December 1, 2002 - Advent 1
Isaiah 64:1-9a
Psalm 80:1-7
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
Mark 13:24-37
“Therefore, keep awake-for you do not know…” The gospel of Mark is often blunt. The shortest gospel is concise, and direct, and spares not a thought for niceties. This is a good think during Advent, when the readings assigned from scripture tell of apocalypse, the traditions of the Nativity speak of peace, and the practices of our culture scream for frantic activity. A good, blunt dose of Mark’s gospel is just what we need.
Advent, as you may have noticed, happens every year. The four Sunday’s preceding December twenty-fifth are always set aside for the season of Advent and the beginning again of our church year. Last week, the last Sunday in Pentecost, sometimes known as Christ the King Sunday, we reached the end of the cycle. Jesus was a King reigning from heaven, risen from the dead, triumphant over time. This week, a mere seven days later, Jesus is a fetus again, and we have to keep awake waiting for his birth.
The rest of the year we watch the cycle play out. Jesus will be born at Christmas. twelve days later the wise men will realize what has happened at Epiphany. The following week Jesus gets baptized and a few weeks later his parents present him in the temple. We go on like this, marking various events in Jesus’ life until Ash Wednesday when we spend forty days anticipating his death. On Easter it’s resurrection, then ascension and the introduction of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and finally a long summer of parables and stories about all the great things Jesus had to say. Finally we’ll reach Christ the King Sunday and we’re back where we started.
You might think of it as a circle, as we go around and around the cycle of Jesus’ life each year. History as a circle has its nice points. It is comforting to think that things repeat themselves, that there is a rhythm to life, and a sense of completeness when the circle comes around. There was a bump in the circle last week, where we went from the end back to the beginning. Of course, there is a downside too. If time is a circle then we have to keep doing the same things over and over again. Elementary school teachers like to say that if you don’t learn your history you are doomed to repeat it. I guess this must be true, because in fifth grade I learned about Napoleon and sure enough I have never tried to invade Russia in the winter. [Note: as much as I'd like to take credit for this joke, I admit to borrowing it from Sarah Vowell, author of Partly Cloudy Patriot]
My dad, who thinks mechanical engineering is entertaining, and studies the science of physics for fun, scoffs when I try to tell him history is a circle. “Time is a constant,” he says, “a straight line form the beginning point into the future.” Time is not variable, or mutable, or travelable, despite the overwhelming evidence of science fiction shows. Thinking about time as a line solves the problem of repeating ourselves like hamsters running in a giant toy wheel. It also leaves something to be desired, however, when it comes to the rhythmic and cyclical reality of our lives, the seasons, and the church calendar.
My solution, which I would like to propose to you today, is that history is neither a line, nor a circle. History is, rather, a slinky. I may not be the first person to propose this concept. It’s really quite obvious if you think about it. If you combine a line and a circle you end up with a slinky, for a slinky is just a line that keeps circling around, and a circle that never quite gets back to where it started from.
History as a slinky provides the best of both worlds. Imagine that time is a slinky and we are on it. We travel along the slinky and one complete rotation equals one year. We are now almost back where we stared from, but not quite. We can see last year, but we are just a bit further on. As the years go by we make progress up the slinky but we also can see where we were last year as we cycle around. The slinky model explains the cyclical nature of our lives, while allowing for the hope of progress.
It also explains the bump in the year when we come around again. There are certain points on the slinky where we are particularly likely to pause and look at the circles above or below us. Anniversaries are individual bumps, while seasons like Advent and Christmas usually bump all of us. During these times we look back to see the slinky circles we’ve come from. Some bumps, like New Year’s, also encourage us to look forward, to the slinky circles we’ve not yet reached.
We can even make our own bumps sometimes. World AIDS day, marked on December first, is such a manufactured bump. HIV and AIDS are a disease that a significant piece of this planet’s human pie has to live with every day of the year. If you are not a part of that piece of pie, then you may be able to forget about AIDS for much of the year. And so we invented this bump on December first, where everyone can wear a red ribbon, and everyone can pause and think about AIDS, and how terrible it is, and how we might do something together to help.
Advent is another big bump in the slinky. This period of waiting for the baby Jesus, of living in expectation, reminds us annually of a reality we live with all year long. The idea that God would make God’s self into a human being and spend a human lifespan living among us is not something easily understood. And so we split the idea up into pieces and spread it over a whole year and then do it over and over again. The piece we’re dealing with in this season is the waiting, and expecting, and keeping awake.
It has become traditional for preachers and ministers to make the annual soap box speech about the terrible secularization of The Season. As a priest of the church I feel that it is my responsibility to fire a few rounds in this annual and ongoing battle to recapture the meaning of Christmas. Each year we bewail the state of our holy day, asserting that Christmas is not about Santa Claus, and railing against the secularization, sentimentalization, and commercialization of the birthday of Jesus.
At the risk of sounding like a wild-eyed zealot, I would like to go on record as agreeing with the church’s rant. It’s not that I’m worried about Jesus. He’ll have a fine birthday no matter now much money we waste at the Sharper Image. It’s just that all the extraneous holiday stuff can smooth over the bump in the slinky that is Advent. If you’re not careful all the shopping and decorating and running around can make you forget to stop and look at the slinky circles of the past or to imagine what the slinky circles of the future might look like. Jesus just started his slinky circle all over again. It might be nice if we took a moment to watch how that plays out.