Emperor Nero. And so the
Marcan church was in need of some “pain management.”
I think that it would be safe to say that the
Bible is a book full of “pain management,” since many of the people in Bible
times had to deal with situations of incredible pain and suffering. They needed a vision of a light at the end of
their dark tunnel of pain. They needed
to believe that justice would triumph in the end. They needed to know that their brave witness
of faith was not offered in vain.
In the Bible there is a type of literature
that is called apocalyptic, or visualizations about the end of life as we know
it. The apocalyptic genre of literature
was generated in suffering communities.
Its presence marks the visualizations of suffering community as they
try to give their hope a specific narrative.
A child at a cancer treatment center is
encouraged to visualize by drawing pictures of his fight with cancer. And one can see that the imaginations of
children create heroes to fight for them.
Armies and angels are imagined in the fight against the unseen but very
real cancer.
Adults too, are encouraged to “visualize”
endings of their pain. They too need to
imagine angelic heroes fighting a fight against the pain of their lives. We use creative visualization to provide a
narrative for hope to help survive some difficult times. Our visualized images are less significant
than the truth of the hope that we have in such times of suffering.
For the early Christians, the pain was real
for certain people who faced persecution, but not all Christians faced
persecution. Since the persecution was
unevenly spread, the fear of persecution must have been as bad as the
persecution itself.
How are people who are living with real
threats to their lives and with the fear of threats to their lives….How indeed
are these people supposed to live by faith and hope?
The answer was given: If one is going to fear, then fear one who is
truly worthy to fear. Fear God and God’s sudden coming as the Son of Man.
Can you see the strategy of the Gospel
words? If Christians were taught to fear
God and the suddenness of the divine coming, then with the preparation of their
hearts and minds they could cope with the suffering and the fear of suffering
that was so much a part of the early Christian communities.
So the Advent message for us today is
this: Be prepared. Live in a state of alertness, because the
divine guest could arrive at anytime.
So what will the divine guest find on a
sudden visit? Will the Son of Man find
us caring for one another? Will the
Divine Guest find us taking good care of our environment? Will our future Judge find our earthly home
in order?
Just as we want our home to be ready and presentable
to entertain a sudden drop in guest, so too we should live our lives as those
who are ready for the Divine Guest to visit us.
And the respect that we have for the Divine Guest
should be so great, that we honor the divine presence more than we honor wealth
or fame or fear in our lives.
If God is our end, and a sure future guest,
then we need not live in fear of being the potential or actual targets of the
collateral damage that can happen to us in this life.
Fear God and God’s possible visit and be
prepared. If we live in this state of
readiness, we will find ourselves better suited to face the ambiguity of the
events of our lives.
The Gospels called people of old to a state a
readiness in their dire straits. The Gospel
still calls us to a state of readiness to be ready for the coming of the Son of
Man.
Visualization was good for pain management then; it is
good for both pain and pleasure management today. And so the Gospel is this: Be prepared and always visualize God as coming as a surprise Guest. Amen.
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