Now and Not Yet

A sermon by Beth Downey Swatzky on Isaiah 64:1-9 and Mark 13:24-37

May only truth be spoken, and only truth received. Amen.

Well folks… Blessed Advent. If you’ve been with us for any length of time, whether in person or by podcast you will know that Advent is a pretty big deal around here. As the Lenten fasting season prepares our hearts for the Easter feast so the Advent season has, traditionally, helped the church prepare for the Christmas feast. The Christ Mass. In fact, Advent is the season that kicks off the Church Calendar year. It’s the tone setter. And that tradition, to which St Benedict’s Table has been especially committed since its inception, stands in stark contrast to the pace and performance of pre-Christmas out there, in the world we move through most of the week.

Advent, as our readings this evening show, is about meditating on one of the richest, most central paradoxes of our life of faith. The fact that Christ’s kingdom is, for us here today, both now and…not yet. We live in the time in between. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection are a fait accompli—the truth of his victory over sin and death; the truth of his kingship over our lives and the ultimate trajectory of the world; it’s a done deal. These are spiritual truths we stake our lives on in everything we say and do, day by day. Or that’s the idea.

And yet the fullness of that kingdom, the new heaven and the new earth, the very fullest redemption and restoration of all things, promised and eagerly anticipated in Scripture, are not yet accomplished. This we know. Now, and not yet. Advent is, thanks be to God, a time to feel, to witness, to grieve and very much to pray for all the brokenness we experience in our own lives, our neighbours’ lives, in the human and more-than-human world all around us.

Our first reading tonight, from Isaiah, expresses the passions—the grief and outcry—of the Hebrew nation during a time of exile—very much like the feelings that Hebrew people under Roman rule, in the time leading up to Jesus’ birth, would have felt.

Isaiah’s words sing a dirge for the national soul during this time: he sings the pain, alienation, lack, even oppression they feel. But he’s quick to connect those feelings of real-world exile with the feelings that God’s people ought to have about being in a spiritual or devotional condition of exile—of being distant from and at odds with their source and home, God our Maker.

“When we continued in sin you were angry. How then can we be saved?” [How unified again with You, God?] We shrivel up like autumn leaves, he says, we’re blown away—swept off--in the wind of our own way. What an image: the rootlessness of that condition, the constant tumultuous blowing around without rest; the drying, winnowing quality of that wind.

The NRSV, which we read tonight, puts it this way “There is no one who calls on you or attempts to take hold of you.” —and here in this Advent season of now and not yet, I’ll invite you to take that phrase and cast your eyes forward to a small, insignificant woman who will press through a terrible crowd, too shy to try to speak to Jesus, but certain that if she could just touch his robe, just momentarily lay hold of him, she would be utterly healed.

Back to Isaiah: “Yet you oh Lord are our Father. We are the clay and you are the potter, and we are all the work of your hands. Do not be angry beyond measure, Lord; do not remember our sins for ever. Look on us, we pray, for we are your people.” What an intimate prayer. The language of clay and potter recalls that we are all the children of that first a-dahm, or dirt being, of Genesis, into whom Yahweh tenderly breathed life. And so the prophet who laments “you have hidden your face from us” prays not only for mercy—not only for mercy but for intimacy. For eye-contact. “Look on us,” he prays. As we are, sinful, estranged, deeply broken, prone to wander, yet utterly yours—for if not yours Maker God, then whose? I tell you, Shakespeare was quoting Isaiah when he wrote

Love is not love/

that alters when it alteration finds,/

nor bends with the remover to remove.

Oh no, it is an ever fixed mark

that looks on tempests and is not shaken.

“Look on us, for we are your people.” Now. And …not yet.

Our second reading, from the Gospel of Mark takes us down the timeline a bit, to a point where Jesus is alive and ministering. I’m not going to try to unpack it as a whole but I want to make one observation about a curious gesture in the writing, right in the middle. At the beginning of this passage Jesus is talking about the certainty that many terrible things, many small-a apocalypses will transpire before the Kingdom of Heaven is fully realized. Don’t be shocked, and don’t be misled, Jesus says, when the world as you know it ends. It’s going to end a fair few times before curtains. And that’s part of what Advent is for, too. It’s for those in the midst of their own small-a apocalypse to join voices with those in our great cloud of witnesses who have howled that raw nighttime howl of agony to the Lord their God, night after night, even while others were feasting and celebrating.

