Sermon preached for Advent 1 at Our Savior, Pinehurst, Idaho

Mark 13:24-37

²⁴“But in those days, after that suffering, 

the sun will be darkened,and the moon will not give its light,
²⁵and the stars will be falling from heaven,and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

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

²⁸“From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. ²⁹So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. ³⁰Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. ³¹Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

³²“But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. ³³Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. ³⁴It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. ³⁵Therefore, 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, ³⁶or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. ³⁷And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”

Sermon

Advent always begins at the end, with an apocalyptic text like this one from Mark 13. I read last week that 100 years ago Lutherans in North America got together and decided to suspend preaching on the second coming and the end of the world. They judged that such preaching was doing more harm than good and that they would do better to give it a rest. In some ways that was a good thing, as many of us were spared from hellfire and damnation theology.

But it also left many of us ill-equipped both to deal with apocalyptic literature (scriptural and other) and maybe even less equipped to deal with times like our own. So here we are today, reading Mark 13, trying to understand how it speak to our lived experiences. I am going to take us back to its context and then work our way towards today.

First, we might notice that the celestial events listed in Mark 13 begin after that suffering. In other words, this is no time to fire up rants about the tribulation. That is not what Mark 13 is talking about. If not that, then what? Early readers would have called to mind the horrors of the crushing of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome. Ancient sources say that something like 1 million Jews died. The disaster came to its climax in the siege of Jerusalem, which was horrifying. 

After the suffering, the powers of the heavens are shaken. Imagine what such events would have meant for the first audience of this story, centuries before electricity and GPS. The sun rules the day, says Genesis 1, and the moon rules the night. The stars are for the marking of the regular and reliable seasons. So even during the darkest days of the siege, the sun always rose in the east every morning, and set every night in the west, reliable and regular even in disaster. The moon walked through its phases, week by week, moving from new moon to full, and back again, every month, every year. 

And so, for these guarantors of regularity to be knocked from their places would have meant that all reliability, all predictability, was gone. I imagine that these images named quite precisely how people felt after the Revolt was crushed. After that suffering, there was nothingleft to count on, nothing to trust, nothing to hope for.

Today’s scripture takes the feeling of deadly vertigo that comes at such moments and makes it into a sign that the end of the suffering is near. In other words, this is not a scene about the end of the world. It is a scene about the end of suffering, the end of hopeless desperation. That sounds like some good news.

The gospel continues.  After that suffering, after the loss of so many friends and family members, God will gather all of the lost and scattered Chosen People “from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven. With the orienting stars and ruling sun shaken and unreliable, Jesus promises that when the sufferings end, the lost and scattered will return.

“This generation will not pass away,” he says. But “about that day or hour no one knows.” This is an important collision of ideas, I think. Consolation is close, Jesus says, but not so close or so readable that you could put it on a calendar. 

The “generation” that experiences all these things (Mark 13:30) is simply the followers of Jesus who continue the movement he began. That movement will not be extinguished but will endure until all is accomplished.

One scholar writes, “Thus, hope does not disappoint; salvation does become reality….  We get no explanation as to why there is suffering, but we do get a promise: when all is said and done, we will have our happy ending — and it will never end. This triumph of hope, furthermore, will be truly cataclysmic: the world as we know it projects pessimistic outcomes, but that world belongs to God and it can be changed. It will be changed, and changed so radically that people will someday speak of a time when heaven and earth passed away (Mark 13:30-31)” (Powell).

I grew up Lutheran and so weekly I spoke the words of the second article of the Apostle’s Creed, “He will come again to judge the living and the dead.” Despite this, my parents and home church talked little about the time of Jesus’ coming. I believe the thinking went, since the time of Jesus’ coming cannot be known, we do need not think much about it. To which gospel writer Mark would have replied: since the timing is unknown, we should think about it all the time! Today, I assume that since the time is unknown it could be hundreds or millions of years from now. Mark again draws an opposite conclusion: it could be today!

There is much to celebrate in this wonderful world, but the days in which we live are described in Mark as a time for fasting as well as feasting, as a time in which we will often be acutely aware of the absence of our Lord and Savior (Mark 2:20; cf. 14:7c).

Of course, through our faith, we affirm the presence of Christ through Word and Sacrament, in the companionship of other believers. And yet, the point remains: Christ is not with us as he once was, and he is not with us as he will be!

For many, those we know as friends and those we read about half a world away, life in this world is actually not very pleasant. But even those fortunate enough to have a life filled with joy and blessing should not be satisfied to the point of complacency. There is more! There is better!

I believe innocent people caught in the middle of the war in Israel-Palestine and Ukraine pray for what is better. People living in dire poverty, whether in rural Idaho or in our companion synod, the Ulanga Kilombero Diocese of Tanzania, know what it is to have this hope for Christ’s coming again. 

My mom and I are getting ready to live through the third anniversary of my dad’s death. He was 94, had lived an incredibly full life, and he was only on hospice for one week. He died of pneumonia, and we were able to visit him every day at a residential hospice in Mesa, AZ. By all accounts it was a good death, but it was still one of a half-dozen times in my life when my heart broke in a particularly painful way. In the days and months that followed I was so grateful for the deep hope that comes in confessing and trusting that Christ will be with us again.

My heart also breaks as I live through these hard times, some would say apocalyptic times, in which the nation and the world seem so fractured. There is so much loneliness and fear and anxiety. At times it scares me. I worry about people turning to violence and I pray for suffering to end. Our Christian story is not the only life-giving narrative that exists, but it is the one I turn to and give thanks for. To borrow words from the Lord’s Supper: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

And so, we live in the already, but not yet time. In our small corners of the universe, we prepare for Christ once again by following his instructions to love God and love our neighbor in whatever ways we are able, to live with the sure hope that knows Jesus came once as a baby laid in a feeding trough and he will come again and complete all things.

The season of Advent invites us to wait impatiently for the consummation of hope, longing to know God as fully as we have been known; to see no longer through a dark pane, but face to face; to love as we have been loved; to experience Jesus Christ as he is, and in so doing, to become like him (1 Corinthians 13:12; 1 John 3:2). Thanks be to God and blessed Advent.