November 29, 2020
Hope Lutheran Church
Mary Erickson
Mark 13:27-37
Not Knowing When
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
This Sunday is the beginning of a new Church Year. Advent launches the new year with its deep blue and four candles. Each week we progressively light more candles. The light of the wreath intensifies as we wait for the Light of the world.
Advent is characterized by waiting and anticipation. John the Baptist will arrive on the scene next week in all his camel’s hair intensity. And on the final Sunday we’ll accompany Mary as she opens herself to the divine plan for the world’s salvation.
But the first Sunday of this brief season always begins with the end – the VERY end. This first Sunday of Advent doesn’t focus on Christ’s coming two thousand years ago. We center instead on Christ’s return at the end of time.
When will the end come? During this very unusual year, sometimes it has felt like the world might be coming to an end!
• The first-generation church believed that Christ’s return was just around the corner, something that would occur in their lifetimes.
• In the 16th Century, Martin Luther also believed that the end of the world was near.
• When Y2K rolled around, there was speculation that it might spell the end of the world.
• And in 2012, the Great Cycle of the Mayan Calendar came to a conclusion. People waited to see if the world would end, but it did not. Instead, a new great cycle began its 5000-year course.
We hear today a passage where Jesus discusses the end of time. He says that we’re able to read the signs of our turning seasons. But when it comes to the return of the Son of Man, “about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” His advice: “Keep alert!”
Waiting and watching. Since these Covid Days have befallen us, we’ve been spending more time waiting. We wait politely at the grocery store while the person in front of us in the aisle lingers over the section we also want to investigate. We wait in takeout lines at restaurants. I’m staggered by the aerial pictures of people in large metropolitan areas like Houston waiting in lines at food pantries eight cars wide and a half mile long. We wait for the results of a COVID-19 test, for a 14-day period of self isolation to end. And we all wait and yearn for the advent of a vaccine to deliver us from this trial.
Waiting on COVID-19 and waiting for a vaccine we understand. But waiting for the end of the world seems very distant. We’ve become numbed to this future reality that loomed so large before the eyes of the first-generation Church.
Christians have been waiting for nearly 2000 years for Christ’s return. The long wait has lulled us into thinking that our world will survive forever. And yet, and yet, our earth is showing signs of strain from too many years of neglect. Global warming looms over our head like the Sword of Damocles. Do we still have time to right the ship? Can we restore balance to our environment? We feel the catastrophic dread of global warming more than we look to Christ’s return.
We’re not waiting for Christ. We’ve become lulled by having waited for so very long. Nevertheless, Christ calls us to keep alert.
There’s a difference in how we wait. Waiting can be active or passive. Christian writer Henri Nouwen addresses this:
“Most of us consider waiting as something very passive, a hopeless state determined by events totally out of our hands. The bus is late? We cannot do anything about it, so we have to sit there and just wait. It is not difficult to understand the irritation people feel when somebody says, “Just wait.” Words like that push us into passivity.
“But there is none of this passivity in Scripture. Those who are waiting are waiting very actively. They know that what they are waiting for is growing from the ground on which they are standing. Right here is a secret for us about waiting. If we wait in the conviction that a seed has been planted and that something has already begun, it changes the way we wait. Active waiting implies being fully present to the moment with the conviction that something is happening where we are and that we want to be present to it. A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, believing that this moment is the moment.”
Active waiting. Something already has been set in motion. The seed has been planted. Now we wait expectantly. Each day we return to the garden. We look for signs of the new life emerging.
Many years ago I read a book about the polar expedition of Sir Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton and his crew left port for Antarctica in late 1914. Once they reached the shores of the southernmost continent, they planned to travel overland to the South Pole.
However, as they travelled south, their ship, the Endurance, became hopelessly mired in pack ice. They were forced eventually to abandon the ship. They lowered their small life boats and rigged them on sleds. Packed with as many supplies as they could bear, the crew commenced hauling the heavy sleds over the rugged pack ice as if they were a team of sled dogs.
Eventually they reached the shores of Elephant Island, named for the elephant seals that lived there. The crew set up a camp and maintained their regimen of strict ship discipline.
They knew their only chance of survival was to make one of the small lifeboats seaworthy and send a small crew for help. The nearest help was over 800 miles away at the whaling station on South Georgia Island. They rigged the ship and Shackleton and five other crewmates set sail for help.
Meanwhile, the ship’s crew on Elephant Island set in to wait. Would the small ship successfully make land? They waited without knowing. Shackleton and his crew did make land on South Georgia Island.
Shackleton immediately set about to muster a rescue team. Two times he set sail, only to be forced to turn back due to weather conditions. Finally, on his third attempt, Shackleton would prevail on reaching his marooned shipmates.
Meanwhile, the crew on Elephant Island waited. And it wasn’t passive waiting. They waited actively. Every morning the officer in charge told the men to pack up and prepare their belongings. Each morning he beckoned, “The Boss may come today!” Their spirits flagged, but each day they looked to the horizon. And finally, on day 128, their waiting came to an end. They spied their rescue ship on the horizon.
But they were ready. They knew the conditions to leave the island may open up for just a brief window. They were at the ready. Within an hour, every man had left the island. They were ready, ready for the day of promise, the day of rescue.
This is the kind of expectant waiting Christ calls us to practice! We wait expectantly. We wait with the full certainty that the reign of Christ is opening up in our midst. Whether at the end of time or today, the shoot from the stump of Jesse is about to emerge among us.
And so we wait. We wait and look for signs of his presence. We prepare ourselves to respond in kind. For every time Christ comes, there is a new beginning. We wait for Christ to come. We wait for the new beginning.
Come, O come, Emmanuel!
