O come, O come, Emmanuel. Amen.
Advent is arguably the most important liturgical season we have and also the easiest to miss. The most important because it comes first. The liturgical year starts not in January, but on the first Sunday of the Advent. The Church’s calendar could have been deemed to start with Easter or Pentecost, both of those would have been fine places to begin our calendar. But in her wisdom, the Church has realized that Advent is the proper place to start because it names the reality in which we Christians find ourselves – preparing to celebrate the radical claim that the Creator of the universe took on human flesh and lived among us while also waiting for the culmination of his reign.
There is a tension in Advent, often described as the “already, but not yet.” Already, Christ has come, but not yet is the fullness of God’s justice and peace known on earth as it is in heaven. And this is part of the reason why Advent is overlooked so easily. What do we do about the Second Coming? In today’s passage from Mark, and it’s also evident in Paul’s writings, it’s clearly expected that Jesus would return during the 1st century. But yet, here we are, 2,000 years later, still waiting. Did the early disciples misinterpret Jesus’ words? Was his coming again his Resurrection and we’ve been waiting for an event that already happened? Has God changed his mind about coming again? Was the coming again the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost? Or is the Second Coming still an event that is yet to come in time?
Obviously, I haven’t a clue, and anyone who does is lying. Jesus himself said, “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” So we really don’t know what to do with the Second Coming, so Advent becomes a season that is hard to get our heads around. The other reason why Advent gets passed over is because of Christmas. Not what we celebrate in the Church on December 25, but the secular version of the holiday that is about Santa, shopping, and parties.
For over a month, Christmas takes over radio stations, decorations adorn our businesses, city streets, and homes, and our calendars are filled with baking, shopping, wrapping, and partying. Now, please don’t get me wrong, I enjoy celebrating secular Christmas, but it isn’t Christian. There is nothing Christian about consumerism or flying reindeer, but that doesn’t mean the Church ought to condemn those things. We just need to be careful and recognize that there are actually two holidays that come in December – one is Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation of God and the other is Christmas, the secular holiday. But it’s so easy to blur the two separate holidays into one. This is what often happens and is thus why Advent is forgotten – it’s been squeezed out by secular Christmas.
And this creeping of Christmas into Advent happens not only in society, but in the Church. You can find many churches that claim that the themes of Advent are hope, joy, peace, and love. Those are fine theological themes which really are appropriate in any liturgical season, but they have little to do with Advent as it is understood Biblically or historically. For centuries, the themes of Advent have been death, judgment, heaven, and hell. These four topics are often called the “Four Last Things,” as they are the things that come at the end.
The theological word for these final things is eschatology, and it’s not often that the Church speaks about eschatology in a healthy or helpful way. Sure, you can find churches that preach about judgment and hell, but only from a human perspective. It’s rare for the Church to lift up these weighty topics, especially so because in this season of secular Christmas, a focus on death, judgment, heaven, and hell seems harsh. And I’ll admit, it does seem odd to begin the Church year by focusing on the first of these Four Last Things – death.
Death seems so final, and it is; but sometimes it makes sense to start at the end of things in order to properly understand the beginning and middle. This is what eschatology is all about, telling us about the final things so that we can live faithfully in the meantime. And eschatology is what Jesus is speaking of in Mark. By telling the disciples about the end of things, Jesus is actually helping them to live in the present. This is why Jesus speaks about reading the signs of the fig tree. When we know the end of the story, we can see the signs of its approach in our own time.
The other word that you’ll often hear when it comes to Advent and this passage in Mark is “apocalypse,” which doesn’t mean “the end of the world,” but rather “uncovering.” An apocalypse is a peek behind the curtain, when we see the deepest truths of reality. Apocalyptic literature, which Mark 13 is, reveals something. An important question to ask ourselves is why are the stories that we find in the Bible there? What does the inclusion of an apocalyptic speech by Jesus say about his followers and their faith?
The thing about Mark 13 is that it borrows heavily from Daniel 7, and will be used later in different contexts by Christians. Most scholars agree that Mark was written around the year 70, which is the year that Rome sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. It was an eschatological event in that it was the end of the known world. The Temple was the center of cultural, economic, and religious life. The Temple was the place where God’s presence rested, and so its destruction raised some major questions. It was a catastrophe of divine presence and continuity with the past. It was the death not only of many citizens of Jerusalem, but it was the death of the era of the Temple.
And so Jesus reaches back into his religious tradition to the prophet Daniel and uses imagery that the faithful had used before in times of crisis. And in later centuries, when Christians were persecuted and paraded into coliseums to be devoured by wild beasts, they recalled this imagery in the stories they told each other. These apocalyptic visions of the stars falling from heaven, the sun and moon being darkened, and the Holy One coming in clouds descending signify that a world is ending, that a death is occurring. And that, in and of itself, is a tragic event. But because we have an eschatological vision, knowledge of the end of things, we know that death is not the final end, it not a final tragedy. And so Jesus says “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”
People in the year 70, recalling Jesus’ words about heaven and earth passing away, would have found great comfort in knowing that though the Temple has fallen, though the world as they knew it has ended, that the words of God shall not pass away. The words of God’s abiding love and mercy do not come to a conclusion in the same way that our nations, institutions, and lives do. Death, as bitter as it is, is not final.
The hymn “All Creatures of our God and King,” is attributed to St. Francis, and one of the verses of that great hymn is “And even you, most gentle death, waiting to hush our final breath, O praise him, Alleluia! You lead back home the child of God, for Christ our Lord that way has trod.” It is only with an eschatological vision that Francis is able to call death “gentle.” It is only because he knows that death leads us back to God because Christ has gone on ahead of us that Francis can proclaim “Alleluia” in the face of death. In our Burial Office, we proclaim this when we say “Even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.”
Elsewhere in the Burial office, we hear the words “In the midst of life, we are in death.” And it’s true. Death surrounds us. Bad things happen. Things fade away. People whom we love die. Often before a funeral, I have the cremated ashes of someone sitting on my desk as I do the work of ministry. It’s a metaphor for the reality of death. But we try our hardest to cover over this. Think about how we speak of death – he expired, as if he were a carton of milk; or she’s gone to a better place, as if being with family and friends is a bad place to be; or he’s no longer with us, as if he’s just stepped out of the room for a moment; or she’s passed away, suggesting that person only resides in the past. It’s what I treasure about our Prayer Book – you turn to the pages for a funeral and the title hits you in the face “Burial of the Dead.” No celebrations of life, but a burial of the dead. It’s stark, yes; but it’s also honest.
As much as it is a death-denying culture, ours is also a death-wielding culture. The combative nature of our political life, our military-industrial complex which posits a zero-sum game, the dizzying changes in society, our predatory economic practices, the fact that many live without adequate access to healthcare, food, shelter, or clean water, the countless anxieties and insecurities that lead to stress, depression, or even suicide, the practice of euthanasia as trying to die on our own terms, these are all signs, apocalypses, that, indeed, in the midst of life we are surrounded by death. We do our best to cover over death by seeking all the pleasure we can under the guise of “living life to the fullest.” We try to make death seem less powerful by using euphemisms for it.
Advent though brings us face to face with the last things, with the truth that things end, with death. The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay delivered one of the most powerful statements on death that I’ve ever heard – "I will die, but that is all I will do for death." This is what an eschatological outlook does for us as people of faith. We will all die, that much is certain and unavoidable. However, we do not need to be ruled by death, we do not need to run from it, we do not need to see death as the end of God’s love for us.
I know you all have enough to do, but add some things to your list, even if you don’t get to them until January. Think about your own death, and talk to your loved ones about it. Talk to them about what sort of medical interventions that you would want. Make sure your wills and powers of attorney are in order, and consider joining the 1753 Society by remembering St. Luke’s in your will. Don’t leave unsaid the things that should be said. Seek reconciliation with estranged family members and friends, not on your deathbed, but today. I can’t tell you how much stress and anxiety goes into planning a funeral with a grieving family in the short span of a few days, so talk with me about leaving the gift for your family of a preplanned burial liturgy. And we also ought to care for those who are dying and grieving now. Check in with that friend who lost a loved one recently. Go and visit that person who is in the hospital or at hospice.
Advent is about both joyful expectation and sober recollection. So in this season, we shift our focus to the Last Things. By remembering our future, we can interpret the present through the lens of faith. Death is certain and we live with death all around us. But through Jesus’ apocalyptic and eschatological vision, we are reminded that though all things come to an end, what will remain is the glory, majesty, and love of God promised to us in the age to come. And so we can hope and trust that life lies on the other side of death. While the Prayer Book is correct in noting that in the midst of life we are in death, the hope of Advent eschatology reminds that the inverse is also true – in the midst of death, we are in life. Thanks be to God.
