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| End and Beginning ©Jan Richardson janrichardson.com |
Rather, every year on the first Sunday of Advent, we get treated to descriptions of the apocalypse. It’s enough to unsettle even the most optimistic among us.
What we have just heard are words of discontent, not just longing. We have heard complaints about God’s absence when we need God most. The section from Isaiah we heard is a plea for God to ride down in rescue as the people face calamity—what their theology tells them is punishment at God’s hands—a fear that is echoed by our psalm portion from Psalm 80.
And then, we start our year’s exploration of the gospel of Mark at one of its most challenging spots: Mark 13 is sometimes referred to as “the little apocalypse,” which provides a break or a hinge between Mark’s discussion of Jesus’s ministry and the narrative of the passion. Mark’s audience, much like many people in the world today, lived at the center of a host of disasters.
Mark, chapter 13, begins with a prediction of persecution of Christians (which intensified in 64 CE after Christians were accused of burning down Rome under the Emperor Nero) and the destruction of the Temple (which did indeed happen in 70 CE). It felt, after all, like the end of the world.
And we’ve been being prepared for this reading for several weeks at the end of the last lectionary year, what with parables about vineyard workers and bridesmaids and such. So today’s gospel, too ends with a warning to be watchful, looking for Jesus’s return at every opportunity.
In the year 2020, this collection of readings, with their common theme of feeling abandoned by God, speak especially to our situation, nine months now into Coronatide. Nine months of us worshiping with fear of contagion swirling over us, including 8 months of online worship only. And I hear some of you when you tell me you are sick of it. I am sick of it too. But that still doesn’t mean we get to start acting like COVID-19 doesn’t exist. And so we can look at these readings we hear today as speaking directly to us. Some wonder where God is in this pandemic. They wonder what Isaiah wondered 3000 years ago and Mark’s audience wondered 2000 years ago—when will God come and be with us?
And if you have been paying attention at all this year, you know that almost exactly 100 years ago, a similar pandemic swept across the world, necessitating the closure of schools and churches and businesses, although at that time, with medical intervention still being in its infancy rather than something to take for granted, arguments about government overreach were not QUITE as hyperbolic as they are now. Nonetheless, the so-called Spanish flu that swept across the world carried by deploying soldiers at the end of World War I threatened to bring the world to its knees, just like today.
And 101 years ago, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats looked at the world as it was in 1919—violent rebellions in Ireland against British rule; the end of a modern, industrialized war that was filled with new, human-designed horror of chemical warfare and poison gas. And on top of it, he had nearly lost his pregnant wife to the Spanish flu.
In late November 1919, Yeats wrote a poem that brings together Jesus’s incarnation at Christmas and his Second Coming at world’s end, as the early Christians expected—but fueled by feelings of abandonment such as Isaiah expressed. So, he wrote this poem, entitled “The Second Coming,” and vented some of his anger at his feelings of helplessness as well as the presumption that a baby’s birth 2000 years prior could do anything to alleviate his anxiety:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blind and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?(2)
Yeats looks around his world and sees signs of apocalypse everywhere, much like a modern Isaiah. And he despairs, torn between his longing to believe in something redemptive to come out of all the suffering afflicting the world, and his angry skepticism of Christian promises that “everything is going to be all right.”
After all, the Hebrew scriptures are filled with stories of a God who leads a ragtag rabble through a howling wilderness with a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud and causes the bread of angels and hailstorms of basically Cornish game hens to fall down at the feet of God’s beloved people. Why can’t we have a little bit of that right now?
We seek an answer to our longing for a respite, and our lectionary gives us dark portents. What are we to do with this?
Although Advent gives us the gift of hope and expectation, of learning to wait with grace with building excitement for what it to come, we are impatient. Surely just this once God can just accede to that plea from one of my favorite 80s rock bands, the Smiths, and written by their mad king, Morrissey, in the dreamy, brief musical gem “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want.” As gorgeous music swirls in the background the singer morosely vents his frustration at losing out on what his heart most desires, and prays to a God he usually dismisses:
Good times for a change
See, the luck I've had
Can make a good man turn bad
So please, please, please
Let me, let me, let me
Let me get what I want this time…(3)
Who can’t relate to this feeling of being on the losing end? And we set ourselves up for it, so much of the time. We are constantly caught in a conundrum of our own making. We want to proclaim our freedom and independence loudly—until a crisis comes. Then, too often, that same God we hold at arm’s length so that we don’t have to give up our autonomy and self-congratulatory belief in our own agency suddenly is the same God we cry out to solve all our problems like a genie when things go wrong.
