Gathering Clouds
It’s not terribly often that our lectionary leads us to gospel readings from the Book of Mark. It’s not that we don’t like Mark, or that it’s unimportant – far from it. But it’s widely thought to be the oldest of the gospels, and because of that, it’s the shortest of the gospels. The writers of Matthew and Luke especially relied on Mark’s writings as a basis for their own work, and so those three books tend to cover a lot of the same ground, with Matthew and Luke often expanding on what Mark had written. So often times, you’ll read a story in Mark, then read that same story again in Matthew or Luke and get a whole lot more detail in those gospels.
But what that also means is that often, Mark gets straight to the point. There’s less flowery language, less beating around the bush, less extraneous information. More of just “this is what you need to know.”
Mark gets straight to the point of what we need to know in the passage we just read this morning. In this first week of Advent, one of our seasons of preparation and anticipation, the question that we as a church are asking is the same one that Mark asked 2,000 years ago: When will Jesus come back?
And the answer, that Mark gives us quickly and without equivocation is: “I dunno.”
Ok, so it’s a little but more flowery than that: “About that day or hour no one knows – neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father.” So not only is Mark’s answer “I dunno.” But it’s also, “I dunno, the angels dunno, and Jesus dunno either.”
I like “I don’t know.”
Living a life of Christian faith often asks us to straddle a line between what is certain and what is uncertain. What we can know with absolute conviction in our heads and our hearts and our souls. And what is impossible to know at all. And we’re often asked to live on that line between what is comfortable and a blessing and a mercy – and what we’d rather not think about.
That there are times when as a Christian we can get up and read our Bibles and pray to God and share our testimonies and say, “I absolutely know this to be true.” And other times when all of the study, all of the preparation, all of the insight and discernment in the world, still leaves us scratching our heads and the best we can say is, “I don’t know.”
It’s no sin to say “I don’t know” in our lives of faith. There are some things we’re not meant to know. There are some parts of following Christ where our doubts and our questions and our hesitations and our misgivings are part of the deal. And that’s good – that’s healthy, we should embrace questions. We should embrace discernment. We should embrace thinking deeply about what God wants from us and what God expects of us.
We’ve all heard about “the mystery of the faith.” We’ve heard it in sermons and catechisms and we talk about it every month in our communion liturgy – “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” Embracing the mystery of the faith doesn’t mean that we are uncertain of faith or that we’re not sure if we believe. But that we simply acknowledge that we don’t know what we can’t and aren’t meant to know.
Our scripture reading from Mark invites us into that space of not knowing. Of being uncertain. Of straddling that line between being comfortable and being uncomfortable. Of living in the certainty of absolute, and in the futility of knowing nothing.
Because one of the unshakeable, core tenets of Christian faith is recognizing that God is eternal, God is lord of past, present, and future. And that as his son, Jesus Christ, walked the earth 2,000 years ago, lived and then died, that he lives again. And that he will, in God’s eternal presence with us, return to be God on earth once more.
Of that, we have no question. No doubt. No hesitation. Even if we don’t understand the mechanism or if we wonder about the manifestation, the core truth that God is eternal and that Christ will return to us is central to our faith. Because we know that Christ has died. Christ is risen. And Christ will come again.
What we don’t know, however, is when.
And as servants called into God’s kingdom, to serve and attend to the Lord’s work, we have absolute faith in God’s timeline and we know and understand that Christ’s return is known only to God and not to any mortal man or woman on earth.
And yet, as people created out of the dust and ash of the earth, with all the flaws and blemishes of any other people… we are impatient.
We want to know the who, the what, the why, the where, the how, and especially the when.
And lots of people, from esteemed biblical scholars to half-baked crackpots have dedicated a lot of time and energy into trying to guess the when. Using everything from philosophy and linguistics to try to parse out exactly what is meant by Christ’s thousand-year reign of peace and justice and to figure out what that might mean… to looking for numerical codes in the scripture verses themselves, which while I’m sure it’s a fascinating endeavor, it’s also one that is entirely fruitless.
Because if there were some cryptogram hidden in the Hebrew texts, it would have to be so insanely difficult to figure out, we’d have no way of knowing if we were right or not, and the only way to find out if we’re right is to make a prediction and see if it pans out and lots of people of done that and none of them have been right. So I don’t hold much stock in predicting the when.
We’re not meant to know the when. That uncertainty is part of the mystery of the faith. We don’t know the where. Jerusalem seems a good guess. Or maybe Bethlehem or Nazareth again. Rome, maybe, or Istanbul. Or it could just as easily be someplace completely unexpected. Some backwater town in the Australian outback, some isolated village in the Amazon rainforest… even a small commuter town in suburban Monmouth County, NJ. We have no idea. And that’s ok.