Now, the real finale, sometimes called the Day of the Lord, it’s often described biblically as being preceded by a capital-A Apocalypse. Jesus paints us a brief picture of that here: the sun and moon darkened, the heavenly bodies tumbling from the sky, the heavenly powers (think ‘powers and principalities’) shaken. But where does Jesus go from that image? He talks about the Day of the Lord and the gathering of all God’s people from the ends of the earth (and the ends of the heaven…intriguing). But then he goes to this imagery of the fig tree. Without transition, as though it were no kind of nonsequitor, he starts in on this imagery of new life. Springtime.

“Learn this lesson from the fig tree,” Jesus says. “As soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.” The apocalyptic stuff…that’s not what the Day of the Lord is…the Day of the Lord, at least in this passage, is a leafburst. The first day of a long, indeed an eternal and victorious summer. B’ys we’re in Aslan’s country here! The white witch’s winter shall be permanently overthrown! And what’s one of the first signs of that, in the Chronicles of Narnia? Santa! Father Christmas gets in! That’s Advent in Lewis’s world folks, now and not yet. Christmas comes in the midst of the Witch’s winter, as a harbinger of Aslan’s Spring to come.

(I honestly think from now on whenever I contemplate that major Advent image, the Jesse Tree sprouting anew from the root, I’m going to imagine it as a fig tree.)

Well. This is where we find ourselves. Squarely, inescapably located in the now and not yet of Christ’s Kingdom. All the nows and not yets of daily life in faith. Advent where we start our church year; Advent, where we start every morning of our lives. [Pause.] How then do we practise this reality. How do we learn its graces by rehearsing its rhythms? Liturgy after all, means, the work of the people. Advent is our work and our privilege, not just for the next three Sunday evenings at church, but for the next three weeks.

Many of us are accustomed to the idea of ‘giving something up for Lent; it can be difficult, but relatively speaking, there’s little out there during the Lenten season to really stand in our way. By contrast, in some ways it’s difficult to even contemplate what it would look like to adopt a fast-season attitude toward Advent—complete with a sacrificial practise, whether of releasing or of doing--given that it would undoubtedly clash with the expected, sometimes socially mandatory habits of merriment that, here in this country, tend to begin December 1st or even sooner! It’s not unimaginable that there could be some real awkwardness produced by even small gestures of reserve, of waiting, or sacrificial devotion, in the lead up to Christmas Day. And yet I think most years, most of us deeply need what that kind of a spiritual discipline tends to produce—in our hearts, our heartrates, our thought patterns, our ways of seeing and speaking to others, in our attentiveness to the still small voice of God.

So think about it. Think about holding off on some of the decorations, or the Christmas music. Think about holding off on holiday treats until at least Tibb’s Eve—that’s December 23rd for you mainlanders. Alternately, consider taking up a discipline: maybe you bring a meal, or extend an invitation, once a week, to somebody in your circle who is hungry, ill, or lonely. Maybe you make a coffee date with somebody who needs the warmth and refreshment. Maybe you love to crochet—bring some extra mittens or socks for the Epiphany baskets. Perhaps rather than material deeds, you tithe your attention, by adding someone or something particular to your prayers each day. Whatever it is. Choose a practise that helps you recognize and respond to the Now and Not Yet in your scope of life.

Now, during the pandemic even our beloved, unbrookable Jamie Howison allowed that a softer approach to Advent might be called for, given how extremely sacrificial ordinary life had become during that time. Pastoral sense dictated a recognition that for those years, some folks needed to lean into the anticipation, the now already of “now and not yet.” And I think that can be true for some of us at any time. For the folks who find themselves in that boat, those who need most to sing the now already part, I’d like to introduce an idea--by way of this little book:

It’s a children’s picture book called Snow, written by Uri Shulevitz, and it is a profound little parable about living out the now gospel of our Now and Not Yet reality--witnessing it in small everyday things. It’s very short, so if you’ll indulge me I’d like to share it with you now and then close.

(You can find me after service if you want to see the pictures.)

[[BOOK]]

I bought this book for my son last Christmas because I wanted him to grow up knowing that a start. One single gesture. Is enough to bring about the total condition. In a Christ-defined universe, it is. If the oak tree is in the acorn, then Christ’s Kingdom--a loving, peaceful, hopeful world—is born each and every time one person is brave enough to do something loving. To choose hope. To build peace. In a way that’s what we declare and rehearse every time we partake of the Eucharist. Christ’s individual sacrifice, which draws us all into unity, is the single gesture that brings about the total and ultimate condition of Grace, backwards and forwards in time.

So if you think this Advent is one for you to lean into as a sacrificial, fasting season, something to really give you back the feast of Christmas when it comes, do that. But if you think this Advent might be one for you to lean into as a season for preaching—to yourself and to others—that one snowflake means it’s snowing, do that. Dedicate yourself to witnessing the single gestures, the starts, the pieces, the clay…that God the potter works into worlds.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.