Mark 13:24-37
Advent readings always seem a little off kilter to me. They take and turn the world upside down and inside out. They don't leave us standing on any solid ground. God has left us, claims Isaiah today and the earth is shaken. In Mark we are to keep watch because we don't know when God will come and while this is all happening the earth is shaken and the moon and the sun don't know their right place and the stars are falling out of the sky. Everything turned every which way. Maybe it's a sign. Isn't this what Mark is telling us to look, watch for the sign?
I love advent in a way, a period of waiting, watching. A time to deepen our walk with God, a time to pay attention to where God is incarnate. It asks us also to examine ourselves. Maybe this is why the readings are so jarring. They fit where we are right now. Many would say the world is not in a better place. What have we done to actively help with making it less threatening, less scary, less as if it is ending and all we care for is ourselves.
Maybe this is why I like to be up at night during advent. The dark fascinates me, it also represents a hope to me. Tonight the sky is alight with a pretty full moon and the landscape is not as it is in the daytime. There is a cast of light through the trees, the shadows are different than in the day and yet you can see if you turn off your inside lights. I can see the deck, I can make out the path which leads to the lower deck, and the clouds are shining with the stars out underneath. It is a changed landscape, upside down and turned over.
As we wait for the birth for the arrival of Jesus should we not turn over our whole world and remake it. It's like a good fall cleaning. Getting out the cobwebs, shooing out our complacency with the world as we now know it and making it ready, ready like the nursery, ready for an arrival, more ready for Jesus to come. Watch and wait, learn from the watching. Looking at the night gives me this experience. It is a precious gift this night scape. Where we cannot see, where things are ill-defined and where the light can be blotted out with a mass of clouds and we have to rely on the memory of where things are, or bump into them.
Keep watch, wait for the coming, look for the signs. Where are the signs for us? Merleau-Ponty was a philosopher who dealt a lot in perspective and how it changes meaning for us. This is the same thing with the night scape. It invites me to wander into the darkness and be amazed at what small little lights highlight and change. It makes me wonder about life and how we walk in darkness and yet a light still comes, small and defenseless to a stable in the dark of night with only a star to herald the importance and guide the way. How many things do we miss in this life grappling with truth, with what we can see, and not in wondering about the dark and where it is and what it might show us?
If only I could stumble and fall headlong into this faith. We hope not to stumble, we hope to stay upright and yet our readings swirl and make us dizzy with endings and beginnings, with things falling and not in the right place, and maybe this off balance walk is to keep us knowing what faith is. Sometimes it is watching and waiting when we don't know the way at all. Sometimes it is learning that being off balanced and falling isn't the worst which can happen to us. Because it is in falling we find trust. We find our way deeper into the night scape, deeper into ourselves, and deeper into the one who loves us.
It is a place where we can contemplate how little we are and how young. This takes us back to cleaning out old ways and bringing in new. It is an intentional examining of ourselves. Our own inner darkness may surface and we may find we have missed the path. Its all a part of finding our way and stumbling forward. We are not fully revealed yet. We still have some dark to stumble through and this is okay. Watch, wait and keep the faith.
Comments
Post a Comment