Christ the King Sermon 11 29 20

A1B 2020 Mark 13:24-37
I of course spent this Thanksgiving isolating at home, but I did get to call and Zoom with
some friends and family I don’t get to see often even under normal circumstances. Although I
moved all the way back in May, several of them still asked if I was settled in my new home yet,
since that does take some time. The answer is yes, probably in part because the pandemic has
kept me home so much, I don’t feel like I’m in transition any more. But even when we’re not
right in the middle of a major life change, part of being human means we’re always in flux:
transitioning from one job or career to another, putting down roots or pulling them up and
relocating, moving from relative health through periods of illness and hopefully back to
wellness again, forming relationships that ebb and flow as the circumstances surrounding us and
others constantly shift. In some way we are always just ending and beginning another chapter.
Advent begins a new season in the church. We leave behind a year studying Matthew
and begin to focus on Mark’s gospel. Today is liturgical New Years, which is good news
considering most of us are ready for 2020 to end so we can start what we hope will be a much
healthier, happier future. Advent is a transitional season in itself: it calls us to prepare for the
coming of Emmanuel, God With Us. But we don’t just look back at God coming in history; at
the same time Advent points us toward the end of this age. Mark’s gospel in particular lacks the
signs that we usually think of as heralding the coming of Christmas: no visits from angels, no
miraculous pregnancies, no star to get the magi on the road from the East. Mark begins with an
adult John the Baptist preaching repentance in advance of an adult Jesus whose ministry ushers
in the kingdom of God on earth. And this week’s reading comes even later, almost at the end of
Jesus’ life, when he predicts the destruction of the temple, the end of the religious, political, and
economic world as Israel knew it. Not one stone will be left upon another, he tells them; and
the disciples want to know what Christians ever since have wanted to know: when is all this
going to happen? How will we know it’s coming?
Jesus redirects the disciples’ attention away from the timeline. When is clearly not the
most important question, because even Jesus himself doesn’t know that day or hour. Nor does
he give them a checklist of events to identify. This little bit of apocalyptic literature in Mark,
similar to what we find in books like Daniel and Revelation, is not a prediction of the future but
a veiled description of the present. Apocalypse means the revelation of something that is
hidden. Jesus isn’t telling the disciples to wait for a solar and lunar eclipse followed by a
meteor shower so they’ll know it’s time; he’s telling the disciples to pay attention to what is
already happening around them, now.
This might make sense to us this year more than ever before. Usually I read these Advent
texts about signs on earth and portents in the heavens and it produces, as I think Mark intended,
a sense of urgency and apprehension. But a darkened sun and moon, stars falling from heaven:
after everything else that has happened lately, in 2020 that just sounds like a Tuesday. The scale
and scope of the suffering going on around us is certainly beyond what most of us have
experienced before, but Christians of nearly every generation since Jesus have wondered
whether the catastrophes of their day were signs of the end. Can you imagine watching the
floodwaters rise in New Orleans or the Gulf Coast? Or living in London during the Blitz? Or
being on the battlefield in Gettysburg in the summer of 1863? Or watching more than a third of
Europe succumb to the Plague? Ours is the latest in an almost unbroken chain of world-wide
disasters that have caused Christians to read passages like this one and wonder, is this it? And
that may be the point: we have plenty of signs already that the world we are living in needs
God’s help. What more do we really want to see go wrong before we pray, Come, Lord Jesus?
So yes, this is the end of the ages, the time in between God coming to us in the person of
Jesus and God’s final restoration and redemption of all of creation—but, that’s a good thing.
Advent reminds us that we are living, always, in a time of transition, the kingdom of God
having begun to break into this world, but not yet being fully realized among us. In Advent we
don’t just wait to celebrate Christmas, remembering that God came to us in history; we also
wait to celebrate God coming to us in future majesty. But we’re not waiting with dread for
more signs of the end, we’re waiting with hope for God to come, to heal all the hurt and bind up
what is broken in this world that has already known more than enough suffering, fear, darkness,
and death. We usually think of the song Joy to the World as a Christmas carol, but in our
hymnal, it’s in the Advent section; because that’s what we’re waiting for—the joy that comes
with the presence of God.
Most years I would say God also comes to us in the mystery of the sacraments—in
baptism and eucharist. But these days we even have to wait for that. Yet if we are impatient for
the presence of God, remember that God also comes to us through communion with one
another. We keep awake to how God is still reaching us through others; we keep alert for ways
to reflect the light of Christ to those who are living in darkness. We don’t know how much time
we have, but we do know how we are called to use it, until that day when God comes again and
our joy is complete.