First Sunday of Advent, November 30, 2014 | 8:00 a.m.

Shaped by Hope

Matt Helms
Minister for Children and Families, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 42:1–8
Isaiah 64:1–9
Mark 13:24–37

Work from God goes on quite simply in that way; one does not always have to wait for something out of the ordinary. The all-important thing is to keep your eyes on what comes from God and to make way for it to come into being here on Earth.

Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, Action in Waiting

I’m sure some of you are sitting there wondering if I mistakenly picked the wrong text from the lectionary this week. After all it’s the first week of Advent, and this passage from Mark feels terribly out of place. What do exhortations from Jesus to stay awake and apocalyptic imagery have to do with the season, aside from the madness of Black Friday shopping? I think when most of us think about the progression of Advent, it’s about the messages of Micah and Isaiah speaking about one who will come to bring peace and a righteous rule. It’s about characters like Zechariah and Elizabeth, Gabriel and Mary and Joseph, shepherds and wise men and prophets. These words from Jesus come from the closing chapters of Mark’s Gospel, which feels odd given that we find ourselves at the beginning of the Christian calendar with the start of Advent. Why are we hearing the end of the story rather than starting at the beginning?

But it’s not just the chronology of this passage that feels so foreign. These apocalyptic and urgent words interrupt the childhood joy most of us associate with the season. There is something about the Christmas season that captivates us—so much so that I’ve been seeing décor, lights, cookies, and candy since mid-November! This season brings a rush of memories from our childhoods: waiting for that one present you really wanted, opening Advent calendars, decorating the Christmas tree, the ringing bells of the Salvation Army, and time together with family. These words from Jesus feel heavy and ominous and create a sharp contrast to the colors, lights, and sounds we see up and down Michigan Avenue and even here within our own decorated Sanctuary. This is the season of hope, wonder, and amazement, and yet this passage doesn’t give us any of those things. So what does it have to do with Advent?

Looking at the root of the name Advent helps to shed a little light. Advent comes from a Latin word meaning “arrival” or “coming”; something that looks forward not just to Jesus’ birth but to his return as well. Christ’s return, or the so-called second Advent, was anxiously anticipated by early Christians—something that faded in importance as the years passed. But in the context of this Mark passage, it was much more than timing at stake; how Jesus’ followers were to live their lives became of the utmost importance. We tend to think of the word apocalypse as a catastrophic, end-of-days prediction, but the genre of apocalyptic writing—even for entire books such as Revelation—were less about the future then they were about speaking to the present. Mark’s Gospel is thought to have been written during the terribly chaotic period of the First Jewish Revolt, a rebellion by Israel against Rome that ended with the utter destruction of Jerusalem and left hundreds of thousands as refugees. When people heard these words from Jesus, they would not have been left thinking about a future date. They would have heard him speaking to their reality. They were living in the midst of an unknown, and the promise of a new reign separate from Roman rule would have been of great comfort and hope.

But it wasn’t even just the promise of hope from this passage. It was the urgency of that hope. Jesus isn’t prone to repeat phrases in his teachings throughout the Gospels, and yet within the span of a paragraph, he says “Keep awake” three times. They were being encouraged to be watchful, to be mindful, to be aware while they were waiting. This season of Advent is known all too well by kids as a season of waiting—usually as an unbearable twenty-five day countdown to just get to Christmas—but waiting can be more than a passing of the time. Spiritual writers like Henri Nouwen or Martin Copenhaver write about the practice of active waiting rather than merely passive waiting; an opportunity to drink deeply of the season and to feel its latent sense of hope and renewal. When Jesus challenges the listeners of the Gospel to “keep awake,” he is telling them that hope involves more than passively waiting for things to come to pass. It is a call to participate in active waiting, to be fully awake to the possibility of the season, and, like our characters from the Christmas story, to be alive with hopefulness as we await the coming of the child who promises to bring change to the way things have been.

That same active, hopeful waiting can be seen in our First Lesson today from the very late chapters of Isaiah. Isaiah’s prophecies get quoted a lot this time of year, but our passage from Isaiah isn’t actually a prophecy but rather a sort of prayer. In language that resembles the psalms, Isaiah—or more than likely one of Isaiah’s followers—pleads with God that he and the entire nation of Israel be renewed. “We are the clay and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand,” he writes—one of the most powerful biblical images recalling not just the moment of creation, but also the way in which God is involved with a sustained shaping of our lives. The context and history of the entire book of Isaiah is actually somewhat challenging, but most scholars would say that the latter chapters of the book were written after Israel returned from exile during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. Into this context, the prophet writing this prayer would have seen the Israelites struggling to return to a pre-exilic period, trying to piece together some semblance of national and religious identity. It was a time, in short, of waiting—waiting for those who had been scattered to return, waiting for the temple to be rebuilt, waiting for leaders to arise and for Jerusalem to be rebuilt. But rather than seeing this time period as fruitless—as years of lost time between the desired outcome and where they were—the writer offers a powerful metaphor for this time of waiting: seeing ourselves as clay to be sculpted.

