The Gospel According to Mark 13:24-37

December 3, 2023: Advent I

The Rev’d. Dr. Gretchen S. Grimshaw

Trinity Episcopal Church, Brooklyn, CT

‘But in those days, after that suffering, 
the sun will be darkened,
   and the moon will not give its light, 
and the stars will be falling from heaven,
   and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. 
Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory. 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.

 ‘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. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

 ‘But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It 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. 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, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.’

It is finally Advent! Welcome to the season of insanity……if the definition of insanity, not the serious clinical definition but the cultural colloquial one, is doing the same thing over and over again with the expectation of a different result. Because here we are again, the first Sunday in Advent. Just like last year, and the year before, and the year before that, here we are beginning our story, again. Our same age-old story, in a new year, presumably in a new way. And yet, it is not a new story, not even close.

Advent could easily feel like …Ground Hog Day, the movie…the same old unfulfilled promise of peace on earth, once again.  Every year we wait with joyous expectancy for a gift that never seems to come. Are we that foolish? Or is God that untrustworthy? How can it be that God has already come on earth, and earth is still without God’s peace?

And to make matters worse, this morning’s Gospel reading from Mark makes us wonder if the promised peace on earth will even be worth the cost. Because on this first Sunday in the festive season of Silver Bells we have made our way here through a world overflowing with twinkling lights and lawn Santas; through a maze of retail ads choking every conceivable media, touting a thousand affordable ways to make this Christmas bright.

We have navigated gluttonous lists organizing a fleet of holiday festivities and gift giving. And having made our way here through all of that, we gather this morning in the home of the Good News, to kick off this season of good tidings and great Joy to the World. Merry Christmas is our vernacular. And then bam! We are met with this morning’s abominable reading from Mark’s Gospel.

….the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light….Heaven and earth will pass away….

From holiday cheer to earth-ending fear. From Santa is coming, to life as we know it is on the way out. Which candidly, might actually sound like Good News to some in this world. But I am guessing that for most of us it is……terrifying. Heaven and earth will pass away…...forever?

Jesus, Mary and Joseph!….and I invoke these names in the most reverent way possible. Is this really the time for such an apocalyptic text? In this the Most Wonderful Time of the Year? Was this Gospel reading chosen by the Grinch?

‘in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven….

 O Holy Night! O Holy cow! Jesus is not talking about an eclipse. This cataclysmic Advent premonition doesn’t lend itself to Johnny Mathis or Bing Crosby or Rosemary Clooney. But the stark truth is that nothing in this Christian life, the life that begins anew this season of Advent, does.

Because Christianity has almost nothing in common with popular culture. And that is Good News, although sometimes it seems like bad news. But this morning’s readings could not be more clear. This is Christianity 101.

If we want to live into the outrageous story that begins with the Incarnation of the Divine and ends with the Resurrection of a Human Being, we are going to have to get a handle on the relationship between endings and beginnings. Or more to the point, the Good News that connects endings with beginnings.

And so the first trick to getting Christianity is learning how to hear the end of one thing as simply, miraculously, thankfully, the beginning of another. Not unlike spelling George over and over again. Georgeorgeorgeorge. The end is also the beginning.

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

Jesus’ words are like George continuously beginning in the ending. We hear this general message every year in the Gospel reading for the first Sunday in Advent.

The readings always assure us of the Second Coming of Christ. They always deliver the Good News that peace is still on the way. But they also remind us that peace will not just grace this world, it will replace this world. Altogether. Like the Incarnation and the Resurrection, the Second Coming will turn the world on its head; it will involve both an earth-shattering ending and a life-affirming beginning.

This year, in Mark’s Gospel we hear a slightly more intense edge to this message than we hear in the years when we read Matthew and Luke. But both of those Gospels end with a return appearance of our Saviour after the resurrection. In those Gospels, Jesus returns to the disciples and promises never to leave them…. At least in spirit.

But Mark ends much more definitively. With just an empty tomb. No return appearance for reassurance. And the ones who have come to the tomb are nunderstadnably terrified. Not mystified, as in Matthew and Luke. Terrified. How can the tomb be empty? Where did the body go? The last verse of Mark’s Gospel dewscribes the women who came to tend Jesus’ dead body: 

So they they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them;

and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. 

The end. Drop the mic.

I always hear Linus in my head when I read this last sentence in this Gospel. As though the women at Jesus’ tomb in Mark were somehow connected to the shepherds at Jesus’ birth in Luke: and they were all sore afraid!

This is the end of Mark’s Gospel. And, some might argue, the crux of Mark’s story. There is no soft landing in Mark. Jesus does not return to comfort his disciples. In Mark, the tomb is just empty. In Mark, Jesus has simply come and gone. And the ones left behind are terrified. It is not the ending we expect when we start this story. With the babe in the manger and the promise that peace will inhabit the earth with his very being. Where is the peace? It’s been two thousand years. Where is the peace?

