Sermon: Hope?

First Presbyterian Church

December 3, 2023, Advent 1B

Isaiah 64:1-9; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37

 

Hope?

 

 

The are two things that tend to be true of the liturgical season of Advent, which we mark beginning today; it tends to start off with a bang, as we will see momentarily, and it is usually organized around some theme or pattern, mostly to make sense of the whole thing. One such pattern assigns to the Sundays of Advent a series of commands or imperatives reflective of the scriptures assigned to each day; "watch," "prepare," "rejoice," and "behold." The other evokes more general themes for each Sunday: "hope," "peace," "joy," and "love." As you might guess from the scripture readings we've heard, it is easy to speak of the need to "watch" where this first Sunday is concerned. We might have to look harder to find themes of "hope," however. 

Also, this liturgical season is "two-sided," both remembering the coming of Jesus the first time and looking ahead to the return of Christ, but the structure of the season tends to move backwards. That “looking ahead” part of the season tends to be confined to the first Sunday, while later Sundays move backward from there – presenting the proclamation of John the Baptizer in advance of Jesus’s public ministry, and finally working back to the events before the birth of Jesus such as Gabriel’s announcement to Mary or other events, depending on the gospel of the year. (With this new liturgical year B focused on the gospel of Mark, there is no pre-birth narrative to work from, so bits get borrowed from the gospels of John and Luke; Mark does appear today, as you've noticed.)

The texts for this first Sunday of Advent B do bring the fireworks. The gospel selection for today brings us Mark’s “mini-apocalypse,” a spectacle to taunt even the flashiest of Hollywood special-effects types. Those first verses are the stuff of more hellfire-and-brimstone “rapture” sermons than you can shake a stick at, with the sun and moon going dark, stars falling from the sky, and “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with angels scattering in all directions to gather in the faithful. The verses that follow turn to encouraging disciples to “be alert” and “keep awake” with all sorts of sign-watching and being prepared thrown in. It’s a nerve-jangler of a passage, to be sure, but there is at least that one note of hope - the Son of Man descending with the angels gathering up all the faithful - as frightful as the imagery itself might be.

The reading from Isaiah cuts a surprisingly similar profile, although from a different perspective; rather than foretelling the coming of the Lord, the prophetic oracle is practically begging for it. “O that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you” – that would also be a Hollywood-worthy spectacle, but here the tone is of longing rather than of warning. Speaking from the midst of a people who have fallen away from faithfulness and have lost touch with God altogether, the prophet pleads for God to return – with as much drama as necessary, one might say. Again, though, the passage is not completely without something to hope for, or to hope in, at least in verses 8 and 9, even if that final phrase - "for we are all your people" - might sound more pleading than confident.

It’s no surprise that these two passages get most of the attention on this day, to be sure. However, it might just be that in this time of Advent, particularly in the times in which we live, the most important or needful or even hopeful statement out of today’s readings might just be in the one passage that quite possibly no preacher preaches (besides me, I guess) to inaugurate this liturgical season: the epistle reading from Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth.

This is at least the second letter Paul has written to this church, although it is the first such letter we have in scriptural canon. It seems that some things have gone off the rails since Paul last wrote, and the Corinthians have gotten to be a bunch of folks rather pleased with themselves, for all the wrong reasons. The backhanded complimentary tone of this “thanksgiving” points to the trouble spots that will be made explicit later in the letter; it turns out the Corinthians are rather proud of the “knowledge” mentioned in verse 5 and the “spiritual gifts” noted in verse 7, as if, somehow, they were themselves responsible for them or had somehow earned them. Paul gently rebukes that idea here even before addressing it directly, reminding the Corinthians that both of those were gifts of God, as verse 5 makes clear; "in him you have been enriched in every way." To put it in a modern idiom, Paul reminds the folks in this church that, apart from the gifts and the grace and the strengthening that comes from God, you aren’t ‘all that.’

But the key phrase, really, is the seemingly offhand line that comes after that spiritual gift bit: “…as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (emphasis mine) 

The word to the Corinthians, as it is to any church that thinks it is ‘all that,’ is: you do not hasten the “day of our Lord Jesus Christ” by your knowledge or your spiritual gifts or your money or your votes or by any thing you do. As Jesus says in that mini-apocalypse passage in Mark, nobody knows when that day will be, not even the Son, only the Father. And you can’t do anything to change that or hurry it up. What you do is wait.

Waiting is not passive. Waiting is doing the work the church has always been called to do. Waiting is ministering to one another and to the world around us as Jesus showed us how to do. 

That’s why we keep going with things like serving the CUFF meal this Thursday and providing free flu shots as that season approaches. That’s why you are still making your pledge commitments to the work and ministry of this congregation (you have done this, right?) Because waiting, in this case, means doing the work.

If we’ve learned anything in this time of a pandemic that should be over, but isn't, it is that we live in a society that is abhorrently bad at waiting. Had we had leadership and citizens who were willing to do the hard work of waiting back when this virus first appeared, we wouldn’t have become the world’s official coronavirus petri dish. (For evidence of this claim I offer basically every other country in the world.) In this and many other ways we have proven ourselves incapable of or unwilling to wait, to the point of hostility and threat of violence in some cases. We have utterly failed at waiting and it has cost us.

Guess what? When it comes to the “day of the Lord,” that is our main job: to wait. We do the stuff Jesus called us to do, and we keep doing it, and we keep doing it. We don’t get to ‘force the issue’ or hasten the timetable in any way. We don’t get to negotiate an accelerated schedule. We don’t earn our way to a quicker second Advent. We don’t manipulate Jesus into an early return. 

We do our job, and we wait. 

And yet we don't do so without that hope. Even in this passage we are reminded of that, and we are also reminded of the source of that hope. Even while Paul is previewing those things for which the Corinthians are going to be held to account, he's also reminding them that it is no less than the Christ whom we await is the one who will "keep you firm to the end," as verse 8 puts it. 

Paul goes on to add in verse 9 the simple yet profound reminder that "God is faithful." Perhaps we ought to be more deliberate about contemplating this simple statement. No matter how we might get a little stuck on ourselves like the Corinthians, no matter how much we might want to see our enemies get it in the end like Isaiah and his readers, no matter how dark or terrible or apocalyptic our times might seem as for Mark or his readers, "God is faithful." No matter how bleak things look as we wait, we are assured of the faithfulness of the God we worship and serve, and therefore we can wait in hope. 

One might be reminded of a passage of reassurance from another of Paul's letters, the one to the church at Rome, in which he reminds those readers that "in all things God works for the good of those who love him." (Romans 8:28) In all of our circumstances, great or awful, God is working for our good. Perhaps that helps us remember that in our waiting for Mark's promised coming of that Son of Man in the clouds with angels descending to gather up the faithful, we wait in hope. Hope, and not fear. Hope, and not despair. Hope, and not hopelessness. 

For the time of hopeful waiting, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #---, When the world tells us; #352, My Lord, What A Morning; #105, People, Look East; #348, Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending