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Isaiah 64:1-9 & Mark 13:24-37
The Velveteen Rabbit, written by Margery Williams Bianco, is one of those children’s books that really isn’t just for children. It tells the story of a velveteen rabbit who becomes real through the love of a little boy. Early on in the story, the velveteen rabbit, on a search to become real, meets the Skin Horse who is real. The skin horse explains to the Velveteen Rabbit what real means:
“Real isn’t how you are made, it’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” “Does it Hurt?”, the Velveteen Rabbit asked. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.” “Does it happen all at once,” he asked, “or bit by bit?” “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen to people who break easily or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But those things don’t matter at all because once you are real you can’t be ugly except to people who don’t understand.”
I often wonder why we start out our Advent with such strange and disturbing stories, like this passage from Mark, often called the “little apocalypse”, instead of something like the Velveteen Rabbit? It’s Advent after all, the season where we prepare for a Christmas we say isn’t here yet, where we sing songs about the impending arrival of Jesus before we sing songs about the tiny, little, 8 pound -5 ounce baby Jesus born in a manger. Advent is an artificial drama, a tale told over and over again each year as a way of talking about becoming…a way of talking about hope as a verb…a way of talking about being “real”, which doesn’t happen all at once.
Honestly this is what is happening with all of this harsh language about darkened suns and falling stars, signs of fig trees blooming and the anxiousness of heaven and earth passing away. This is language of hope, as strange as that may seem to us. I want you to try and imagine with me living at a time when everything around you seemed in chaos. The economy in turmoil, decisions made that directly impact your life by people you don’t know or recognize in some far off place, decisions that seem to have little to do with you. The governing bodies make those decisions for one another and their cronies, not for the people they are supposed to serve. Marginalized people are made more marginalized, the poor getting poorer, the sick getting sicker, the distance between the haves and the have nots growing each day. The threat of war looming over you at all times and the interplay of state and religion taking very disturbing turns. I know, I know…it is hard to imagine, but try. And then interject, in the middle of that hopelessness, the rhetoric of renewal, the promise that what we feel trapped by now will NOT be the end, it will not have the final say.
Meanwhile, we try and deal with the hopelessness in lots of ways. We turn to a favored elected official – one of the “good” ones, or we transport ourselves to a fantasy world where a fictional hero, like Superman, comes to save us. Or, perhaps more likely, we give in to a numbing temptation from a culture that is really good at anesthetizing pain, with drugs or smartphones, with binge-watching or national championships, even in a Christmas where we ice skate in 75 degree weather or gather in a meeting to cut services to the poor and sick…a meeting we start with a prayer. Mark’s audience also tried to deal with such hopelessness. They wrote and spoke words of lament and struggle. They cried out to God – save us! And then began to wonder – How might God save us?
One popular proposal among scholars holds that Mark stitched this chapter together from two “apocalyptic tracts” present as he was writing. Mark was writing just after the takeover of Jerusalem by Rome and the absolute destruction of the most sacred place in all of Judaism, the temple. His time was full of the same angst and struggle that ours is now. The apocalyptic tales were a way to deal with that angst, but they were not unified, they sounded competing themes. If you read Mark in sections – certain verses of chapter 13, the text flows smoothly, warning Christians to prepare for an imminent apocalypse. And if we read different verses of chapter 13 in Mark together, the text also flows smoothly, but offers different counsel: believers need to dig in, stay faithful, and prepare for the long haul. The theory is that Mark had both of these stories in his head and rather than choose between them, decided to weave them together into the composite text we now possess.
That leaves us with a tradition that says both things, Jesus is coming again – very soon – an assertion that now seems implausible to say the least, and Jesus is coming again, but who knows when, so hunker down, stay awake and get ‘er done…which is a paraphrase of the Greek, of course. This leaves us with a dilemma. If the plan is for Jesus to come back and fix the world, a pretty alluring plan if I do say so myself, then the command would be – go back to sleep, Jesus has got you. But the other part of what is present even in Mark’s passage alone is the imperative for us to stay awake!
So, like Advent and Christmas, the reality might lie in finding a balance between capitulation of all responsibility to the impending arrival of a Savior and the burden of feeling like the world has to change on your shoulders alone. Maybe that’s why Mark wove these stories together, because they have relationship to one another. Without God we cannot, and without us God will not. We must have both sides of the equation to enact the kin-dom among us. This cry of Advent-waiting comes to us with an inherent subtext…as you wake, stay awake. But, we must also add – and maybe this is where the whole second coming thing figures in – do not wait passively, but wait instead with the intention of the kin-dom of God being born all around us. Wait with the anticipation of newness, the expectation of resurrection, the audacity of hope. Actively wait, with word and deed and heart, as if the world that we all wish existed, exists now. This is, after all, what makes something real. It isn’t the claim of reality, it is the living of it.
I think that we might find the longer we cry out, “Save us!”, the more we’ll notice that Jesus is standing next to us, shouting it too. For the work of Jesus is not about the end of times, it’s about the end of the injustice and misery, the end of the darkness with which we start our Advent-waiting. It’s not imminent or future, it’s participatory. This is why we begin Advent with hope. For hope is where this all starts because hope is never a realized thing. Whatever it is that you hope for, if you get it, you no longer need to hope. Hope is aimed forward, ahead of us, towards that which is not here, but which we affirm will be here. A more just world, a more kind world, a more loving world…yes, we hope that it is coming. But as followers of the Christ child, we are meant to hope actively, with defiance and boldness. We are meant to hope with purpose.
As we prepare ourselves for the “Christ-mass” to come, let us know…let us know deeply and without reservation…that the Christ-mass is not a worship service, it is a revolution. It isn’t about attendance, it is about participation. It is the defiant act of hope, met with the same intensity that drove these words onto a page somewhere in the first century…words that hoped with aggressive rhetoric and audacious visions of a change, a shift, a transformation so complete that it would seem like a world died and a new one awoke. We are called to bring the good news, which is God’s love for all people, justice for those on the edges of life, care for the sick and injured, freedom for those in chains. We are called to be hopeful people, to live it as a way of life so that once we start hoping, we never, ever stop. Because that’s how we change. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, that’s how we become real. And it takes a long time. It doesn’t happen in ease or comfort…it happens in the chaos, it happens in the struggle, it makes our joints loose and our hair thin. And it’s the only way to make something real. But, as the great theologian James Cone once wrote, no one wants a hope that hasn’t been tested in life’s great agonies.
Mark has a term for that. He calls it staying awake.