I don’t know how many of you have ever had the experience of working with clay as a child or adult, but my church had an entire room dedicated to crafting clay when I was growing up. There were machines designed to press the clay out, a pottery wheel that you could use to gently shape the clay into shapes by placing your hand upon it, and we even had a kiln in the corner of the room to fire the clay. I was always fascinated with how malleable the clay was, how it was able to stay together so easily, even while being molded at the slightest of touch. It was a responsive material, able to be shaped and changed and restarted whenever you wanted, until the time came for you to place your final creation into the kiln to be fired. I was always shocked that the fired clay was the same material that I had just been playing with hours before. It went from being easily shaped to a hard, and yet fragile, substance. It was no longer fun and joyful; it was an art piece, a beautiful, finished product.

At the start of this Advent season, I’ve found myself wondering if the habits and routines and traditions of Advents past have acted like a kiln to the clay of this season. There’s nothing wrong with these routines and traditions in and of themselves: the decorating, baking, and shopping are filled with joy. But when they become the whole of our Advent preparation, or if they become a beautiful, finished product rather than a source of hope, we might be missing what this season is all about. The urgency of these passages from Isaiah and Mark suggest that Advent is about the urgency of allowing our lives to be molded by this season, not just falling into our usual routines and traditions. Keep awake, Jesus says. We are the clay and you are the potter, a prophet writes. Our Advent preparations should be messy, like working with clay—not a beautiful and fragile finished product. We need our hearts to be maleable—our daily patterns tractable—in order to truly prepare for the coming Christ.

And while these exhortations from Jesus and one of Isaiah’s followers are spoken towards individuals, it can’t be forgotten that they both have a wider audience in mind. Being shaped by this Advent season and seeking renewal isn’t just an individual process. It’s a communal one as well. The late chapters of Isaiah are addressed to all those who have returned home to Israel after exile, encouraging all of them to be made new in order that this rebuilt country might obey God’s commands. Jesus’ words from Mark are in his final discourse to the disciples, but he closes by emphasizing that his message is not just for them, but for all: we are to be awake, tractable, ready to be renewed.

There is so much in our world that needs renewal that oftentimes the needs feel completely overwhelming. We read daily about cycles of poverty, war-torn nations, and oppressive regimes. This week, news cycles were dominated by the grand jury’s decision on the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, even as similar scenarios and questions about justice continue to occur throughout the country. There is a need for renewal, a need for hope, a need for the Kingdom of God ushered in by the Prince of Peace. And that is the challenge of Advent: not to use this time as a cycle of routine and traditions to withdraw into, but as a time to actively wait and hope for what the Christ child means. Advent is a time for us to be open to new experiences that shape us, rather than repeating old ones that harden us like clay in a kiln. It can be a time for us as community to reevaluate the ways in which we are entrenched in old patterns rather than allowing new practices to shape us.

One of my favorite representations of this approach comes from what is called the praxis model, a movement in Latin-America during the twentieth century that emphasizes the ways in which our experiences affect our beliefs and vice-versa. The praxismodel depicts our experiences and beliefs in a sort of cycle, with each informing the other about how we engage and understand the world around us. Every time we have an experience, whether it be positive or negative, our reflections on that experience inform our understanding. In turn, our understanding informs how we will experience something. This cycle is inescapable, the theory goes, but it is up to us whether the cycle is a generative one or a destructive one. In a destructive cycle, we don’t allow ourselves to be open and our pattern becomes entrenched. In a generative cycle, however, our openness to new experiences or new ways of looking at things gives us the ability to reshape ourselves. We become that malleable, messy clay, able to be shaped and molded and reformed by the God who is our potter.

This season of preparation is not passive time, waiting for twenty-five days to pass on the calendar. It is an urgent invitation to be shaped by hope. So what might we do to be reshaped during this Advent season? Where might God be calling us to break out of patterns and to be molded by the latent sense of hope and renewal that this Advent season brings? On this first Sunday of Advent, each of us are challenged to consider these two questions as we wait, actively, for Christ’s coming. Amen.