December 3, 2023

Advent 1B

Epiphany, Winnipeg

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

In the fall of 1985 I took my first trip to Norway, just to see the place where I knew some of my ancestors were from, and maybe to try to track down some family who most of us here in Canada didn’t know. My great-grandfather was born in a small community in southwest Norway in 1880, and he left on a boat for Canada in 1888. He went back to his birthplace once, maybe 60 years later, and that was all his family back home had seen of him all that time, and that is all they would see him again. He was the oldest, so he had siblings and step-siblings who still remembered him, but he had some who had only known their older brother Tobi through letters and stories.

One evening after supper one of the relatives drove me over to the next town to visit Teodora, my great-great aunt, Tobi’s younger sister. I think she was about four when her brother moved to Canada, and when we went to visit her she was ninety-one. We arrived at her place and found her sitting in a rocking chair in the living room, with a blanket on her lap, and when she saw her big brother’s great-grandson she started to cry. And cry. I shed a tear or two as well, but I was twenty-one so I held it back a bit. Then we all had cake and coffee. After that we had coffee and cake. And with Norwegian and English and lots of translation we all told a lot of stories.

Her grandson drove me home after that, and on the way home he said, “Grandma just heard you were coming yesterday. She was so excited that Tobi’s great grandson was coming, so this morning she had breakfast and then she sat in her rocking chair and waited there all day for you to come.”

That’s kind of Advent. Waiting. Not waiting for a twenty-one year old from Canada who’s trying to figure out where he’s from, but waiting for Jesus who is coming with peace and healing and honesty and forgiveness and new life that rises up even where death and distance seem to have done their worst.

We’re in the rocker in the corner of the living room, waiting for someone some of us know as a dear friend; waiting for someone that some of us feel like we know only through a letter or two here and there and some stories we’ve been told along the way. We wait with a weary world that is beautiful and beloved and ancient and hurting and still broken. We work to try to make it right. And all the while we wait for it finally to be made new. And we wait for the one who comes to make it new.

Our first reading from scripture, that started out our whole Advent this year, was that reading from Isaiah that we heard a few minutes ago. The prophet is writing to people who have just come home after seventy years of being in exile. For seventy years they were separated from their homeland and forced to live in a place far away from their home in Jerusalem. Now they have come back home to a city in ruins and a temple that was turned into rubble, and somehow they have to rebuild the whole thing. There was such excitement about coming home, they had waited for seventy years, but nobody is really sure what home will look like when it’s rebuilt. Maybe nobody even knows where to start. Where do you begin with rubble?

Some of the people cry out like Isaiah does with a simple cry: “God, why don’t you tear open the heavens, come down here, and fix it all? Everything?” And how many times have we said or heard the same? Some say, “God, you were silent and you hid from us all that time…we’re pretty sure that maybe you still are silent and hiding.” And they wait for a word from God, and some begin to think that maybe that word will never come. And the people know that in some way they too brought their disaster on themselves, and maybe that is the worst thing of all. It’s not just God’s problem. So the people who have come back home wait and wonder to see if they can change, and to see if their lives will come back together, and to listen to see if God will speak again. And they wait to see if God will tear open the heavens and come down and make everything right again.

Then right in the middle of it all Isaiah drops one little line: “From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait...for God.”

While people try to rebuild their homes and their lives in the biblical story twenty five or twenty six hundred years ago, they hear a word from a prophet who says, “It’s OK to wait. God is interested in those who wait. God even works for those who have nothing left to do…but to wait.”

We’ve got permission to wait.

Even today, when there are so many things that need our attention and it seems that the world is going somewhere in a handbasket and somebody better do something fast, we are given permission to wait. Even just for a minute. Or maybe even for a month or so in a time and space we call Advent.

And while we wait?

Three or four times today in that reading from the Gospel of Mark Jesus says what we’ve heard him say a few times in the last few weeks: Keep awake. Keep alert. And maybe that’s not as dramatic as it might sound. The master leaves the house and tells the servants, “Just do your work. I’ll be back.”

What do we do when the stars fall, like Jesus says they will fall, and the light fades and the moon and the sun go blank and the heavens shake? Maybe we just do what we do…. Cook the next meal, get up and out of bed one more time. If you’re an activist keep activisting, if you’re an encourager keep encouraging, if you’re a pray-er keep praying, whatever we’re called to do we’re still called to it.

Take care of your neighbour whose stars have fallen, hold one another up and light the way for each other when the heavens shake and the sun seems to go dark, because the light will shine again. So just keep awake. For all of us together maybe that just means that we keep telling each other that there will be light and that we will move on. When I can’t see it I’ll hear it from you, and I hope that you hear it from up here or from each other day after day. We will see that the one who is weak will be held up, and the ones with nothing will instead have what they need…we will act, with one another and with the world around us, as though the shaking and falling won’t have the last word.

Jesus talks about heavens shaking and stars falling and the sky going dark. Today really is a stars-falling-and-light-fading-and-heavens-shaking kind of time. It always is. These days it looks mostly like Israel and Gaza or a housing crisis and addictions, or any of the things that go on in our own lives…our own falling stars.

And in the middle of all that, Advent comes around again and Advent speaks of Jesus who is coming again to heal what is broken, and to reign with gentleness rather than power. But Advent speaks and says that we have reason to wait with hope, maybe worry with anticipation, or wonder but be carried by the hopes of those around us…

Advent declares, quietly and peacefully, that when the powers of heaven shake we don’t need to cower in fear. We keep awake, we stand up, because good news is drawing near. So dress the church in blue, dress your home in blue. Put up a tree, sing a song, stand up strong because the giver of life is coming here.

And when the light fails and the sun goes cold and the days grow short, Advent speaks clearly and reminds us that light is coming and light will always shine. Remember that when you see lights on a house – even the loud and the tacky lights – or when you put lights on a tree…Or better yet, step outside on a clear Advent night and see the stars that are not falling, and know that light does shine. Or get the youngest ones in the room to light a candle, even a single candle.