“Darkened Light of Love”
“Darkened Light of Love”
Isaiah 64:1-9 1 Corinthians 1:3-9 Mark 13:24-37
Year B, First Sunday of Advent
December 3, 2023
Pastor Andy Kennaly, Sandpoint, Idaho
[SMACK the Bible with some intensity] [say loudly] Keep awake! [SMACK the Bible with more intensity] [yell louder] Keep awake! [SMACK THE BIBLE HARD] [Quieter] Need I say, keep awake, again? [pause]
What I just did probably got your attention. Welcome to Mark, the controlling Gospel of Lectionary Year B, which begins the First Sunday of Advent, today. What I just did involved repetition, three times I smacked the Bible with my fist. In a linear way, the first time was experienced, the second time came after, and the third time was [most likely] the conclusion. But there was more than linear time at work. There was also intensity. That intensity was felt as an energy, a shock, perhaps a confusion or a disgust. Maybe we didn’t like it, or were glad when it was over.
This intensity was also shared through the spoken word as I repeated the final two words of the reading, “Keep awake.” These summarize the story about the man who leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with their work. Keep awake plays with time as chronology, as the “master of the house” may come home at any moment, and it lists out times of day and night. But this story is set up by intensity that carries through, as we hear the words, “Beware, keep alert.” Time as intensity / more than quantity / as a quality / something that may be quantifiable, counted, measured / but more likely lived, experienced, felt as a sense, intuited. Time is a pressure that is in relationship with us. Past, future, present, these are all connected, influencing one another and we participate in this.
We’re much comfortable with counting, and viewing time in linear ways, like the count of years. So, here we are on December 3, 2023, reading the Gospel According to Mark. Isn’t this nice? We’ve got it dialed in. We do this, then this, then that, then the other, one thing after another, and reading Mark has an appropriate place, and is a good thing to do. But for that scenario to work, we make many assumptions. Even in saying, The Gospel According to Mark, this title is suspicious and time’s intensity creeps in to shock us into alertness that makes no assumptions.
Mark who? Jesus died around the year 33. Someone named Mark wrote about the life and death of Jesus. This was put into words most likely around the decade of 65 to 75, about 40 years after Jesus died. Was Mark a disciple? An immediate follower who knew Jesus personally? Not even Paul did that, and Mark may have been a friend of a friend, a companion of Paul. Others think he was a follower of Peter, in Rome. Did Mark write this after the Emperor Nero killed Peter in Rome, along with a vast persecution of Christians? Or was it worded out in the countryside of Galilee, or even in Syria, or Egypt? Those ten years, 65-75 were filled with persecution and the Jewish-Roman war which lasted eight years and ended with the total destruction of Jerusalem, including the Temple.
This writing is the earliest of the Gospels, even though it gets listed after Matthew. The koine Greek is very simplified, keeping it accessible to many, but, in aural form, because most people couldn’t read. These words were meant for hearing, rather than reading. Instead of information processed by the mind as concepts, the drama and story of biography takes shape aconceptually, through images and impressions that are felt as intensity. “Keep awake!” has some weight behind it!
I suppose the other words, those words that convey days after suffering, the darkening of sun, the moon obscured, light not shared as stars fall from heaven, and powers shaken; these also have intensity because the images are loaded. To “see ‘the Son of Man coming in the clouds’ with great power and glory” as angels are sent out to gather “the elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven;” these are images that stick.
But, like most things, as these words are shared they are also interpreted, and in the life of those hearing them, they also make big assumptions. Are we talking about Rome burning Jerusalem, so much destruction that the sun is covered and the moon is not seen? Or are we talking about themes of mythology, where the sun represents life, a birth, and the moon involves death? The sun will be darkened because life as we know it will be no longer, yet death is defeated by Christ’s power and glory, we have a Resurrection hope.
