Invitation to Confession
First Sunday of Advent
The Lord comes, bringing to light things now hidden in darkness, and disclosing the purposes of the heart.
Silence may be kept
Let us open our hearts and prepare for his coming, confessing our sins in penitence and faith.
Mark 13.24–37
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.
26 Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory.
27 Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.
28 ‘From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.
29 So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates.
30 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.
31 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
32 ‘But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.
33 Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.
34 It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch.
35 Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn,
36 or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.
37 And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.’
We don’t need suns falling out of the sky to convince us that these are dangerous times. And Jesus’s language isn’t designed to make us fearful. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: he brings us reassurance and peace. We are not like those whose eyes are open wide and shut.
For us this morning, Jesus’ Advent message is a simple one: it points to a moment, right in the centre of everything …a whole explosion of meaning with the New Testament as its monument, highlighting many shifts in understanding such that we find ourselves on the inside of a fantastic vision.
That the I AM – is the starting point not us. That he is constantly approaching us, constantly moving towards us – an approach in which we find ourselves to be on the edges, peripheral beings and he is at the centre.
And the more time we spend in the presence of this I AM, the more we see ourselves and EVERYTHING shot through with “secondariness.” We catch ourselves reflecting back a REALITY held in BEING by something prior to us.
Let me be clear: this is NOT a form of diminishment, rather it is an accurate and objective sense of createdness which arouses in us a permanent state of GRATITUDE.
A place where I receive myself through the eyes of another – another who is for me, who helps me discover the positive things about myself which I didn’t think I possessed. And through this new perspective I encounter the rich foundations which had always been there unrecognised, and which takes me to places of mutual flourishing.
A space where I am surrounded by friends who give me back to myself by drawing me into their laughter in such a way that I am able to laugh at myself.’
A space where I glimpse my secondariness as someone else’s presence forever coming ‘towards me,’
One who opens up for me a relationship simultaneously connected with my past and my future. The longer I am held in that regard, the more easily I am able both to remember, to cope with, my past and to imagine a future to which I can aspire
On the one hand, my ‘becoming’ is enlivened such that I experience being reached from a future that is not yet me but that pulls me in.
On the other hand, in ways I hadn’t anticipated, my past is alive and flexible. That is to say, the person who I thought I was and who I think I am becoming are both simultaneously altered by the quality of presence of the other [friend] [companion] who ‘walks’ with me.
Ultimately, we are talking about what comes upon us as an alteration of the axis of CREATION rather than a resolution of a moral problem.
The I AM is determined to make alive in us the wonder of being God and so decides to involve us on the inside of creation. In fact, in our case, being forgiven is prior to being created.
Hoicked into a completely new orbit… we begin to sense what is really going on: who we really are, and what we are really becoming.
[See John 16: 7-11 – the Counsel of Defence]
Which raises a tantalising question: What if the beginning starts in the middle? What we have in both accounts, Luke and John is the narrative of a particular human intervention in history which has tipped the moral axis.
Here we see both accounts running Genesis backwards.
Consider St Luke’s Passion narrative. Luke 22.42-44. Hidden from us in translation are a series of Hebrew puns: Blood, earth and Adam = “dam” = Adam’s sweat combined with reddish dust, that of the earth looks like clots of blood… = futility. In effect what we have here is the Genesis narrative running backwards.
Now, let’s move forward to Luke 23:44-46. And again we see the order of creation running backwards…Up until now we are looking at things prior to the moment when God made light, God creating everything out of nothing, and the beginning of materiality of everything that is torn. Till finally, we are back to the Spirit hovering over the formless void of Genesis 1.
But notice this: in the Gensis story the Spirit is impersonal. By the time Jesus breathes out his Spirit at Pentecost, the Spirit has a fully anthropological content.
[See Romans 8.18-23]
The axis turning is the present moment in which we are living and which feels like an upheaval full of suffering while in fact it is an act of childbirth. [John 20:22] St John narrates the same sense of a futile creation winding down, and the real creation happening now.
In this scene of staggered vision, nothing is quite as it seems. Thus, the first day now stretches backwards…from an evening in Jerusalem until the beginning of Genesis 2:7…The breath of life…
The Deathless One has opened an evolving but frankly oppressive human culture which eventually makes outsiders of us all, to CHANGE where the Forgiving Victim dares us to aspire to be valued insiders in the adventure of creation starting from our place on the cusp of that shifting axis – in the middle.
What does it all mean? Imagine if you will this ‘relationship’ in terms of a gravitational pull of one planetary sphere on another.
At first you think the sphere is moving at incalculable speed towards you when actually it is you that is being acted upon by the force field of that stationary sphere/star which highlights your essential and intrinsic “secondariness.”
As you are being drawn ever closer its gravitational forces adjust your planet’s axis throwing what you thought was your long-cherished stability and security into disarray.
The REALITY is that this former understanding was a delusion anyway. You and your planet in fact had been gradually tipping backwards into the maw of a black hole.
The new orientation reveals what had been so much fakery… and now unveils what real stability and security actually are:
a wild ride adventure which has drawn you into this tail of a hugely powerful [morning] star.
The MORNING STAR the star of Bethlehem, announcing a peace and security which cannot be taken away.
28-31 “Take a lesson from the fig tree. From the moment you notice its buds form, the merest hint of green, you know summer’s just around the corner. And so it is with you. When you see all these things, you know he is at the door. Don’t take this lightly. I’m not just saying this for some future generation, but for this one, too—these things will happen. Sky and earth will wear out; my words won’t wear out.
32-37 “But the exact day and hour? No one knows that, not even heaven’s angels, not even the Son. Only the Father. So keep a sharp lookout, for you don’t know the timetable. It’s like a man who takes a trip, leaving home and putting his servants in charge, each assigned a task, and commanding the gatekeeper to stand watch. So, stay at your post, watching. You have no idea when the homeowner is returning, whether evening, midnight, cockcrow, or morning. You don’t want him showing up unannounced, with you asleep on the job. I say it to you, and I’m saying it to all: Stay at your post. Keep watch.”