However…. (There’s always a however, isn’t there?)
If you think waiting is hard for us to understand, just wait until you see the Incarnation.
That the same God who gives us free will means it, and chooses self-limitation in order to grant us our freedom to choose. A God who so often chooses the underdog, the youngest son to be the leader, the barren womb to give birth to nations, is telling us to WAIT, darn it, and that God is coming into this aching world to help us learn how to better tend to it and each other. But instead of the heavens torn open and a warrior God on a chariot from heaven, with white beard streaming over his muscular, warrior’s body swooping down to fix things, straight from the Sistine Chapel to your living room, what do we get instead?
A baby. One of the most helpless, squishy things on earth. That’s what we’re waiting on, while the world crashes down around our ears. A God who enters human history as a peasant baby in a backwater of Empire with an unwed teenaged mother.
We KNOW this story and how it is going to resolve itself at Christmas. But have we really SAT with how seemingly inconsequential Jesus’s entering into human life is? Mark’s gospel doesn’t even recount it. THAT’S how inconsequential it is to some early Christians.
Jesus’s shockingly unspectacular birth was a source of embarrassment for some of his earliest followers, those like Judas Iscariot, who maybe could get past Jesus’s humble birth but could not get past his refusal, as the rightful king of Israel to take up arms and foment a military coup in which the TRUE savior of Israel would restore the monarchy of King David and drive the invaders from Israel’s borders.
So one answer to our situation, especially in times such as these, is to see if there are spots where we can embrace mystery and wonder—the mystery and wonder of worshiping a God who does the unexpected.
One answer to Yeats’s howl of rage is given to us from another poet-- Denise Levertov. At age sixty, she converted to Christianity after growing up with a Welsh mother and a Russian Jewish Hasidic émigré father who became an Anglican priest. After her conversion, she wrote some of the most beautiful religious poetry of the late 20th century, in my opinion. And she answers Yeats’ dread and despair with wonder and awe in this poem, entitled “On The Mystery of the Incarnation:”
It's when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.(4)
Levertov reminds us that God looks into our pain, our waywardness, and, instead of abandonment or punishment, answers with the best God has to offer: God’s own son to show us how to live a fully human life, and to show us how close to God’s heart we are, how to recover the divine spark that God enclosed in us from our beginning. That’s what Advent promises us, despite apocalypses all around.
The theme of Advent is "watching and waiting." These two attitudes can be filled with either hope or dread, and sometimes both at the same time, because sometimes an ending can lead to new life, new growth. Sometimes an ending can be a blessing—even if that comes later, and especially if it becomes a blessing only because our tendency as humans is to try to reshape our stories so that even our losses end up blessing us with new wisdom, new resilience, new inner resources.
It’s easy to take for granted God’s care of us when things are ticking along smoothly. It’s easy then to discount the safety net that God stretches beneath us, running alongside us as we wobble along from one adventure to another like a small child riding their bikes without training wheels. But this pandemic has brought us real heartache. It’s also called us to embrace minor inconveniences for the sake of the protection of others. And we should not equate the two. Real tragedies are job losses and health care coverage then disappearing and long term illness and a quarter million families dynamited by the loss of loved ones forever just in the US alone. We stand in the midst of millions of little apocalypses too, no less real because they are personal rather than global in scale.
Jesus’s entire life and career are wrapped in riddles and mystery, especially at first glance. There are some of us who have heard these stories dozens of times and are still no closer to penetrating their meaning for our lives.
Yet Jesus’s coming also reminds us of the power that God has handed to us as God’s children and agents for change and renewal in the societies in which we live—the fact that God is within US to act according to bring God’s healing presence into view in the midst of sorrow.
