Westworth United Church

Rev. J. Clark Saunders,  November 27, 2011, Westworth United Church

Mark 13:24-37

The first Sunday of Advent. The first Sunday of a new Christian year. It’s a season when I have a sense of a time warp, of time collapsing in on itself, when the present projects itself into the past and anticipates a future that has already happened.

What the heck am I talking about? Well, let me give you an example. Here at Westworth, the first hymn we sing on the first Sunday of Advent every year is, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” It’s a hymn that asks Jesus to come into the world. But, of course, that is something that has already happened. It happened 2,000 years ago. So in a sense you could say that, with that hymn and with many others and with several of the scripture readings we hear over the course of this season, we are projecting ourselves back into history and imaginatively re-enacting a sense of waiting for the coming of the messiah. Once again we are preparing for the birth of the Christ child.

But, in another sense, we are firmly grounded in the present and looking toward the future. Jesus may have arrived, but there is a sense in which the work he came to do is not complete. The world still does not look the way God wants it to be. The kingdom has not arrived in all its fullness. That is a fact that we acknowledge every time we say the Lord’s Prayer and ask, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

And it’s something that the Bible expresses in an idea that we encountered in our gospel reading this morning, a passage from Mark 13, a passage in which the writer has Jesus speak of a second coming. Jesus paints a vivid picture of himself coming on the clouds with his angels to gather his chosen ones from the ends of the earth. Nobody knows when this is going to happen, he says, but it sounds like it’s going to be pretty spectacular and more than a little scary.

Biblical scholars sometimes call this 13^th chapter of Mark’s gospel, “The Little Apocalypse”. It – along with its parallels in Matthew and Luke – is described as “apocalyptic literature”. And you can find other examples of this kind of writing in the Bible. Both testaments have bits and pieces of apocalyptic literature scattered here and there. But in the Old Testament the most extended example of it is the second half of the Book of Daniel. And in the New Testament the biggest section is the entire Book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible. In fact, depending on which version of the Bible you have at home, you may find this book given two alternative titles. One is “The Revelation to John”, and the other is simply “Apocalypse”, because “apocalypse” is the first word in the book in the original Greek.

So what is apocalyptic literature? Well, to oversimplify, apocalyptic literature may contain some or all of the following:

First, it is usually writing that purports to reveal something. In fact, the word “apocalypse” means “revelation” – something revealed. In a sense, what it intends to reveal has a future dimension, but it may also be a revelation to people on earth about the way things already are in heaven.

Second, apocalyptic literature is often dualistic. In other words it sees things in stark terms of good versus evil, of God versus Satan, of a life-and-death struggle between positive and negative forces. I suppose on that basis you might describe Harry Potter or science fiction epics like Star Wars as apocalyptic literature.

Third, this kind of writing is often esoteric. That just means that it is meant to be mysterious; it is intended to be understood only be a select group of people who are “in the know”, people who can crack a symbolic code. To everyone else it will be indecipherable and mind-boggling.

And fourth, I suppose we could say that it is usually pretty dramatic. Prophetic literature in the Bible often has a future dimension to it as well. But the prophets usually saw God’s purposes being worked out within this realm, within the unfolding of human history. The apocalyptic writers tended to write in desperate circumstances and to look beyond human agencies, beyond our age and this world, and imagine God intervening in human affairs from a whole other dimension of time and space. What they tended to see was God taking extraordinary steps to put wrong things right, engaging in some ultimate struggle against the forces of evil, and in the process winding up the whole show on earth and bringing about the end of the age.

Now, you may not have come here today for a Bible study lecture, but I have to give you some of that background before I ask the question, “What are we going to do with this kind of stuff?” There are some Christians – including the Seventh Day Adventists and members of sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses – who base their scenarios for the future on a study of some apocalyptic passages in the Bible – even if they don’t all reach the same conclusions. On the other hand, some mainline Protestants – including no less a figure than Martin Luther – have said of apocalyptic literature in the Bible that they really don’t know what to make of it all.

Can we do any better? Well, maybe not. But let me at least point out an important way in which Christians divide in their interpretation of these passages. First, there are those who believe that these writings were written for a future time, that when John the Divine was writing Revelation, for instance, or when Mark was ascribing an apocalyptic vision to Jesus in today’s gospel reading, they were thinking about a future time. In fact, a few years ago some people were saying that they had the year 2,000 in mind when they wrote these things, believing that the second coming of Christ or the end of the world were going to happen then. And, as we were reminded at a session here with Mac Watts last Sunday night, an American named Harold Camping was sure it was going to happen first in May and then in October this year.

Another way of reading these passages, though, is to understand them as being written for their own time. On this reading, John of Patmos wrote the Book of Revelation never imagining that people of the 21^st century would be equating the “beast” with the now defunct Soviet Union or seeing the creation of a modern state of Israel as something that John had foreseen long ago. Rather John wrote his book with his own time in mind. The beast, more likely than not, stood for the Roman Empire, and John was writing his book in a kind of code in case it fell into the hands of Roman authorities who were persecuting him and his fellow Christians. And he wrote his book as an encouragement to his contemporary fellow believers to assure them that God had not abandoned them and that, if they just hung on and kept the faith, ultimately they would prevail.

And I am one who would agree with this second position and say that the details of the Book of revelation and of Mark 13 were of far more use and interest to the people of the first century than to those of the 21^st – and in fact that it is a misuse of these scriptures to see them as a kind of blueprint for the unfolding of events in our time.

Does that mean that we should ignore them? Well, not quite. Because I still think there are some underlying principles here that can stand us in good stead. These passages remind us that life does not go on forever. We live until the world ends or we die as individuals, whichever comes first. It may be vain to speculate when our ending will be. Mark says that even Jesus doesn’t claim to know when the end-time will happen, but the principle remains that our time on earth – like the earth’s very existence – is finite. That realization should give a sense of urgency to our living. We don’t have all day; we don’t have all the time in the world. Or, as a woman I know is fond of saying, “This is not a dress rehearsal.” This is it. And if we aren’t paying attention to what is going on in our lives and in the life of the world, if we aren’t focused on the most important things and making the most of the time, we are missing out. Mark’s way of putting it is to say, “… keep alert … keep awake … What I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”

And the other thing to be said, I think, is that it is no accident that passages like this one from Mark should be read in the season of Advent. Each year, as we re-enact the waiting-time for Jesus’ first advent, or first coming, we hear reminders of a promise of a second coming. What that means to me is simply that Jesus has a future. God’s dealings with humanity are not all in the past. The story is not yet over. God still has a passionate interest in the course of human life. The world and time are still in God’s hands. That is – and should be – a sobering thought. But it is also reason for us to approach the future with confidence and with hope.