Here's the text to a sermon given at the Episcopal Preaching Foundation's Preaching Excellence Conference in Richmond, Virginia May 27-31:
Advent One, Year B
Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37
Christ Beside Us, Waiting
The dawn’s warm orange glow bathes Jerusalem. The men sit quietly in the shadow of the Mount of Olives, its western side as yet unwarmed by the morning sun. From their rocky vantage point over the olive trees they take in the spread of cemeteries before them, fading from view as the slope eases into the valley below. The horizon is broken by rugged hill lines, but the men’s attention remains drawn to the holy city’s daily awakening. Buildings constructed of local stone shine gold in the light. Gold thus centers the men’s sight on the Temple Mount, the centuries’ old site of sacred worship. Present political tension buzzes the air; past faithfulness intones chant-like from graves; future end-times expectation bears down upon the east-facing beautiful Golden Gate, the door through which the Messiah will enter on the Day of Judgment, as prophesied by Zechariah.
Good morning, Jerusalem: yesterday, today, tomorrow.
On the rocky mountain ledge we sit beside Jesus as his first four disciples—Peter, James, John, and Andrew—ask their teacher when the stones of the temple’s stunning buildings will topple. Jesus concludes his warnings with these difficult lines: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.”
Jesus didn’t know how many more sunrises there would be.
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We’re still waiting, and many of us are getting impatient. There is something deeply ingrained in the human psyche that seeks always to know what comes next. It’s a comfort and security thing. So when it comes to what happens next and finally, we’ve really got to know. This end times tension engages many of our coping mechanisms: denial, as embodied by the long and lavishly marketed Christmas (shopping) “season”; fear, as seen in the running tally of miscalculated “apocalypses,” the latest falling on May 21 of last year; and fascination, as imagined by the Left Behind book series.
But what about faithfulness? The liturgical season of Advent is the church’s look into-the-not-yet-risen-sun, the hopeful but still-shadowed space set apart by Christians for their generations-long watch for Christ.
We thus proclaim in faith, O Christ, that you are coming: vulnerable as a baby, victorious as a Messiah. Yet you are here, we also believe: surely in the Bible we meet you and your words which “will not pass away,” those words that lead us deeper into interior dark spaces in order to heal them. You are here in the single mom in need of a favor and the aunt with cancer, but also those with whom our souls yearn for reconciliation: the alcohol-abusing homeless man we judge, the infuriatingly smug politician we curse, the annoyingly smiley megachurch members we pity (while secretly envying their average Sunday attendance!) You are here as we listen in prayer for forgiveness, for reassurance, for sure and certain hope.
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Christians follow the psalmist in singing: “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides for ever. As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people, from this time on and for evermore.”
Indeed, Christian faithfulness rests squarely on biblical bedrock; the Hebrew Scriptures comprise the stories of God’s people struggling to maintain faith in a God for whose deliverance they often had to wait much longer than they would have preferred. This is no exception in today’s readings of Isaiah and the psalm. These texts lament the disaster that has befallen Judah, most likely Jerusalem’s destruction at the hands of the Babylonians. In its wake there is recorded an honest reckoning, corporate and penitential in character. There is also the heart-wrenching cry: “Stir up your might and come to save us!” This painfully honest introspection and painfully sincere expectation found their fulfillment in God’s faithfulness, in God’s restoration and deliverance. For the people of God faith became possible because of God’s faithfulness.
Paul, a faithful Jew, continued this Jewish tradition of interpreting the events of his day through the lens of the Hebrew Bible. His blinding encounter with the risen Christ drove this scriptural wrestling; his letters eventually became the earliest contributions to the baby New Testament. What it meant to live between the time of Jesus’ resurrection and the final days gripped Paul’s attention, as can be seen from today’s letter to the Corinthian church. Paul asserted that by faith we believe that our Lord Jesus Christ will certainly return. But where is Christ in the meanwhile, and what is our relationship to him? How can we relate to Christ in this spiritually awkward in-between time?
Paul claims that Christ is coming and that Christ is here. We are “in” Christ Jesus by the grace of God, and this wholly encompassing, embodied quality to our relationship with Christ leads to enrichment “in speech and knowledge of every kind.” Such spiritual gifts thus strengthen us in our waiting for the “revealing of our Lord.” So Christ strengthens us through our membership in his body in order that we might have the spiritual resources to wait for his return. Whoa: there’s mystery there. God is good and faithful, we affirm, alongside all those who have heard and believed this spectacular Pauline claim over twenty centuries of Christian experience of Christ’s presence among us.
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We know you are faithful to your people, O God -- and so we wait for you, especially in this season of Advent. We embrace the spaciousness of this spiritual landscape and face its shadowed, doubt-ridden uncertainties, its devastating call for honesty as we name and claim our personal and social sins. We corporately breathe, catching our breath and praying in this moment of ancient transition for clarity: of purpose, of vision, of love. Instead of striving to do more than we can handle, even when done in your Name, keeping us too busy to hear your saving word, in this introspective season we recognize the gift of grace that is to watch for you around us. We can only do such honest soul-searching in the light of your gracious presence. You are coming, and you are here beside us.
In these minutes before the sun crowns majestically over that blessed Mount, when the city’s saffron light-soaked veil yet drapes the landscape, in the moment when time itself has caught its breath—between night and dawn, between faithfulness and fulfillment—Jesus and his disciples sit steadily beside us on that solid rock-of-faith ledge: watching, and waiting, and longing, together with the church and its saints across time and space: watching and waiting for Christ.
