Facing Our Day of the Lord

1 Advent Cycle b    November 29, 2020
Is. 64:1-9     Psalm 80:1-7
1 Cor.1:1-9   Mark 13:24-37

Lectionary Link

During the time of Jesus, the native people of Palestine had the long experience of being perpetually occupied.  Such people needed dreams and whispers in their community about hopeful liberating freedom.  The occupations had been for so long that there was much speculation about how a great God would eventually intervene and end the days of occupation.  Without the visual evidence of strong armed resistance to occupation, the underground talk of the community lived on the fumes of dreams.  The politics of the Messiah and the Son of Man was the talk and the whispers, and the entertainment of the oppressed people; it was fueled by writings, some which were in the Hebrew Scriptures and others, "apocalyptic" writings from various sages from wisdom schools of the various eras pre-dating the time of Jesus.

So, Jesus had read the one reference to the "Son of Man" in the book of Daniel, but he surely had read more expansive reflections on the Son of Man in other writings like Second Enoch.

And Jesus identified with the Son of Man, whom he had read about in the various writings about speculation regarding the end of things.

And Jesus said that the generation of people who were with him would witness this end; and of course we know it didn't happen, so how are the words of Jesus true, or wisely meaningful in his own time and in our time?

The literal ending of the world as we know it is what we call death.  What if we add together every death in the past, and every death in the present, and every death in the future into one big collective end, we could spiritually understand the wisdom of the kind of ending Jesus could say would come to all of the people in his time and in every time.

When one dies the sun doesn't shine and the moon has no light and the stars fall from the sky as one loses consciousness of them and everything.  And when one is ushered into the unknown realm of the afterlife, one hopes that the friendly messengers of God, the angels will be our guides to the afterlife.

And we can't quite process the collective death of every human being, past, present and future and so we roll it out into linear time, but we know that continuous life doesn't work that way.  Our science tells us that some kind of life will always go on.

When I die, what I know of heaven and earth dies for me as I experienced them while alive.  But they don't die for everyone else, still living.

The Apocalypse that Jesus was speaking about was about death as the great portal that comes to everyone and when it has collectively come to everyone, it would seem to be the end of the world as we know it.

The people in the time of Jesus live under the threat of death.  Average life expectancy was but thirty something;  you were a revered survivor if you lived to a riper age.  Death defined people; the Roman occupiers could be agents of death and so oppressed people lived under under the certainty of their lives ending.

Every age is attended by the phenomenon of death.  We have had the magnitude of death in the great wars which have defined the life of our country.  We have caused the death of many because we assumed the right to subjugate native peoples and to enslave others, and many to cruel deaths.

And we are living the apocalypse of the pandemic now.  Great death is upon us, death of biblical proportion or statistical magnitude.  More than a quarter of a million people have come to the end of their lives in less than a year because of Covid-19.  Many people are entering into the great collectivity of the end of their worlds.

And the words of Jesus which we read and quote in Advent, is to be ready for the end of one's world as it is known, because death can happen to anyone at anytime.

We could really be depressed by this dose of reality that Jesus gives us; namely, the every present reality of death: The reality  of the end of life as we know it for anyone at anytime.

St. Paul wrote that people were spiritually gifted as they waited for the revealing of the Lord Jesus Christ and that they were strengthened for the end to be blameless for the day of the Lord.

Advent is a time when we reckon with the condition of freedom which in human experience we call death.  Each person's death is the day of the Lord for one person at a time.

During the season of Advent we juxtapose the end of life as we know it, with the impending celebration of the birth of Christ in the Christmas event.  That birth event celebrates the birth of Christ in us who will be our chariot of fire to the next life.

In a way, the season of Advent is learning the discipline of living with the day of the Lord in mind.  It is he discipline of not taking life for granted because we know it will end.  The motivation of pondering the day of the Lord in our lives is to love and cherish life in such a way that we work to bring quality of living to ourselves and to everyone else.

Let us this Advent live into the possibility of a good death, when we will have lost our power to preserve our lives.  Then we will have to commit our afterlife to the preserving work of God and the angels.  To this end, the Advent words of Jesus advise us to, be ready.  Amen.