Don’t Miss the Signs
THE FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT
Isaiah 64:1-9 • Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18 • 1 Corinthians 1:3-9 • Mark 13:24-37
A few summers ago, I was pushing my daughter around the park in a bright blue stroller, when a dragonfly that exact shade of blue landed on the stroller’s sunshade. I don’t know how the world looks through a dragonfly’s giant, compound eyes. But I like to imagine the dragonfly’s thrill at spotting that identically blue stroller. A perfect place to alight! From its perch on that stroller, the dragonfly could survey its domain, and rest for a bit, securely camouflaged.
For me, this meeting of two identical shades of blue on a perfect summer’s day felt like an extraordinary alignment of heaven and earth.
We could use more moments like this. In our first reading today, a prophet cries to the Lord, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” This longed-for collision of the Lord’s presence with our earthly home would be like fire kindling brushwood—the crackling start of something we can’t contain. It would be like fire causing water to boil—the simmering beginning of wholesale transformation.
But for now, the prophet laments, “We all fade like a leaf.” These withered, faded leaves are snatched away by vices, injustices, and malignant forces pervading the prophet’s world. From our current seasonal place on our planet, we too see many faded leaves carried off by wind, and no blue dragonflies.
This prophet wants God to act more like the God he was 800 before. Back then, the Lord showed everyone who was boss. In the longer version of the passage that we read an excerpt from today (63:7-64:11), the prophet recalls how the Lord “became a savior” to his people. Because the word “savior” and “Moses” sound similar in Hebrew, you could almost say that back then, the Lord “became a Moses” for his people. Now the people ask, “Where is the [God] . . . who caused his glorious arm to march at the right hand of Moses, who divided the waters before them . . . ?” Where is he?
In the words we read today, the prophet desires torn-open heavens, quaking mountains, and fire-like presence—just like when the Lord appeared to the Israelites after their escape through the Red Sea. There was thunder and lightning, descending fire, and the violent shaking of Mount Sinai (Exo 19:16-18).
As people told and retold the story of the Exodus, they came to feel that God was awesome back in the day. We need that God to come storming back.
In our gospel today, Jesus asks his disciples to watch for the saving presence of God breaking into our world.
Jesus starts with a stock image from the prophets: “the sun will be darkened, and the moon won’t give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven . . .” The prophet Isaiah froetold that after the heavenly bodies darkened, the sky would roll up like a scroll (Isa 34:4), wiping away the flimsy barrier between earth and God’s presence. Another prophecy from Isaiah proclaimed that the heavenly bodies would go dark because they put on the sackloth of repentance. Repentance was necessary for God’s transforming presence to appear (Isa 50:3).
For the prophet Ezekiel, the obstruction of light from stars, sun, and moon, and the ensuing spread of darkness, would intimidate aggressive empires (Eze 32:7-8). This darkness would repeat the plague of darkness that the Lord brought down on Egypt long ago—a darkness so thick that no Egyptian could see the other’s face for three days (Exo 10:21-23). Prophets like Amos and Joel thought the darkened sun would foreshadow deliverance from the Assyrian empire, from the Persian empire—and from sin itself.
In all these cases, the image of the sun, moon, and stars going dark portends that the barrier between earth and heaven, between ourselves and the saving presence of God, could dissolve.
On April 8th of next year, a total solar eclipse will cross North America, reaching Arkansas around midday. When it comes, the eclipse might remind us of the Lord’s words, though the prophet Amos in the eighth century BC, “I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight” (Amo 8:9). The moment might remind us of Jesus’ crucifixion, when darkness covers the land from noon until Jesus’ death, three hours later (Mk 15:33). We’ll have heard that story just two weeks before the eclipse. The moment might remind us of today’s gospel reading.
But I tend to think that Mark the evangelist wasn’t trying to train us to correlate ancient words with precise current events. Instead, I think Mark the evangelist uses imagery from the prophets to evoke for us a world alive with God’s saving presence.
We’ll have many chances to immerse ourselves in that world in the year ahead. Like our planet, the church has a cycle of seasons with their own signs, and today is the first day of the church’s new cycle and season called Advent. Each year, we focus on one gospel. This year, that gospel is Mark.
Mark evokes a world alive with God’s saving presence, using resonant words and subtle allusions. Mark’s gospel begins with a new exodus—when John the Baptist journeys out of Judah, back into the desert. There, just as the infant Moses was saved by his mother and Pharaoh’s daughter from the Nile, so God dredges another savior from the river: the baptized Jesus. Just as an ancient prophet longed to see the heavens torn apart and the presence of God coming down, so the baptized Jesus sees “the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove” (Mk 1.10). When Jesus dies, the curtain of the temple also tears, from top to bottom (Mk 15:38).
For years after Mark’s gospel was written, people have tried to spell out the theological significance of images, like dipping people in the River Jordan, the spirit in the form of a dove, the temple’s torn curtain. But in Mark’s gospel, these images simply invite us into an atmosphere where God’s saving presence is closer than we think. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus asks us to station ourselves like doorkeepers at the fractures and pinholes where we can welcome this presence in.
Jesus knows that we know the signs that summer is near—signs like branches becoming tender and putting forth their leaves. But even in winter, we can watch with that level of alert expectation. In the church season of Advent, we watch especially closely for the birth of Jesus as a sign of God’s saving presence with us. On Christmas itself, we’ll have to read from a gospel other than Mark—since Mark doesn’t include a story of Jesus’ birth. Christians after Mark’s gospel chose the symbol of his mother Mary’s pre- (and sometimes post-)partum virginity to signify the utterly nonviolent entrance of Jesus, the anointed one into the world.
“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” the prophet cries. The Lord responds with an arrival that’s impossibly gentle, but just as portentous.
© 2023 The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas