If Not Now, When? First Sunday of Advent, Year B

Isaiah 64:1-9 Psalm 80:1-7; 17-19; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down so that the mountains would quake at your presence – as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil. . . .”

The Season of Advent marks the Christian New Year, as the darkness descends over the Planet’s Northern hemisphere. The prophet who wrote the third portion of Isaiah saw only corruption and regression among the returnees to Judah. Yet another group of exiles had returned to the homeland only to be met with suspicion and hostility. The response – all too human – was to abandon Covenant, non-violence, and distributive justice-compassion, and fall back on the old gods that promise safety, survival, even salvation. One hundred years later, the writer of Mark’s gospel saw his world come to an end with the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. The only hope was for God to act once more. But, Mark warns, there will be many false Messiahs, so stay awake. The true Son of Adam will come with the day of the Lord: “the sun will be darkened; the moon will not glow, the stars will fall from the sky.”

Exile, suspicion, fear, and despair are all in full supply as we approach the end of 2008. People are on the move from camp-to-camp in the Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Somalia. After 50 years in exile, the Tibetan people, are questioning the wisdom of the Dalai Lama’s middle path – “autonomy” for the people in the Tibetan homeland, but still subject to Chinese rule. Young Tibetans who have never seen the homeland are challenging the government in exile to rise up and demand rangzen – independence. Janet Napolitano, Governor of Arizona, has been chosen to head the Department of Homeland Security in the new Obama administration. She is reported to be more interested in defining and dealing with systemic conditions that lead to illegal immigration than in a strictly law and order approach to immigration. Republicans are not happy. Closer to home, dismayed Republican voters in the South, following national Republican leadership, insist that an Obama presidency will bring “socialism,” and the loss of personal freedom and civil rights.

Perhaps because of the global economic meltdown of 2008, the Christmas season started the day after Halloween this year. Fortunes have diminished, jobs have disappeared, houses have been foreclosed, major chain stores are going out of business, people are beginning to live in their cars. The bright prosperity mind-set that sent the markets into the stratosphere over the past 15 years has been replaced with fear. Christian leaders are beginning to ask, Where is God in all this? What is the Church doing? What can the Church do beyond stocking foodbank shelves, sponsoring clothing drives, and opening shelters?
The usual answer is of course that the Church offers the hope of the Christ, who is coming soon. Jesus died to save us, and will come again in the last days of darkness and tribulation to “gather the chosen people from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the edge of the sky!” So be ready.

This imagery is very different from what the Apostle Paul was outlining in his letter to the Thessalonians, which was the text for Proper 28. As John Dominic Crossan says in In Search of Paul, “Paul, like Jesus before him, did not simply proclaim the imminent end of evil, injustice, and violence here below upon this earth. They proclaimed it had already begun (first surprise!) and that believers were called to participate cooperatively with God (second surprise!!) in what was now a process in human time and not just a flash of divine light (third surprise!!!)” p. 176. Crossan then challenges readers: “Do you believe the process of making the world a just place has begun and what are you doing about joining the program?” The challenge is present-tense.

If not now, when?

Look carefully at what Paul wrote in his first letter to the community in Corinth. The verb tenses are all present-perfect: “. . . the grace of God . . has been given you in Christ Jesus. . . you have been enriched in him . . . the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you . . . you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. . . .”
Before he launches into his response to their request for his intervention in some local misunderstandings, Paul reminds the people of their current condition: they are in grace; they are rich in Jesus’s teachings, and they possess any spiritual gift they might need.

Suppose that Christianity began acknowledging the present-day, present-moment spiritual power for transformation that all humanity has? There is no doubt that humans tend to distrust and second-guess ourselves whenever things look bad. There is also no doubt that we like to project our need for deliverance from adversity onto some outside force that will intervene on our behalf. But in the post-modern, post-Christian, pragmatic, sophisticated 21st Century, “God” as an intervening, personal bodyguard makes no sense.

What does make sense is that the natural order of the Universe in which we live is a reliable, faithful realm. To date, no one has discovered anything in the known Universe that does not comply with the laws of physics as we know them. As Christians, we are called into relationship with Jesus because we share that same realm. But this is not an exclusive relationship. As we saw earlier, whenever we or anyone acts with distributive justice-compassion, we act in relationship with Jesus, the inclusive Christ consciousness. The kingdom of God – the realm of distributive justice-compassion – is found within all of us, and revealed in the order of creation that surrounds us .

Isaiah’s prayer is the same prayer that everyone prays whenever we run into overwhelming adversity. There is no present hope in the psalm nor in the apocalyptic warnings spoken by Mark’s Jesus. But in Paul’s opening words there is empowerment for living in Covenant until God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion is established, not by some angelic aerial descent, but by our own commitment to the work.

If not now, when?

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