As our ears hear these words and feel the images, most likely we filter them through rationalism, translate them on the fly into mental concepts, ignore the felt sense or feeling wisdom underneath them, as assume it all has to do with people, human people. But what if these words are prophetic in a future sense about global warming and the suffering of the Earth we are just beginning to wake up to? We’ve seen days where the sun is darkened. We’ve had summers where the gardens don’t grow because the smoke is too thick. We have seen nights where the moon glow does not cast shadows in the forest because by the time that light reaches the ground it has been weakened through feedback loops of degradation that are only getting stronger year after year.
Here we are on a cloudy weekend that has followed a very sunny week. El Nino is keeping us warmer and dryer than the average year, and yet that is our experience in the Pacific Northwest. If we lived in central Africa, last year’s drought that caused famine is now this year’s deluge with destructive floods. Same El Nino, different part of the planet. They are wet, we are unseasonable dry. This is noticeable if you’re paying attention. This fall, I hiked up the Mickinnick Trail, where I estimate about 40 percent of the forest is now dead. Some 60 percent of the pines and noble firs are dead. These corpses of trees are beginning to topple, and windblown trunks litter the brown grass. Those percentages are my numbers, my unofficial surveying as I notice a huge difference between hiking 12 years ago and hiking today. Not only that, but there’s a sadness, because I remember the green woods, and now the suffering seems so unstoppable.
Then again, who cares? Most of us don’t notice that the woods around us are suffering and dying from extended drought and beetle kill. We’d rather enjoy sunny days and no snow shoveling, less ice to slip on seems good. We can rationalize the changes, believe whatever theory we want to create, keep words like, “global warming” and “climate change” in quotes so they are mere ideologies of others, rather than realities affecting all. This type of denial is preferred rather than facing the depth of despair and grief that suffering involves.
But like those first listeners in the middle of the second century, Mark reminds us that in order to get to the glory, there is always an “after that suffering” involved. Life and death are constantly tripping over each other, and as they fall, they fall forward, and the future catches them, rearranges them, and pushes them back for us to sort out. This is very active. Even waiting is active, thus Advent as we wait for the birth of Jesus, wait for the revealing of Christ among us, wait, wait, wait, but this is not idle waiting; this is active, involved, experiential, faith-filled trust that leans into that future as we carry the weight of all that is past with an intensity of intention in the present. Like Isaiah says, “Yet, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.”
Did you notice the assumption? Did you notice that as those words are read, “we are all the work of your hand,” that most of us assume this is talking exclusively about us, about people? Human people? Yet maybe this is too small, narrow, and perhaps we’re needing a reminder that “all the work of your hand” in reference to God’s creation includes the non-human world. Yet even that phrase, non-human world, is a concept based on separation, which is a deficiency of thinking. To get past this, healed from it, we must cultivate the efficiency of soul-work, of re-lationships, of re-lashing together our Earth-bound, heaven-connectedness as creatures that are nothing less than expressions of Christ revealed. When those expressions suffer, the body is ill. When the tree people suffer, we suffer; when the water suffers, we suffer; when the ocean creatures suffer, we suffer. And when all these people thrive, are respected and honored, love is proclaimed, love is given shape, life’s intensity flows.
This morning’s verses come across as rather apocalyptic, like the end of the world, and they certainly involve some sort of ending. But there’s also beginning. The fig tree puts forth its shoots, the tender branches emerge, and leaves come out in the spring, for summer is near. So, there’s an image, not only of an ending, but a new beginning, and in either case, the point is nearness, at the very gates. This is not only temporal, as in one object in relation to another by a short distance, but qualitatively relational, a nearness, a knowing, an inter-being, like love, and an aconceptual, spiritual perception at work.
As we gather here on December 3, 2023, the First Sunday of Advent, may the words written down in whatever context it was that shaped them, for us to hear them through whatever filters we project, may God’s Holy Spirit be active in hearing, interpreting, and living out as we embody all that is past, and recognize the future emerging among us, as we seek to “Keep awake!” Keep awake, for the glory of God, now, even as in forever’s fullness. Amen.