Isaiah 64:1-9 & Mark 13:24-37
Advent 1B, 2020
In the past few years I have become enamored with dystopian interpretations of the world—that is a story that is told within an alternate reality often cast well into the future of the time of writing. Some later time in which things are wildly different than they are now—a time that presents the new reality as completely normal. So for instance, think about the world created by the writer George Orwell in his classic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Big Brother the formless leader, who may or may not actually exist, looks over all the inhabitants of London seeking to impart on the minds of every citizen the veracity of the three foundational slogans, "WAR IS PEACE", "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY", "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” Or consider the work of the English writer, Aldous Huxley, whose book Brave New World, created a society in New London in which hedonistic pursuits represented the chief end of humankind and all free-thinking was kept in check by the daily dispersal of what Huxley called soma, a drug that put all the denizens of the society in a constant state of blissful ignorance. And while I love both of those works of literature, the most profound dystopian world that I have encountered in the one created in the movie, The Matrix. Released in 1999 and heralding a new era of computer generated imagery—one in which bullets could freeze in midair and a young Keanu Reeves could hover in the air or run on the ceiling, The Matrix is a futuristic retelling of the story of Jesus, in which the protagonist, a computer hacker named Neo, played by the aforementioned, Reeves, is tapped by a group of revolutionaries living outside the normal, everyday world to assist them in freeing the inhabitants of that world and offering them an existence that was more real, more beautiful, liberated from the confines of what they call The Matrix. And in what is the most important scene in the movie, the character of Morpheus, the person in the story who represents John the Baptist, played brilliantly by Lawrence Fishburn, offers Neo a choice in the form of two pills, a red pill and a blue pill, and he tells Neo,“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
That is, take the red pill, you will be baptized, and I will show you the Realm of God erupting all around you and you will see the world as it actually is and not through the lens of the old order—the order in which everything is not real, perishable, controlled by sin and fallenness, and whose inhabitants are asleep and don’t ever realize it. Take the red pill and your life will never, ever be the same. Since that moment, there has never been a sermon, a chapter, an essay that I have written that doesn’t contain a piece of that movie in it because it is for me, the best rendering of the Christian message for a world that needs to be invited to awaken to the presence of God all around them, that needs to know that there is something more real than simply the biological time with which we are gifted, that there is a truer home than the one found in a broken and fallen world and we are all invited to take the red pill and see just how far the spirit of God goes. And it is a message that needs to be heard now more than ever.
Because, as we all are well aware, there is something surreal, maybe even a little dystopian about the world in which we find ourselves as this year draws to a close. A year that closes with a season of holidays largely absent of parties and frivolity, the celebration of a national Day of Thanks in which many if not most couldn’t or didn’t see their larger families, an Advent that we know will be largely bereft of the old and comforting Christmas carols sung together in the sanctuary. A year where we will find out if it is even possible to tell of the birth of the savior without also singing of the Little Town of Bethlehem, the First Nowell, the Angels we have heard on high, the silence of the night into which our messiah slipped into creation. For though surely, by now, the words of the second chapter of the gospel of Luke have been woven into the fabric of our collective souls and when we gather on the eve of the arrival of the baby in a manger, they will enliven us again, even as they reassure us like a correspondence from an old friend that comes just when we need to hear it, we also know that the soundtrack to which those words are so often set will be at least somewhat lacking and maybe, too, some of the power of those words, as well. And yet, really, that is just a small sliver of the queerness of the world into which we find ourselves this moment. A world that feels profoundly unsafe and growing increasing more so with each new day, each new news report, each new passing of someone we love. A world that is so weary from the weight of the last almost year and the feeling that we have all just been pushed a little further than we believe we can possibly go. We miss the embrace of one another in love. We miss the gatherings with our friends just to be in the presence of one another. We long for days of normalcy when the very act of breathing didn’t seem so potentially harmful to ourselves, our families, our communities. When we could stop in at the grocery store simply because you want to make this recipe for dinner tonight and you are missing that one key ingredient. When we don’t have to tell our children for the millionth time, “no, I’m sorry, we can’t do that until after the virus is gone.” At the same time, when unity in community is essential, more necessary than ever, we are just finishing with a political season in which the very fabric of our more perfect union has been torn asunder as we were told time and again to hate one another in the quest for power. The healing that will be required to resew those tears in the cloth of the nation will take time, will take grace, will take a willingness to open our fists and reach for the hand of the other in our midst. And this is where we find ourselves. In the last year, we have seen our corporeal bodies under assault, our mental capacities stretched beyond their limits, our religious gatherings largely denuded of the comfort of familiar music and words of praise sung to our creator, of shared touch, of communal gatherings, while the soul of our country has been tried and tested and now needs more than anything the gift of time to find solace in the bounds of our national spirit once more. And just like that, before you know it, in the blink of an eye, we are the people who dwelt in darkness, we are the people who search for a great light, we are the people who have been starved of hope, of peace, of joy, of love. We are the people to who need to see the in-breaking of God into the world once again, the redirection and remolding of our shared story, the birth once again of the savior into creation, proof of God’s amazing love for the whole of the world, a love so great, we are told that we are given the gift of the person of God, cloaked in the flesh of humankind, sent to show us the power of God over death, sent not to judge the world of its fallenness but to save the world from its sin, from itself. That is what we long for, what we yearn for, what we wait for, staring into the darkness and yet believing that there will come a light once again.