Advent reminds us of the truth of Jesus’s THIRD coming as much as the first two in this: Jesus comes into the world from within us, when we let him. A miracle, by definition, is often only recognized as a miracle AFTER the fact, when it comes from the unexpected—a miracle is itself a mystery, since it’s unexplainable by our normal tools of natural law and reason. The season we are called to observe for the next four weeks is stubbornly wrapped in miracle and mystery, even from our perspective 2000 years on the other side of it.
But here’s the blessing behind the currently unanswered longing we hear today: even in the storm surges of human existence, Jesus enters into human life and reminds us that God is not aloof from human suffering but knows it intimately. Jesus is Alpha and Omega, present at every beginning and cradling us to his shoulder in every ending. Jesus’s willingness to enter into this howling wilderness of human existence offers us the hope of healing and wholeness and peace—that beautiful state of release and rest our Jewish brethren call shalom—to bring our longing, aching hearts to rest and recovery, from our beginning to our end. Every ending also contains within it a beginning—and that IS good news, indeed. (5)
Stay awake and alert, therefore. Open your heart to Jesus, and allow Jesus’s power and love to work through you where others are hurting and lost.
Amen.
And 101 years ago, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats looked at the world as it was in 1919—violent rebellions in Ireland against British rule; the end of a modern, industrialized war that was filled with new, human-designed horror of chemical warfare and poison gas. And on top of it, he had nearly lost his pregnant wife to the Spanish flu.
In late November 1919, Yeats wrote a poem that brings together Jesus’s incarnation at Christmas and his Second Coming at world’s end, as the early Christians expected—but fueled by feelings of abandonment such as Isaiah expressed. So, he wrote this poem, entitled “The Second Coming,” and vented some of his anger at his feelings of helplessness as well as the presumption that a baby’s birth 2000 years prior could do anything to alleviate his anxiety:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blind and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?(2)
After all, the Hebrew scriptures are filled with stories of a God who leads a ragtag rabble through a howling wilderness with a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud and causes the bread of angels and hailstorms of basically Cornish game hens to fall down at the feet of God’s beloved people. Why can’t we have a little bit of that right now?
We seek an answer to our longing for a respite, and our lectionary gives us dark portents. What are we to do with this?
Although Advent gives us the gift of hope and expectation, of learning to wait with grace with building excitement for what it to come, we are impatient. Surely just this once God can just accede to that plea from one of my favorite 80s rock bands, the Smiths, and written by their mad king, Morrissey, in the dreamy, brief musical gem “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want.” As gorgeous music swirls in the background the singer morosely vents his frustration at losing out on what his heart most desires, and prays to a God he usually dismisses:
Good times for a change
See, the luck I've had
Can make a good man turn bad
So please, please, please
Let me, let me, let me
Let me get what I want this time…(3)
Who can’t relate to this feeling of being on the losing end? And we set ourselves up for it, so much of the time. We are constantly caught in a conundrum of our own making. We want to proclaim our freedom and independence loudly—until a crisis comes. Then, too often, that same God we hold at arm’s length so that we don’t have to give up our autonomy and self-congratulatory belief in our own agency suddenly is the same God we cry out to solve all our problems like a genie when things go wrong.
However…. (There’s always a however, isn’t there?)
If you think waiting is hard for us to understand, just wait until you see the Incarnation.
That the same God who gives us free will means it, and chooses self-limitation in order to grant us our freedom to choose. A God who so often chooses the underdog, the youngest son to be the leader, the barren womb to give birth to nations, is telling us to WAIT, darn it, and that God is coming into this aching world to help us learn how to better tend to it and each other. But instead of the heavens torn open and a warrior God on a chariot from heaven, with white beard streaming over his muscular, warrior’s body swooping down to fix things, straight from the Sistine Chapel to your living room, what do we get instead?
A baby. One of the most helpless, squishy things on earth. That’s what we’re waiting on, while the world crashes down around our ears. A God who enters human history as a peasant baby in a backwater of Empire with an unwed teenaged mother.
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| Jyoti Sahi, Incarnation in the Anthill, 2019 |
Jesus’s shockingly unspectacular birth was a source of embarrassment for some of his earliest followers, those like Judas Iscariot, who maybe could get past Jesus’s humble birth but could not get past his refusal, as the rightful king of Israel to take up arms and foment a military coup in which the TRUE savior of Israel would restore the monarchy of King David and drive the invaders from Israel’s borders.
