Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Mark 13:24-37

The ending of the musical, “Hamilton,” is sudden, surprising, and quite powerful. When I first saw the show, I experienced this rush of emotion—tears even–that I still can’t quite explain.  In the final scene, Alexander Hamilton’s widow, Eliza, sings of living 50 years after his death, during which time she established an orphanage, raised funds for the Washington Monument and worked to further her husband’s legacy. Then, in the show’s final moment, she looks straight at the audience and gasps, and the stage goes dark.

People have been debating the meaning of that moment since the show debuted in 2015.  Is it the moment of her death, and she sees her beloved Alexander, who promised to wait for her on the other side?  Does she see God?  Or does that theatrical, fourth wall drop, and she sees the audience and realize that her work to ensure his legacy was accomplished?  Or is she overwhelmed to discover that her own story has now being told; that she is an author in her own right, a crucial storyteller in American history even, an actor in her own history?

Lin Manuel Miranda, the creator of the show, won’t say what he intended. For me, every time I think of that moment, I want to watch the show again and look for clues, or, at least, just sing along, “Look around, look around now how lucky we are to be alive.”

The first Sunday of Advent comes just late enough this year that for many of us we have danced full speed into Christmas, but the season begins with these sharp, bewildering, and powerful words of Jesus about the end of history.   The end of the show. The sun is eclipsed.  The moonlight refuses to shed its light during the night.  Stars are collapsing into black holes. The very historical powers that have served as the foundation of our experience and our meaning are trembling.

The most powerful word in this little apocalypse in Mark’s gospel is the word “Then.”

Then…

After all these frightful things, THEN you will see the Coming One, this archetypal Human One, the vision of what God meant all along, the Last Word, coming to collect us.

In a way, it shouldn’t be a surprise.  The pattern has been there all along.  You see it in the fig tree.  There is growth.  There is harvest.  There is fall and winter.  Things pass away.  Even what we thought was most important passes away.  We pass away.  Yet, in that passing, in that dying, there is a shout that goes up, a gasp, that all is not finished.

Every single one of us will have that same moment as Eliza.  Just as everything goes dark in one way or another, we will have a vision.  The fourth wall drops.  There is more.  There is always more.  Note that the implication of the moment, the coming of whatever is next, in Mark’s gospel is not fire and brimstone or some eternal burning hell place, but a gathering, a collection, the surprise of being counted as not just one among many, but one of the elect.  “Rise up.”

The world for which Mark was crafting his stage play of the Jesus story wasn’t much different than our own.  There was a constant, background, nagging sense of foreboding.  Violence seemed just ahead.  The structures that had held life in villages and towns in Nazareth and Judah were cracking under the weight of Roman occupation.  Things in Judah were about to boil over. There was a rising surge of outrage and anger; there were plans afoot for an uprising that everyone knew would set into motion the horrendous response of military power.  Jerusalem would be destroyed.

It was the first century version of our human story: war, oppression, extreme poverty, growing insecurity.  It was conflict in families, and misunderstandings about mental illness.  It was the diagnosis of disease, or the sudden end of a livelihood.  It was the disappearance of community, the mistrust of difference; widening isolation. It is every moment that something ends, or dies, or falls away.

And THEN…

It is the moment of promised redemption, the promise of God’s arrival.

Of course, the “then” doesn’t take away the struggle or even the pain of the present moment.  It may not even change the trajectory of the history we have been setting up for centuries. We will have to pay that price, or, at least, face it and work within it. THEN does say, however, that there is an ingredient that will be added to the chaos.  It’s no accident we pray on the first Sunday of Advent, “Stir up your power, O Christ, and come.” Grace will be introduced to the mix.  Love has come already as the leaven that we need. Stir it up.

I’ve thought about that in our own congregational life.  At the beginning of this year, Javen left his role as associate pastor suddenly.  It wasn’t the end of a pastoral ministry that any one of us expected or wanted. His resignation from the roster of the church was painful, and for many of us traumatic.  He is still in our hearts, our prayers, and part of our history.

Yet, as we now stand at the edge of a new ministry, revealing a candidate next Sunday, I suspect that our “gasp” at how things happened in January may surge again.  Grief has a surprising way of catching us, even in moments that hold great celebration.  At the same time, as I look back on January, when the foundation shook, I can see the many ways that God arrived, gathered us, held on to us, and now prepares us for traveling with a new companion, with another gifted person, another opening to ministry that will certainly comfort, challenge, and renew us.  Maybe even an announcement that will make us gasp in surprise.

Along with those first followers of Jesus, standing on the edge of the unknown, in a complicated and frightening world, we proclaim that we have been gathered into an eternal pattern of dying and rising.  Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.

It’s the story of tonight, the story that will be set into motion once again this Advent, when the sun goes dark, or when it is rising–even when it’s rising later and later–or when the stars, or the snow begins to fall. What Mark remembers Jesus saying, we say to one another:  Stay awake. Watch.

Or, if you’re up for it.  Listen to the stories again as we tell them over these inky blue weeks, look for the clues; watch for the hints, or just sing along.  Advent may be our best shot.