In both our scriptures for this morning, we are asked to take the perspective of a people who have been devastated by the movements of history and must have felt incredibly forsaken by the God whom they were told was in a covenantal relationship with them. I once taught a history of the scriptures class where I said that no matter what part of the Bible you are reading, no matter what the historical epoch that the stories, the words have arisen from, no matter whether it is the unified kingdom or the kingdoms of Israel and Judea, whether in Egypt or the Promised Land, the age of judges, the age of Kings, the age of Empire, it was never, ever easy to be Jewish. Really, the trajectory starts from with beginning with a story of fallenness in which its first parents were cast our of the paradisiacal life they knew in the Garden of Eden, before swiftly moving to God wiping out the entirety of the human race save a singular family, before the transition to Egypt and slavery under the Pharaoh, until they finally escape and enter the Promised Land, a land that took years and years of brutal war and death to finally fully overtake, only to discover that the land they now occupied would be forever cursed by geography. A sliver of land really no bigger than a postage stamp that was bracketed by the Sinai peninsula to the south, the mountains of Syria and Lebanon to the north, the largest Empire the earth had ever known just to the east, and an outsized coastline on the busiest trading corridor in the Western World. And they were constantly under attack. The passage that we have from Isaiah comes at the end of, depending on when and how you date it, at least two and possibly three separate periods of exile in which the empire to the east took the best and brightest from Israel back to their home countries . First the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, and then the Persians. And coming back from that Isaiah finds himself lamenting over the anger of God at the people of Israel. Feeling like in God’s anger they were abandoned to the wishes and whims of other nation-states whose greed and avarice swallowed the tiny nation up again and again and calling on God to divinely right this wrong. In a similar manner, our passage from Mark comes at a time in which the Roman Empire has overtaken the tiny nation, a time in which the Temple and much of the holy city of Jerusalem has been sacked with no stone left on stone, a time of violent revolution and brutal reprisal until just existing in the Hebrew nation seemed an act of resistance against worldly powers and principalities. And its only in knowing this history that the writings of the prophet leap off the page, “O that you, O God, would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence--as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil--to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence! And its only in knowing this that the words of the messiah become all the more potent, all the more powerful, “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.” In both cases, when all hope seems lost, when the darkness is all-encompassing, when the wails and lamentations become deafening, it is then that God breaks into creation, that the power of God, the might of God, the glory of God shakes the heavens and all the nations know the God is still God and that it is God who is in control. And we place our faith, our trust, our lives in the hands of God. When the physical realm feels profoundly uncertain and unsafe, we put our hope in the God of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rachel and Leah, in the God that first birthed creation, that first birthed us, that first birthed the savior, who in the midst of despair, of violence begetting violence, of sorrow, of hatred, came in the form of angels offering glad tidings of great joy for Immanuel, literally God with us, had been born in a town where The hopes and fears of all the years were met in God that night, and while mortals slept and angels kept their watch of wondering love.
In thinking about Advent, this period of waiting in which we find ourselves, I have thought about the theme of coming home for Christmas. And I thought about that both because of the church’s desire to be a spiritual home for folks in our community, where you can come and be welcomed just as you are, and where we will walk with you regardless of what your life’s story has been. But, I also thought about it because for a great many of us, we won’t be going home for Christmas. That our earthly homes, the lands of our youth, our extended families simply won’t be available to us this season. And that is sad. It is hard. And if we let it, it will rob us blind of the spirit of the holiday season until it becomes just another day on the calendar in a year that feels as though it will never end. But look at the last words of Jesus to us this morning. After darkness swallows up everything, after the heavens roar with might, after everything seems lost, then will come the son of humanity, then will come angels and four winds, then will come life and life everlasting and we will see, maybe for the first time, that our home is not of this world, that brokenness and suffering, that struggle and death never, ever get the final word because our true home, the one that we are told that Christ is preparing for each one of us, the one where death has no sting, where God will wipe every tear from our eye, where God will be our God and we the people of God, to that home Christ will return and show us. And while we know neither the day nor the hour of our final homecoming, we are all invited to see Christ born into our midst again and again and again and to celebrate that moment in a real and special way but only if we stay awake, stay aware, and keep peering into the darkness believing that from darkness shall emerge a blinding light, a light that will show us all the way to get back to source of all life, that all of God’s children might finally come home.
Sisters and brothers, we are on a journey together, for some it is a journey that we have taken many, many times and we might be tempted to think that this year will be just like all the rest and yet, this year, this moment brings with it a set of challenges, a set of difficulties not experienced in anyone’s lifetime and it will require that we walk this journey unified, that we help one another to keep awake and alert for Christ to be born into this moment and this one and this one, that we carry one another when we have lost the strength to traverse the path ourselves, and that we all meet up here once again and mark that moment that the savior of the world silently slipped into creation, in a nothing town, in a sliver of a region on the edge of an Empire, when no one thought God could still break into the course of history, it was only then that a baby was born, a son was given, and in his life, death, and new life we see that our true home has little to do with our temporal biological existence and everything to do with the forever of the soul, and because of that we can place all our trust, all our faith, all our hopes and our dreams and our visions and our yearnings in the hands of a loving God who calls all the children to finally come home. So friends, let us take our place alongside the multitudes of the heavenly hosts who sang to the shepherds that night long ago, Glory be to God in the highest and on earth, peace, amongst all God’s children. Alleluia, amen.