Isaiah 64.1-9 O that you would tear open the heavens and come down
1
Corinthians 1.3-9 We are
waiting for your Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed
Mark
13.33-37 If he comes
unexpectedly, he must not find you asleep.
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It's becoming almost painful, and certainly more
and more upsetting, to see and hear the news day after day.
You don’t need me to list what those things are
I suspect a newsfeed on a phone may well have
pinged in some more bad news even as we are here this morning.
The news and events at home and abroad and
globally, are profoundly disturbing.
It leaves us with questions: about human nature;
about God; about the nature, purpose and destiny of Creation itself.
And is our faith silent on these questions? No.
Are human beings irredeemably doomed? No.
Has God abandoned us to our self-induced fate?
No.
Can the Good News still be proclaimed - and
received - in a dark, frightening and forbidding world?
Yes. It most certainly can.
Today’s passage from St Mark’s Gospel gives us
the pointers for the hope that is promised in Jesus Christ, who says
24 ‘But in those days, after that suffering,
the
sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
25 and the stars will be falling from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens will be
shaken.
Those words are not words of upbeat boosterism
or naïve optimism.
They are stark words, full of foreboding.
The mistake of the world, our of culture, of
those who do not believe, or ourselves when we’re feeling fragile, is to think,
‘that’s it: we are all doomed’.
The mistake of our world and culture is not to
read on.
Yes, Jesus is speaking in dramatic terms about
how the world feels in the depths of despair.
It is a depth of despair and pain that is an all
too real reality for so many people.
Yet in the midst of that Christ is present and
is coming.
The Master is present to the world, and those
who are awake to him will be alert to receive him.
There is an invitation here not to be despairing
but quite the opposite, to be trusting and recalled to faith.
The invitation: are you ready to commit to
Christ, ever more deeply, in trust and faith?
That in itself is a good message for this Season
of Advent: be renewed in trust and faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Today’s Gospel asks us, ‘when all is stripped
away, what is left to us?’
One day all of the joys, goods, pleasures, and
accomplishments of this world will be taken from us.
At your funeral, and mine, almost certainly
these words will be used: ‘The Lord gives and the Lord has taken away, blessed
be the name of the Lord’
All we have is grace, for life is a gift in the
first place that is not ours to play with.
As the prophet Isaiah says in our first reading,
8 Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand.
The signs of the times tell us that our efforts,
under their own steam, in contravention of God’s word, are doomed to lead to
what we see in our world.
Lives lived in accordance with God’s will and
purpose, for men, women and children and for the whole creation - of which we
are a part, not apart – is what we must commit to at all times and in all
places, especially in the darkness.
The culture that says ‘it’s all about me’, ‘I am
the master of my own destiny’, ‘I am immortal’ is a culture of death, darkness
and despair; that’s a culture that won’t see beyond a collapse into nothingness
and absurdity.
The Gospel culture that says ‘my existence is
first about God’, ‘God is the Creator and sustainer of the Creation where I
find myself’, ‘I am mortal, dust of the earth, to which I shall return’ - that
is a culture of life, of hope, of joy, of assurance.
The Christian Gospel has so much more to offer
our dark, cold, despairing world than the voices we hear around us that
airbrush God out of the picture.
When we see or hear the news, let us not allow
the darkness to collapse in on us, but offer the darkness to be transformed by
the light.
The Season of Advent speaks, amongst many other
rich themes, of the dawning light, the light revealed in the true light Jesus
Christ,
For
in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in
the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1.4,5)
So, we
look elsewhere; we look beyond to the steadfast love of God, which brought the
entire universe into existence from nothing, which sustains it even now, and
which will one day draw us to a life and a joy beyond it.
Out of
destruction and desolation God has the capacity to renew and refresh: just look
to the Cross on which he died, and from which we now proclaim him, Risen,
Ascended, Glorified!
And may
the Lord, when he comes, find us watching and waiting. Amen.
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