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‘B’ // Advent 1 // 11-30-08 // Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian
Scriptures Isaiah 64:1-9 Mark 12:24-37
Nurturing Night: Life Amidst Death
Welcome to Worship!
Welcome to a new Church year! Welcome to Advent.
And yet, we suffering Michiganders may do well to ask: an advent of what?
With apologies to Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill both: Amidst the winter of our economic discontent, it’s a long night’s journey into day.
The day God centers all creation on the margins of a manger.
The Christmas day – like that Easter day – when we come to realize, in the midst of death, there is life – and life abundant.
We begin that long night’s journey into day – today.
Won’t you join me?
Prayer: We come, O God of grace, seeking the bearable … and you, with a knowing nod, give us the inescapable.
We come, O God of hope, seeking relief … and you, with a gentle smile, give us freedom.
Free us, we pray, to the inescapable way.
Free us, today, to wait … to wonder … to hope.
And now may the words of my mouth,
and the meditations of our hearts,
be receptive of you these moments to come –
O God, our rock, and our redeemer. Amen.
The gun metal gray of yet another Michigan winter … The end-game stress of another school semester … The sputtering of economic engines afar – and, more pointedly, near …
These anxieties and more emerge to greet us from our brief Thanksgiving snooze.
What to do, but pray? What to do … but nurture the fig leaves of hope?
Welcome to this sanctuary – this safe place – today.
And welcome to the advent – the dawning – of this new Church year.
The advent of imminent new birth – of hope resurrected.
The advent – midst the nurturing night, and the nurturing of the night – of the promise of new life amidst death and the rumors of death.
At our most recent Session meeting, our Worship Team requested that we once again celebrate Holy Communion each of the four Sundays during the Advent season.
No one objected strenuously to the idea. In our brief discussion on the matter, however, one longtime elder asked a pertinent question I had heard another longtime elder ask a couple of years ago: “Why do we celebrate Communion during Advent, anyhow?”
Why – indeed? When the Communion feast is an event historically linked to the Last Supper, and Christ’s impending Passion at that time: “This is my body … This is my blood”?
As we hear the vivid words of apocalypse in our gospel scripture today – apocalypse meaning, foundationally, a revelation – and as we partake of Holy Communion together through Advent, I invite each of us to refrain from taking these biblical words and events less literally. I encourage each of us instead to take them more seriously.
Less literally … more seriously. For the season of Advent, as with the season of Lent, beckons us as a church to descend into a nurturing, metaphorical darkness – a dark night of the soul, for some – out of which a heavenly light would emanate. A nurturing, metaphorical darkness: whether it be the labor pains of new creation as related in our gospel today, or – in three short months – the valley of the shadow of crucifixion that would trail us till Easter morn.
For whether it be the creating or the crucifying – the womb or the tomb: The nurturing night lingers over all spiritual journeys of Advent or Lent.
The nurturing night that rudely -- often abruptly – reminds us: There is no birth or rebirth without labor – without struggle.
The nurturing night that rudely – often abruptly – reminds us to tell the biblical story and to tell our life’s story forward. Not in the midst of life, there’s death to be avoided at all costs – that’s backward. Rather, in the midst of death, there exists life, and life abundant!
The nurturing night that can and must be embraced to comprehend the sustenance our Holy Communion gives us today – the body of that Son of Man, that Offspring of Humanity, that New Human Being broken for us, that the cup of his blood may pour forth its healing balm. As that Son of Man puts it today, “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from the heaven.” For this undoing of the fourth day of God’s creation – Genesis, chapter one – can and must be embraced to usher in the Advent of a whole new creation.
The Advent … of a new Church year.
The Advent … of new birth imminent – of hope resurrected.
The Advent … of life amidst death.
Not life after death. For isn’t that what we all selfishly long for – some form of heavenly reward?
But life amidst death. Something much more profound – something much more.
Something that trumps and utterly trivializes any reward we would receive for anything we could have done.
Something we have learned to claim as the God of grace.
