Advent - Looking forward

Advent - looking forward: and how we face the uncertainties of the future, and what 'the coming of Jesus' can mean for that. Bill Weston found unexpectedly that the life-story of St Mark, with its emphasis on immaturity and failure, had a lot to offer in reflecting on these questions, in his sermon on the 4th December 2011.

“Advent”. Sermon for 4th December 2011 (2nd Sunday in Advent), Holy Trinity, Funchal

Isaiah 401-11, 2 Peter 38-15, Mark 11-8.

Advent – that word always takes me back to the classroom of my village primary school, and to some of the things we were taught there, which have stuck with clarity and permanence over 70 years. One was the multiplication tables; another was ‘Advent means coming’, and so I got, hardly noticing it at the time, one of my first understandings of a Latin word, and an early bit of fundamental and durable Christian teaching. Advent – coming. Then one of the most recent things I read was the same: in an expressive phrase, the ‘embracing mood’ – the default attitude might be another way of putting it – of Christian living is a mood of expectancy, or desire, looking forward, to something that is ahead, that is coming. Advent invites us to spend a month every year with this special emphasis, a large block of time, suggesting that this is comparable in importance to Lent, with its focus on the facts of Jesus’ suffering and resurrection. So – the first question for us on these Advent Sunday mornings - is that where you and I are, in a state of expectancy and looking forward ? It suggests that that is the appropriate state to be in, and encourages us to take a kind of thorough annual review of our lives and states of mind, looking back over this year, forward to Christmas and the new year beyond, and to renew that state of being attentive to and ready for what is coming. So going over the story of Jesus’ birth, or considering what might be meant by his second coming are not just historic or imaginative exercises, but what they are about is woven into what is happening in our own lives and in the world today. And why every year ? Well, I hope we don’t buy into the common attitude that annual repetition can only be boring and pointless. We are into material that quickly goes beyond what ordinary human language and comprehension can reach, and it is as we re-read and re-visit them throughout life that there is some chance that they will sink in and their meaning will be found, and that they will be found to be alive, formative and nourishing in the growth of Christian character and maturity.

But I found, rather to my surprise, that a theme far removed from that of maturity was coming to the fore when I started to consider these Bible passages for today, and I would like us to follow that a little. The gospel reading takes us to the first words of St Mark, and that drew my attention to the possible interest for us of how his ministry came about. Although he was in right at the beginning of Christianity, most of what little there is in the New Testament about Mark, is about immaturity and mistakes in his life. There is no suggestion that he was particularly close to Jesus, he certainly was not one of the hand-picked disciples. It seems that it was his mother who first became a follower of Jesus, while he was a boy living at home, and she had a house large enough to host gatherings of the first Christians; another of those women who apparently had quite an important part but whose story the New Testament leaves untold, concentrating as it does on the male disciples. It would be fascinating to know how she became a Christian, about her family, about how it changed her and the part she played, and how her faith was picked up by her son Mark. However, there is only one mention of Mark in the gospels, and he wrote it himself, although it doesn’t actually give his name. He was the young follower of Jesus who had the enthusiasm, and was close enough to know what was going on, to turn up in the garden of Gethsemane on the night Jesus was arrested, only to be the first to lose his nerve and be so frightened and desperate to get away that he slipped out of his clothes when someone grabbed him, and ran away naked. It must have been the most embarrassing and shameful moment in his life, the sort of memory we want to keep secret at all costs. Mark could have done that; instead, later in life,he put it in his account, his behaviour shown in the starkest contrast alongside that of Jesus.

When Mark next appears in the New Testament could be around 10 years later, perhaps in his 20s. He was still obviously among the inner group of the first Christians, but he chickened out part way through a major undertaking and apparently gave up the work of the church. He came to be seen, no doubt rightly, as seriously unreliable, and when it was suggested later that he be given a further chance of taking responsibility, Paul would not have it, which triggered one of those sharp conflicts that have always seemed characteristically to hit active churches like sudden painful hail-storms. They recovered of course, and as more years went by Mark evidently matured and improved, and when he is next mentioned in the New Testament, aged perhaps around 50, he and Paul were evidently reconciled and he was valued and appreciated.