And that is when we remind ourselves that the story does not begin in the manger. It begins with Advent. And Advent comes with the message that peace is indeed coming, but…… Not until everything else has passed away. And so the hope of peace on earth is in the Second Coming. Not the birth, but the Second Coming of God’s flesh on this earth. The Second Coming that is foretold in this morning’s Gospel.

There is hardly anything more uniformly and widely attested in the New Testament than the Second Coming of Christ. It is in all three synoptic Gospels, Acts, Corinthians, The Book of Revelation, etc. And even though we do not, in our contemporary culture, talk much about the Second Coming per say, we embrace that hope every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer. Every time we pray that God’s Kindom will come on earth as it is in heaven. That is an explicit prayer for the Second Coming of Christ.

And so this morning we hear Jesus’ answer to that prayer. Sit tight. I am coming. I’m on the way. But, I can not do this without your help, says Jesus. So here is your instruction. It’s not complicated. Just stay awake. Jesus does not tell us to Deck the Halls or even to Go Tell it on the Mountain. He says sit tight!  Keep Awake! That’s it. God’s Christmas wish for us: Keep awake.

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away…..so Keep awake!

It sounds easy. Sort of. But personally, I’m a big chicken. And if the world is going to come to an end, I would just as soon sleep through it! I don’t want to keep awake. It scares me to death. And I am guessing I am not alone. Like the war broiling around the world that scares us to death. Like the almost commonplace gun violence almost in our schools and houses of worship that scares us to death. And the opioid epidemic that scares us to death.  And the nearing tipping point of climate change scares us to death. Like Covid before the vaccines, scared us to death.

And so as it turns out, Mark’s Gospel proclamation of the Second Coming does not have a lock on terrifying endings. We already know what it feels like to be scared to death. But the difference is, in Mark’s Gospel, the end is not just the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad end. It is more of a means to an end. An end that is required to clear the decks for a brand new, life-giving beginning.

Because every beginning is preceded by an ending. It’s just the law of Creation. It’s by God’s own design. As the popular preacher Barbara Brown Taylor says in her sermon on this passage in Mark, this end comes not in the absence of God, but with God front and center.[1] And God is not only present at this ending, God causes it. Intentionally.

Which makes this passage no less terrifying in my book, but it does offer an enormous light at the end of the tunnel. And not just a light, a light whose brilliance and comfort we can scarcely imagine. A light that so outshines our fear that we will want to be awake to see it.

Although I must admit that if I were Mark’s editor, I might have suggested a slightly different instruction for our preparation. Because, while staying awake is surely good practice, I think that a more helpful instruction might be to let go. Let go of all the things that block our embrace of this ending as anything other than a divine new beginning. Let go of everything that we fear we will lose in order to gain the Kindom of God.

Let go of our obsession with security.

Let go of our grip on prosperity.

Let go of our cultural and constructed and limiting notions of home and family.

Let go of our comfort and complacency and competitive drive.

Let go of our notion that death is worse than suffering.

Let go of our notion that life begins with, and belongs to, us alone.

Let go of every human construct that gives us something to lose.

Because lose it we will. All of us. All of it. Eventually. Whether we lose it now or later, in the course of our lives or at the end of the world, we are going to lose it. But the Good News is that either way, there will be life abundant in the aftermath.

So Advent may well be the time to prepare for the new beginning by letting go of our fear of the ending.

This morning we lit that first candle on our Advent wreath. It is the inextinguishable sign that we are not in Kansas anymore. We are now powered by God’s particular light, empowered by God’s expansive vision, and overpowered by God’s everliving love.  We are in God’s time. With God’s blessing. In God’s hands.

I think it is no coincidence that our Christian calendar begins in the darkest part of the year. When the days are short and the light of hope is waning.  I think December 21^st….the longest night is a bit of a metaphor for Mark’s message.

The days become shorter and shorter….darker and darker until one day, in the blink of a single night, they suddenly begin to grow longer and longer…lighter and lighter. December 22 is immediately lighter than was December 20^th. Just like that. One day turns the whole tide. From darkening to lightening in a flash. So fear not!

But let us be duly aware that there will be darkness before there is light. 

The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven.

And then there will be a radical new world that we cannot begin to foresee!  To say that the Second Coming of Christ will be mind-blowingly radical is an understatement. It will be off the wall! Over the top! Beyond the pale and out of this world! Profound. Extravagant. Revolutionary.

This binding of endings and beginnings in God’s realm will turn the world and everything in it on its head. All of our expectations will be moot. And all of our norms will be shattered. And all of our fears will be cast out by nothing less than love. And all of this is guaranteed by nothing less than our steadfast faith.

Let us begin our Advent practice by letting go of everything but….the promise. The promise that God will never, not ever, never leave us. Jesus said:

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

And that is nothing but Good News!

Amen.

© December 2023, The Rev’d. Dr. Gretchen Sanders Grimshaw

[1]Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine (Cowley Publications: Cambridge, MA) 1995. 135-6.