The God of grace who does not render life more bearable, necessarily. But a God of grace who does render life inescapable. Who does not, as some sort of Holy Anacin, bring us fast, fast, fast relief in our long night’s journey into day. But who does bring us, in all of the inescapability of life-amidst-death, what our country’s Great Emancipator once called “a new birth of freedom.”
Not “bearability”, perhaps – but inescapability. Not relief, necessarily – but freedom.
And once we discover that inescapable freedom God’s grace provides – once we accept the awful grace of a God who may first go about hiding the divine face from an uncomprehending people, as the prophet Isaiah depicts the holy today – once we grasp the kernel of wisdom in that hoary yet biblically-sanctioned maxim, “It’s always darkest before the dawn” … We just might find the longsuffering faith to practice what biblical commentator Ched Myers calls “revolutionary patience”.1 The revolutionary patience to listen to Jesus today – to really listen: “keep alert” … “be aware” … “keep awake”.
Keep awake, and – as our Lord and Savior – “embrace the world as (our) Gethsemane … (amidst) the darkness of history.”2 Keep awake, and practice a bracing and embracing discipleship of the fig tree today: “learning (its) parable” – the Greek word for learning is the same root word for discipleship, here – that leads us not into the center of Black Friday’s imperial dominion, but into the edginess of Good Friday’s kingdom power.
Kingdom power – ushered forth amidst another Michigan winter. Kingdom power – ushered forth amidst another semester’s deadlines. Kingdom power – ushered forth, dare we hope, out of the trials and tribulations of the Big Three.
The kingdom power evoked out of the laboring, nurturing night. The power evoked by ringing – for all its worth – life from amidst death … and life abundant!
It’s the power of Advent, as it is the power of Lent.
It’s the power of human hope. A hope that inspires us, as a prison camp friend once put it to me, to “do the time, rather than let the time do you.”
“Keep alert”, Jesus cries out today to us. “Beware” – meaning, “Be aware.” “Keep awake.”
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I enjoyed a four-hour DVD from Ann Arbor’s public library system. It was a documentary about the late American artistic Andy Warhol – a profile from PBS’s American Masters series.
Of all the observations made about that pop icon over the course of those four hours, these comments -- from the art critic Dave Hickey -- struck me the most:
One of the things that Warhol understood that a lot of great business people will understand is that you can’t lead in America – you can’t get up with a flag and make people go anywhere. What you do is you move to the edge, declare that the center, and let everybody reorganize the world around you.
And, in a sense, that’s what Warhol did …3
“Move to the edge … declare that the center … and let everybody reorganize the world around you.”
All the great figures in history – those truly and magnificently “ec-centric”, out-of-center – have done this.
And now, Jesus – the Son of Man, i.e., this Offspring of a Humanity, this New Human Being – has declared that this greatness of self is about faithfulness to God, and it can be our call, too.
It’s the edginess of Christian discipleship. A discipleship ilocated in God’s center: the margins and marginalized of the world.
In Jesus’ prophecy today, it’s the advent of a darkened sun and moon – an empire eclipsed. The advent of the stars falling, and the powerful shaken.
Can we witness to the Son of Man – and his new creation – amidst our own imperial eclipse? Bringing it all back home: Can we serve as a faithful disciple amidst our own daily suffering, and our own sense of dread?
Let us stand on the margins – God’s center – together.
Let us stand on those margins – of our world, and from our lives – showing forth the fig leaves of a new creation amidst the nurturing night.
Let us stand there. And keep alert. And be aware. And keep awake.
Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.
1“For Mark, (this passage) is the culmination of Jesus’ sermon on revolutionary patience.” Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), pp. 347-8.
2Myers, op. cit., p. 348.
3Donald Rosenfield, Daniel Wolf, and Ric Burns (producers), “Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film” (Steeplechase Films: 2006).
Benediction …
It’s not life after death God calls us to hope for, this Advent – as in Lent.
It’s life amidst death – the nurturing night.
Standing on the edge of this new Church year, let us stand back, take that night in, and – strengthened by our Communion retelling of Christ’s life-amidst-death narrative – let us begin that journey anew, together.
Keep alert … be aware … and keep awake.
And go out into the world in peace, to love and serve our servant Lord.
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