FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT, YEAR B

December 3, 2023

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Warwick, R. I.

 

Isaiah 64:1-9

Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18

I Corinthians 1:3-9

Mark 13:24-37

 

Today, as we begin a new liturgical year, the season of Advent invites us to reflect upon the future and, more than that, upon our relationship with time itself. Is there a uniquely Christian understanding of time and history--a distinctively Christian attitude towards past, present, and future?

 

Before attempting to answer this question, it may be helpful to survey four basic options suggested by different philosophers and thinkers down through the centuries in the way of possible orientations towards the future. That way, we’ll be in a better position to appreciate what’s distinctive about the Christian viewpoint.

 

The first basic attitude is optimism: the belief that things are just getting better and better all the time. Every day in every way, things are getting better. This view came into prominence in the eighteenth-century, and it’s with us still. This worldview confidently asserts that despite periodic setbacks, the steady march of reason, science, technology, and education is gradually improving the human condition, eradicating disease, poverty, ignorance, and superstition, until finally we achieve a perfect society, or utopia, upon earth. 

 

The second basic option, diametrically opposed to the first, is pessimism. This viewpoint characteristically looks back to a past golden age, from which everything seems to have gone downhill ever since. This pessimistic view is sometimes associated in old age with nostalgia: wistful reminiscing about the “good old days,” combined with disapproval and dismay at the dreadful state things have fallen into now. The trouble is that it’s all too easy to view the past through rose-colored glasses. When we actually study history, we discover that the good old days weren’t always that good, and many aspects of the present aren’t really all that bad by comparison.

 

A third basic option might be described as resignation. In this view, the future is determined by blind impersonal forces beyond our control. So, there’s no guarantee that the future will be either better or worse than the present or the past. Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be.

 

One ancient variation of worldview is a cyclical view of time, which sees history as having neither direction nor purpose, but simply as a never-ending cycle of repetitions. Civilizations and worlds come to birth, grow, prosper, decay, and die, over and over again. To quote the Book of Ecclesiastes, there’s nothing new under the sun. Or the French proverb: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Our only option, in this view, is to make the best of whatever our circumstances happen to be. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

 

The fourth basic option is despair. From this viewpoint, history isn’t going anywhere at all; past, present, and future have no discernible direction, and hence no purpose or meaning whatever. In its more depressive moments, the Book of Ecclesiastes gets into this frame of mind: “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!” But my favorite expression of this outlook is expressed in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

 

So, to recapitulate, four possible orientations towards the future are optimism, pessimism, resignation, and despair. We might each find it useful in the coming days to reflect on where we stand in relation to each of those options. Perhaps we can strongly identify with one or another, or perhaps it changes according to our moods. 

 

Over and against those four, however, we’re now able to sketch out the biblical worldview. In the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, first, time has a beginning and an end. So, history has a definite direction and purpose. In the beginning, God creates the heavens and the earth. From that moment, the world moves forward, according to a God-given plan, towards its final goal and end in the kingsom of heaven.

 

Contrary to the optimistic viewpoint, however, progress is not inevitable. Things are not necessarily getting better all the time. Despite our very real advances in science, education, medicine, and technology, we still live in a world afflicted by war, poverty, disease, famine, pandemic, and disaster. Indeed, the very technology intended to better the human condition often has unintended consequences that threaten our very survival: for example, environmental pollution, global warming, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The Christian tradition expresses this predicament in theological shorthand by saying that we’re fallen creatures living in a fallen world.

 

Contrary to the pessimistic viewpoint, scripture nonetheless promises us that the best is indeed yet to come. The future is better than the past. God holds in store for us joys infinitely surpassing anything we’ve ever known. Still, this glorious future is in no way the result of human achievement or inevitable progress. Numerous passages in Scripture suggest that things will get worse before they get better, culminating in a final apocalyptic crisis before the end comes. And the end itself will take the form of God's own final intervention in human history – an intervention that the Bible calls “the coming of the Lord.”

That observation brings us to today’s lectionary readings. Our Old Testament reading from the Prophet Isaiah looks to the future with intense longing for the Lord’s coming: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence … to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!”

 

Psalm 80 similarly looks for the Lord’s coming with eager longing and expectation, repeating three times the lines: “Restore us, O God of hosts / Show the light of your countenance and we shall be saved.”

 

In the epistle reading, Saint Paul promises his readers in the Church at Corinth that God will strengthen them to the end, for they’re not lacking in any spiritual gifts as they wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

And in the reading from Saint Mark’s Gospel, our Lord warns his disciples to stay awake and keep alert, for they do not know when the time will come, when they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds and great glory,” sending out his angels “to gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.”

 

The Church’s traditional teaching is, in the words of today’s Collect, that just as Jesus has come among us once in great humility, he will come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead. Our response, then, must be to cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armor of light, so that in that day we also may rise to the life immortal.

 

For Christians, then, the proper orientation to the future is neither optimism, pessimism, resignation, nor despair, but hope. Every year, this season of Advent calls us to be a people who live in joyful hope for the coming of the Lord, whatever hardships and trials we may have to face in the meantime. So, another question worth reflecting on during the coming week is how we can best cultivate this virtue of hope in our own lives. 

 

Advent is an exciting time: of anticipation, expectation, and preparation, of watching and waiting. We pray, then, that through our observance of this holy season, God will grant us the joy of Christian hope.