So one answer to our situation, especially in times such as these, is to see if there are spots where we can embrace mystery and wonder—the mystery and wonder of worshiping a God who does the unexpected.
One answer to Yeats’s howl of rage is given to us from another poet-- Denise Levertov. At age sixty, she converted to Christianity after growing up with a Welsh mother and a Russian Jewish Hasidic émigré father who became an Anglican priest. After her conversion, she wrote some of the most beautiful religious poetry of the late 20th century, in my opinion. And she answers Yeats’ dread and despair with wonder and awe in this poem, entitled “On The Mystery of the Incarnation:”
It's when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.(4)
Levertov reminds us that God looks into our pain, our waywardness, and, instead of abandonment or punishment, answers with the best God has to offer: God’s own son to show us how to live a fully human life, and to show us how close to God’s heart we are, how to recover the divine spark that God enclosed in us from our beginning. That’s what Advent promises us, despite apocalypses all around.
The theme of Advent is "watching and waiting." These two attitudes can be filled with either hope or dread, and sometimes both at the same time, because sometimes an ending can lead to new life, new growth. Sometimes an ending can be a blessing—even if that comes later, and especially if it becomes a blessing only because our tendency as humans is to try to reshape our stories so that even our losses end up blessing us with new wisdom, new resilience, new inner resources.
It’s easy to take for granted God’s care of us when things are ticking along smoothly. It’s easy then to discount the safety net that God stretches beneath us, running alongside us as we wobble along from one adventure to another like a small child riding their bikes without training wheels. But this pandemic has brought us real heartache. It’s also called us to embrace minor inconveniences for the sake of the protection of others. And we should not equate the two. Real tragedies are job losses and health care coverage then disappearing and long term illness and a quarter million families dynamited by the loss of loved ones forever just in the US alone. We stand in the midst of millions of little apocalypses too, no less real because they are personal rather than global in scale.
Jesus’s entire life and career are wrapped in riddles and mystery, especially at first glance. There are some of us who have heard these stories dozens of times and are still no closer to penetrating their meaning for our lives.
Yet Jesus’s coming also reminds us of the power that God has handed to us as God’s children and agents for change and renewal in the societies in which we live—the fact that God is within US to act according to bring God’s healing presence into view in the midst of sorrow.
Advent reminds us of the truth of Jesus’s THIRD coming as much as the first two in this: Jesus comes into the world from within us, when we let him. A miracle, by definition, is often only recognized as a miracle AFTER the fact, when it comes from the unexpected—a miracle is itself a mystery, since it’s unexplainable by our normal tools of natural law and reason. The season we are called to observe for the next four weeks is stubbornly wrapped in miracle and mystery, even from our perspective 2000 years on the other side of it.
But here’s the blessing behind the currently unanswered longing we hear today: even in the storm surges of human existence, Jesus enters into human life and reminds us that God is not aloof from human suffering but knows it intimately. Jesus is Alpha and Omega, present at every beginning and cradling us to his shoulder in every ending. Jesus’s willingness to enter into this howling wilderness of human existence offers us the hope of healing and wholeness and peace—that beautiful state of release and rest our Jewish brethren call shalom—to bring our longing, aching hearts to rest and recovery, from our beginning to our end. Every ending also contains within it a beginning—and that IS good news, indeed. (5)
Stay awake and alert, therefore. Open your heart to Jesus, and allow Jesus’s power and love to work through you where others are hurting and lost.
Amen.
Preached at the 10:30 am online service of Morning Prayer on November 29, 2020 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.
Readings:
Citations
1) End and Beginning, © by Jan Richardson, janrichardson.com. Used by permission.
2) William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming," in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 1989. For a discussion of this poem, see here.
3) Steven Patrick Morrissey and Johnny Marr, "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want," from the album Hatful of Hollow, 1984.
4) Jyoti Sahi, Incarnation in the Anthill, 2019, from Art and Theology blog.
5) Denise Levertov, "On the Mystery of the Incarnation," from The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, 2013. For a wonderful overview of her spiritual poetry, see here. For a collection of Levertov's religious poetry, see The Stream and the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes, 1997.
6) Jan Richardson, "Blessing When the World Is Ending," November 23, 2014, at The Advent Door, at janrichardson.com