It seems a very ordinary story, true to life, and perhaps true to much in our lives. What I think is worth noting is what that personal life-journey, of which he was obviously very conscious, motivated him to do, and perhaps we can recognise this also as a normal response to what are seen as deeply significant personal experiences. This was to make a record. Apparently he was the first to see and act on the need for this. Starting with the ancient prophecies of Isaiah (which I hope rang in the minds of many of us with the unforgettable music of Handel’s Messiah, as they did for me), and with the work of John the Baptist who saw the nature of Jesus’ mission so clearly and set the scene for it before others did, he calls that, and then the account of Jesus’ ministry, death and resurrection, where he quite abruptly finishes, as ‘the beginning of the gospel’; as if he felt there was no need for more to be written, but, Jesus now being risen, people could take the gospel story forward in their own experience. It is also thought that his aim in writing this first vivid and short account of Jesus was for the benefit of Christians in Rome where life was getting suddenly and seriously harder for Christians because of persecution and other problems. Perhaps we can sense how Mark, an expert in knowing how easy it was to crumble completely and shamefully when things got tough, but also having reached a place where he felt no need to hide that but humble, forgiven and confident enough in the presence of Jesus, felt he knew what would most help others in the same kind of situations. He is saying, get to know Jesus as I have done, let your life be changed by that as mine has been, let these basic historic facts and teaching get to work in your life, and you can find the toxic power of past failures and inadequacies neutralised, and have what it needs to take up yourselves the baton of the on-going gospel story.

What has all this to do with Advent 2011, for us and the situations we and our churches are in at this time ? However much we keep our own most embarrassing moments out of sight, I guess it is not difficult to identify with Mark the young man. But I hope that we can also share with him something of the difference Christian discipleship can make when it is centred on experience of living with the risen Jesus. At about the same time as Mark’s gospel was being written, St Peter wrote the letter from which we also read today, addressing the same circumstances of the times and considerations about the second coming of Jesus. Today’s news items can seem like an almost unrelieved prospect of doom and gloom which can be seriously unsettling, and it’s not all that unreasonable if it calls to mind that strange Bible theme of the Day of the Lord. For everyone who has lived so far, that, or the second coming of Jesus, has been in effect at the time of their death, and the statistical probability must be that that will be true for us as well. The best-qualified gurus today do assess the threats and challenges facing the planet and humanity in the decades immediately ahead as the greatest ever known. One sees the lifetimes of our children and grand-children as like the challenge of dangerous white-water rafting through the rapids of an appalling and unknown canyon, where all will depend on how they are prepared, and what they have got in their heads and characters in the way of steadiness, skill, training and confidence. But he also thinks it will be the best time in history to be alive as a young person because of the growth in technological and other resources. The main risk, in his view, is whether human knowledge and skill will be matched with enough of what he calls the quality of wisdom. At that point, where his expertise runs out, he happens to have dropped on a word the Bible knows very well and which is fully developed there and in the Christian gospel. Christian wisdom is about humans living at the fullest level of adult independence and responsibility but under God and in companionship with the risen Jesus, knowing deeply and intimately at first hand the love of God for people and the whole of creation, and taking all the gifts of intelligence, motivation, learning, science, technology and so much else as the resources God intends as our tool-kit. I hope this is familiar to us, and the message of our lives and our churches, fitting us, without being immune from anything that is around us or ahead, to offer sane perspectives, and hope, which people everywhere are increasingly looking for, and which are not found anywhere else. It means taking our Christian identity and discipleship seriously, and in ordinary daily life showing a different standpoint from that of the prevailing lack of vision and hope; and perhaps more so, and in a more distinctive and costly way than has been necessary in the easier times of our earlier lives.

So in Advent, with its month-long Christian focus on what is coming, we can be sure of two major areas to fix our attention on: first and obviously, the future, some of which we can envisage, imagine and prepare for but which is essentially unpredictable and unknown; and a continually fresh, deeper and better experience of God’s love, companionship and resources, intended and provided to enable us, and others, to face that future, changing and developing us, as we have seen Mark changed and developed, and by the same means. Resources matched to need.

Bill Weston