sermon - advent 1B

Entering into Advent

Isaiah 64:1-9
Mark 13:24-37

I had not been in this country long when I returned to California on holiday to find that one of my brothers now owned two wolves. He was the middle child in our family and he had always done unusual things, but this took the prize. He and his wife had moved out to a cabin in the foothills, and they had acquired two wolves as pets.

I only managed one visit with them during that period, but I will never forget it. I drove out to the cabin in the evening and had a meal with Ken and Cathy, full of anticipation. It was only when we had finished eating that he opened the back door and invited the wolves in from the big enclosure he had built for them.

Now, ordinary dogs, for the most part, like to greet people, yes? I’ve just been to visit friends for American Thanksgiving, and their black lab was all over us from the minute we walked in the door. A big slobbery hello and all the attention we could deal with for the rest of the evening. That big old tail wagging away, great big smile.

The wolves never came near me. They were incredibly beautiful. Thick coats and gorgeous colouring. They were thickset and you could tell they weren’t dogs immediately by the way they walked. Obviously something different in the skeleton. Something about their poise and dignity, their self-containment, gave you the impression instantly of intelligence. And that was confirmed by their eyes.

I will never forget those eyes. From across the room they sized me up and contemplated me. I still get shivers up my spine remembering the awe I felt looking into those eyes. Here was another creature, majestic and powerful. And intelligent. And dangerous. I’m sure that was part of it. If they’d wanted to, those animals could have killed us, and there wouldn’t have been much we could do to defend ourselves. There was no threat in the way they looked at me, although it was a little unnerving the way one of the wolves would get up and pace from time to time over the course of the evening. I would love to have been allowed to touch them, but it didn’t happen. They kept their distance from me. Even with my brother and his wife, although I think the respect between them had grown into love, they were not affectionate. Love was expressed with gifts, with allowing Ken to run with them, with a hundred small signs of acceptance. It wasn’t so much that the wolves became part of Ken and Cathy’s family as that Ken and Cathy were privileged to become part of theirs.

And although I’ve met and fallen in love with many dogs since that time, there is part of me that has never been quite satisfied since. That intelligence, that dignity, that otherness. The danger. It was an incredible experience.

We might debate as to whether it’s right to keep a wild animal as a pet. Certainly, the night that the wolves ran away in the midst of a terrible thunderstorm, I agonised over what we had done to them, what chances they could possibly have with all the farms around. They were never anything you could call domesticated. Their beauty was in their wildness.

I tell this story in order to make a plea with you for wildness. The Word of God is free and will not be domesticated. We want the Bible to be like a nice puppy dog - straightforward, full of energy but easy to understand, comforting, affirming, something to bring warmth and reassurance into our lives. We don’t mind that it’s demanding, so long as the demands are such as we can meet them. Straightforward. Even unreasonable is OK, so long as it’s clear and unreasonable.

But the Bible is wild. It meets you on its own terms. Lock it up if you want - we’ve got many ways of taming the Bible. We buy little books to explain away all its rough edges. We read just the easy bits and ignore the uncomfortable bits. We figure out ways to iron out its contradictions - what a mammoth task that is! We even publish translations of it that explain everything as they go along, fill in all the gaps in the logic. Worst of all, we take our agenda to it. All we want to know is, “Is it true?” or “Does it work?” To get stuck there is to miss out on the myriad of questions the Bible wants to ask of us.

Maybe with enough skill you could domesticate the two passages we read today. But what if, just this once, we don’t?

“Oh God, where are you? You have abandoned us.” The cry from Isaiah is that God is absent. God isn’t there. Now, don’t domesticate it. Don’t say, “Of course God is there, they just can’t feel it. Of course God is there, they’re just looking in the wrong place.” Maybe that’s true, but it isn’t what the text says. The text says that God was angry and now God is gone.

I was about nine the night my mother abandoned us. I can understand it now — four young children, my dad working long hours, she must have been at the end of her tether. We were all at the dinner table, dad and mom, me and my three brothers. And my brothers and I were messing around, like children do, fussing about things and complaining about the food. My mother had told us half a dozen times to calm down and eat, and we’d paid no attention to her. Suddenly she got up from the table and walked out of the room. She got her coat and we heard the front door open and close, and she was gone. We were absolutely stunned. My father told us to behave ourselves, and then he went out to find her, and we sat in silence and waited. It probably wasn’t ten minutes before he had brought her home, but those were some of the longest ten minutes of my life.

