Advent 1, Year B | Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18; I Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
December 3, 2023
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
Due to technical difficulties, no audio or video is available this week.
For us as Americans, Advent is probably the most frustrating season on the Church Calendar. While everyday life is hurtling us toward “the Most Wonderful Day of the Year,” our longstanding religious traditions keep on trying to hold all that festivity at bay, disrupting the mood with themes of judgment and doom, and doing everything they can to force us to wait. We hear Christmas carols on the radio (since the beginning of November, in some cases), but heaven forbid we sing them in the sanctuary. We string our lights and set up our trees and garland our homes, but God alone have mercy on the one who dares dress the church before Christmas Eve. We attend party after party and plan sumptuous courses for our own coming feasts while, in our hearts, we feel a pang of guilt, suspecting that God would probably prefer us to spend our time fasting.
When it comes down to it, Advent and American culture just don’t sit well together. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. It certainly offers us the experience—at least for a few weeks—of the “already/not yet” aspect of Christianity discussed so popularly in the wider church today.
We spent the last couple years looking at our misunderstanding of Advent, how we’ve been taught to presume we’re getting ready for a new baby when we actually need to be straightening up the entire Earthly Realm for the arrival of our king. This Church Season should find us functioning less like a young couple struggling to paint the walls and put together a crib somewhere in what was formerly a spare room and more like the staff of Downton Abbey preparing for a visit from the Queen. As an inverse of Lent’s more internal, individual focus, Advent is a time of collective, external preparation, the opportunity for all of us to come together and rebuild the Camino Real, the Way of the Lord, waiting not only on the coming king but for all who would precede him or follow in his train.
However, even if we are able to adjust to that concept, I wonder how many of us would recognize the one it is we’re waiting for.
We listened this morning as Jesus described “‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory.”[1] We sighed with Isaiah, longing for someone to “tear open the heavens and come down.”[2] As a congregation we cried for the God of hosts to “restore us,” to “let your face shine, that we may be saved,”[3] as we “wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.”[4]
But I really have to wonder if we realize what all that genuinely means or if we maybe aren’t waiting for the wrong thing.
From what the Bible shows us, God’s actual presence tends intrusive, to say the least. God’s arrival would, at a minimum, involve a complete restructuring of our beloved, time-honored human structures and expectations. A true Advent would be incomprehensible, a final undoing of “the way things are,” “the way it’s always been,” and “the way they’ll always be.” God’s arrival, like the coming of any guest, forces us to change—to straighten up, plan some meals, hide the bottles, whatever.
But God isn’t a guest—if anything, we’re the ones squatting on God’s property. Do we really want God here uncovering all the damage and scuffs we keep hiding behind pictures and under area rugs? When we’re waiting for a god that will wink their eye at the mess, affirm us, and conform to our image, do we really think any of us could handle the continuing, day-in day-out presence of the God who made us in—and expects us to live into—theirs?
And we aren’t just talking about mental scenarios or “what if’s.” As Christians, we claim that God already has come. And we all know how that last time went. We were thrilled to finally have God walk among us, until we realized that God wasn’t who we thought he would be. Instead of settling nicely into our expectations, God challenged us to embrace his. God’s ideas and instructions quickly became annoying—even unsettling. God didn’t just let us feel good about ourselves or give us all gold stars or endorse the way we’d been running things. So, deciding the whole situation was becoming a little too threatening, we killed him. Humanity, as a whole, chose to take the God we say kicked us out of Eden and return the favor, kicking God out of the Hell we keep building for ourselves. However, despite our vocal and violent disapproval, God, for some reason, came back. God keeps coming back.
We look at today’s passages and salivate over some sort of future vindication, but I think deep down we all recognize that God isn’t likely to rip open the sky and avenge us, at least not today. Even if it does happen, I doubt God would appreciate our desire to “scorn our neighbors” or “laugh among [ourselves]” at our enemies.[5] “The stars [just may] be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens…be shaken,”[6] but we probably shouldn’t expect even that scene to play out how we would really like it to. None of that is particularly surprising, though, because in our heart of hearts we know that, although it’s what we keep waiting for, that simply isn’t how God comes. It isn’t how God works. It isn’t who God is.
The god we look for is some sort of magical being external to our reality, one that swoops in and instantly sets things the way they “should” be.[7] We look for a god who inspires terror and fear, whose simple presence eliminates even the option for negative or evil behaviors. We cry for a god who breaks our shackles, all the long hoping to place them on those we dislike or don’t understand. For some inexplicable reason, our deepest desire, as humans, seems to be a god apart, a god beyond imagination (yet who somehow still conforms to ours)—a god above and beyond and outside not only our lives but the universe itself. What we keep hoping for, even as Christians, is Zeus or Odin or some other fantastical deity who will, in the end, simply make things the way we want. Despite knowing he’s never going to fly off the pages of a comic book, we just keep waiting for Superman to come and save us.
But the truth is, God—the Living God—is not apart or above or beyond. God doesn’t toy with humanity from somewhere outside our reality, a dimension or existence somehow superior to the one we know. God isn’t going to tear the heavens and come down. God simply won’t[8] do that…because God is already here.
God does exist—it’s just not the god we’ve been looking for. We keep staring at the skies and filling our minds with dreams and imaginative scenarios. We set our hopes on something so utterly unreal that there’s no way for us to notice, much less comprehend, the One who actually is. If Jesus was right about “the least of these” [9] in last week’s Gospel, God is already here, with and around and among us. God is wandering our scrubland with blistered feet. God is working three jobs or trying to convince someone to let them wash their car windows for spare change. God is sleeping under the stars or trapped behind bars or sitting hungry and forgotten at a kindergarten desk.
God is already here. If, as the Apostles taught, God is Love embodied in action, God is already with and around and among us. God is stuffing giftwrapped shoeboxes. God is stirring and serving soup. God is offering time and attention to a lonely friend. God is chatting on the phone and baking cookies and buying handwarmers. God is praying for peace and helping with a stranger’s bills and reaching out to those the Church has marginalized, rejected, or harmed.
This Advent, there is no reason to wait. The God we keep imagining is not and never will be the God we have. God is not above. God is not beyond. God is with us. God is here. So in light of that, what are we waiting for?
[1] Mark 13:26 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Isaiah 64:1a
[3] Psalm 80:7
[4] I Corinthians 1:7
[5] Psalm 80:6
[6] Matthew 13:25
[7] Aka: the way that aligns with our personal desires and agendas
[8] Maybe even can’t?
[9] Matthew 25:40, 45