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First Sunday of Advent Year B

  • Isaiah 64: 1-9

The Book of Isaiah concludes by recalling two distinct and seemingly contradictory traits of God’s behavior.  When God reveals God’s-Self, it is the equivalent of creation erupting– “mountains quake,” “fire kindles.”  Yet, this same God whose self-revelation can induce awe and even fear “works for those who remember [this God] and who wait….”   When this God of these contradictory traits “hid,” the results were dire:  we all became “like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like filthy cloth.”  Our lives “fade like a leaf” and our “iniquities” blow us away with the wind.  In such terrible times, “no one” calls “on your name, or attempts to take hold of you….”  Yet, (here is that peculiar biblical “yet” again!)  “Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.”  Do not stay “angry” and always remember “we are your people.”

  • Psalm 80: 1-7, 16-18

In a time of deep distress (perhaps the imminent destruction of the Northern Kingdom), the psalmist pleads for the “Shepherd of Israel” to “come to the rescue:  “bring us back.”  How long, the psalmist wonders, will the Lord “smolder” despite the “tears” of the Lord’s people, who are in constant conflict with their neighbors and mocked by enemies.  Exert your power and strength, the psalmist entreats the Lord, and “bring us back.”  Remember and recognize this “this vine,” this “stock that Your right hand planted.   May You adopt/guide/protect/enable “the son of man” as the channel for restoration.

  • I Corinthians 1: 3-9

Paul begins his difficult letter to this church in Corinth by recalling the core meaning of their identity: “the grace of God that has been given to you in Christ Jesus.”  Your self-understanding and all that you are counting on to get you through “to the end” is based on the life-giving words and works of Christ.  “God is faithful….”  God “called us into the fellowship…” which was inaugurated by the “Son, Christ our Lord.”

  • Mark 13: 24-37

Given the repeated conquests, rebellions, pogroms and mass death and destruction by the Greeks and then the Romans over the previous two hundred years, we should not be surprised to find a rich tradition of “apocalyptic” literature in the Hebrew scriptures,  and the Christian scriptures, including sections in the gospels, the writings of Paul and, of course, the Revelation of John the Divine.   Drawing literally and figuratively from the books of Isaiah, Daniel, Zechariah and Deuteronomy, Mark’s narrative depicts “In those days” the appearance of “the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.”  We must live as if this life-altering event could occur at any second, because no one knows or can know when it could happen.  The narrative  adds to the uncertainty by stating “this generation will not pass away” before this history changing event will occur and then says “no one knows when this will happen.”  Consider this scenario, the text invites: a boss entrusts to you everything valuable to her while she is away; you will need to keep one eye focused intently on what you are responsible for and your other eye just as sharply focused on signs of her return, which could be awhile or immediately; you have no way of knowing.  “Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.”

Among writers regarded as post-Modern, our self-understanding is not a cognitive exploration so much as it is self-awareness of our affective make-up.  Michel Foucault’s description of human  self-understanding is not a “certainty, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating….”  Instead self-understanding “must be conceived as an attitude, an ethos….”  (quoted in Blackwell’s Companion to Postmodern Theology, p. 87)

In this critical thirteenth chapter of Mark’s narrative, “the little apocalypse,” the writer is not concerned with “theology” or any sort of conceptualizing.  He is instead focused on an “attitude,” a stance, an “ethos,” a visceral preparedness.  The writer tells us to live in a permanent state of altertness to the possibility that everything we regard as important and reliable could be lost at any second.  We should regard whatever time we have as borrowed time.  We are to be alert, engaged, vigilant, not sleep-walking through life.  Live with one eye on our immediate responsibilities and the other alert to see when it could all end.  Life is not a rehearsal! 

Like some mighty double fugue, the scriptures weave together two dominant melodies and improvise on them endlessly: human-constructed time– hour, day, week, month, year, era, a single lifetime– juxtaposed with God’s time, which is always an ‘event’– an eruption/disruption/course correction/revelation/fresh start that comes unexpectedly out of nowhere.  John Caputo considers both these senses of “time” when he writes:

The time of the world is the sort of time that you can count, the time you can count on, the sort that economics depends upon; it is regular and reliable enough for us to calculate… Ticktock, ticktock.”  By contrast Caputo continues: “The coming of the kingdom is not a matter of prediction or prophesying some coming event off in a dark and unknown future.”  Rather: “The Kingdom is already in us and something we are already in.  The time of the kingdom is today, now, already.”  “God rules now, in Jesus, who says that the kingdom is upon us.”   (The Weakness of God: A Theology of Event, pp 162/167

Biblical texts offer the most complete description of our humanity: one eye fixed firmly on our immediate responsibilities and the other eye just as firmly fixed on the advent of something over which we have no control but will change our lives fundamentally.  Alertness to the unexpected, the unscripted in the quotidian is a visceral “attitude, an ethos.”  For the believer, this sets the tone, the mood for three venues of expectation: for the birth of Jesus which inaugurated the first time God lived among us in the flesh; for the fact that time as we experience it will end; and, simultaneously,  the commencement of  a new year, a new liturgical year during which we will dare to walk the whole  journey from his birth to his death and resurrection and the founding of a new community dedicated to re-telling annually and living out daily this unique attitude toward life.  “God rules now, in Jesus….”

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