For Israel, it had been a generation. Jerusalem had been sacked. The soldiers had come and God had not protected them. God had been nowhere to be found. They had been taken into captivity, a massive number of them. So not all of them had watched as the temple was burnt to the ground. Some of them had just heard about it.

How well I can relate to what they felt! “You were angry with us, but we went on sinning; in spite of your great anger we have continued to do wrong since ancient times, all of us; even our best actions are filthy through and through.” Do you hear the agony?

When my mother came back she gathered us up into her arms and hugged us and apologised to us and promised it wouldn’t happen again, and it didn’t. But for ten minutes we had known such guilt as marks you for the rest of your life. It was our fault. Of course it was. It was obvious. What if that had gone on for 30 years?

The reading we have heard today gives us no happy ending. It leaves us bereft, empty, longing. “You are our father, Lord. You created us. Please don’t be so angry with us. Please find it in your heart to have pity. Please.”

Let’s be honest. You and I wouldn’t last 30 days, let alone 30 years. But the end of the month, if our worship was empty and our prayers weren’t being answered, we’d throw in the towel. Clearly there isn’t any God. Clearly the whole thing was only wishful thinking, a fantasy. God doesn’t rescue people. There isn’t any God. It is so easy to leave the church.

Thirty years they kept pounding on the doors of heaven. Thirty years. Don’t domesticate this book.

If the Old Testament today pushes us to abandonment and guilt, the New Testament adds awkwardness and embarrassment. The Son of Man is going to come back on the clouds. What in the world is that supposed to mean? The sun and the moon will grow dark and the stars will fall. I don’t think so. Fall where? There’s no up or down in space. The powers of space will be derailed. Which powers might those be? And all of this will happen before some of you — A.D. 30 - have died.

In my encounters with other ministers this week, I’ve been kind of feeling them out for answers to this. “What about the Second Coming then?” “It didn’t happen,” said the Anglican vicar on Thursday night. “It’s not going to happen,” said my URC friend. Dismissive.

But the early church lived by this promise. As a prophecy it falls flat on its face. It didn’t happen, and it won’t happen, not in the way it’s described here. But as a promise, it wants to grab hold of you and change the way you see things. The way you see everything! Do you despair of what you read in the newspapers - crime and injustice, the stock market in terminal decline and the nations preparing for war, bombs in hotels and men running wild with machetes to protest a beauty contest? Why are you surprised? History is in anguish, waiting to give birth to a new thing. Do you worry for the future of the church? Is the building a headache? Do feel sometimes that you work harder and harder for fewer and fewer results? Why are you surprised? It was never meant to last forever. God is going to do something new. Do you look at people around you and wonder how it is that the God who means everything to you seemingly is a matter of total indifference to them? It’s time. Time for God to do something new.

And time for me to stop talking. What do we do with these uncomfortable texts?

I want to suggest that we hold onto them exactly as they are, and let them lead us into Advent. Isaiah with its courage, that uncompromising look into the abyss. God is not there. God has abandoned his people. And the guilt they feel as they assume it must be their fault - who else’s fault could it be? And their persistence in the middle of it, their extraordinary faith. Stay with those feelings. Stay with the darkness. Don’t run away from it. Don’t plaster it over with something artificial, just for the sake of escaping the pain. This is Advent - acknowledging the depth of the darkness and reaching, reaching for God. Longing, aching, yearning, and in the middle of all that somewhere, hoping, hoping. This is Advent. The deepest feelings inside us, they all belong here, as together we pray for God to break through the sky and enter our world, our lives.

And Mark with its audacious, its crazy promise. Surely by the time Mark wrote the words down a lot of people who knew Jesus had already died. But he wrote them down anyway. He wrote them down so that we could hear the promise that had been the powerhouse of their discipleship in the early days. And so that, just possibly, that promise could fuel hope for us too.

The wolves sat along the far wall of the living room for the couple of hours I stayed there. Alert, guarded, they simply watched. And their wildness was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. No one would ever domesticate them. And the world was better for that.

The scriptures invite us to living, committed grappling. No one will ever succeed in taming them, though I’m sure many people will continue to try. If you domesticate them, if you correct those Israelites who thought God was absent from them, and if you remove the promise from Mark because it didn’t happen, you’ve just taken away the power. Do you see? Look into those eyes. See the bright intelligence from a world different from your own. Enter into that world. And enter into Advent.

Tagged as: christian theology, exegesis, protestant, revd roberta rominger, revised common lectionary, sermon, the united reformed church