Because as much uncertainty we have with the where or the when, we have equal, if not more certainty – CERTAINTY – of the who and the why.
We can be absolutely sure in the season of Advent that the “who” is Jesus Christ. That he is the light of the world, the living Word of God made flesh. It is no coincidence that as we worship before the Advent candles this season that the candle we light first, the flame that burns the longest – is hope. That we live in eternal hope. Glorious hope. Fantastic hope. In the promise of our Lord Jesus Christ.
I titled this sermon, “Gathering Clouds.” Which may sound ominous at first. Because when we think of clouds gathering, we think of stormclouds. Rain and lightning and thunder on the way. Gathering clouds is a sign of trouble – of upheaval – we don’t like gathering clouds.
And in Jesus, there certainly is a storm coming, there is upheaval. But it’s a storm we should welcome. As he calls the angels together on the four winds and Christ himself comes in clouds of glory, Jesus’s promise is a storm of renewal, rains of rejuvenation, an upheaval of our lives, where we are burdened with pain and death and sorrow, and brought into an everlasting kingdom of peace, joy, and love.
Jesus is the “who” in which we can put our total faith and trust. In Christ our hope is realized and never forsaken or forgotten.
God makes a promise to his people. Not that our earthly lives will be easy. Not that we’ll never have pain or suffering. Not that we’ll never have doubt or have questions.
But God makes us a promise of hope. The hope of his kingdom. The hope that as we move through the ups and downs of our lives that he is with us. The hope that at our best and at our worst, God’s love for us will never diminish. Mark does us a favor in getting straight to the point with us – that even if the heavens and the earth should pass away, the words of hope that Jesus gives us will never die.
That is the hope of Jesus Christ. That is the hope to which we are all invited. To God be all glory, praise, and honor. Amen.
Let us pray.
Gracious God, the mystery of your ways is unknown to us. But while we cannot understand your movements or mechanisms, you give us lives lived in the certainty of your promise, your love, and your hope. Keep us asking the questions. Keep us testing our faith and pushing it further. Make us ever more confident in your eternal love and endless grace. We pray this in the name of our transcendent hope, Jesus Christ. Amen.
It’s not terribly often that our lectionary leads us to gospel readings from the Book of Mark. It’s not that we don’t like Mark, or that it’s unimportant – far from it. But it’s widely thought to be the oldest of the gospels, and because of that, it’s the shortest of the gospels. The writers of Matthew and Luke especially relied on Mark’s writings as a basis for their own work, and so those three books tend to cover a lot of the same ground, with Matthew and Luke often expanding on what Mark had written. So often times, you’ll read a story in Mark, then read that same story again in Matthew or Luke and get a whole lot more detail in those gospels.
But what that also means is that often, Mark gets straight to the point. There’s less flowery language, less beating around the bush, less extraneous information. More of just “this is what you need to know.”
Mark gets straight to the point of what we need to know in the passage we just read this morning. In this first week of Advent, one of our seasons of preparation and anticipation, the question that we as a church are asking is the same one that Mark asked 2,000 years ago: When will Jesus come back?
And the answer, that Mark gives us quickly and without equivocation is: “I dunno.”
Ok, so it’s a little but more flowery than that: “About that day or hour no one knows – neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father.” So not only is Mark’s answer “I dunno.” But it’s also, “I dunno, the angels dunno, and Jesus dunno either.”
I like “I don’t know.”
Living a life of Christian faith often asks us to straddle a line between what is certain and what is uncertain. What we can know with absolute conviction in our heads and our hearts and our souls. And what is impossible to know at all. And we’re often asked to live on that line between what is comfortable and a blessing and a mercy – and what we’d rather not think about.
That there are times when as a Christian we can get up and read our Bibles and pray to God and share our testimonies and say, “I absolutely know this to be true.” And other times when all of the study, all of the preparation, all of the insight and discernment in the world, still leaves us scratching our heads and the best we can say is, “I don’t know.”
It’s no sin to say “I don’t know” in our lives of faith. There are some things we’re not meant to know. There are some parts of following Christ where our doubts and our questions and our hesitations and our misgivings are part of the deal. And that’s good – that’s healthy, we should embrace questions. We should embrace discernment. We should embrace thinking deeply about what God wants from us and what God expects of us.
We’ve all heard about “the mystery of the faith.” We’ve heard it in sermons and catechisms and we talk about it every month in our communion liturgy – “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” Embracing the mystery of the faith doesn’t mean that we are uncertain of faith or that we’re not sure if we believe. But that we simply acknowledge that we don’t know what we can’t and aren’t meant to know.
Our scripture reading from Mark invites us into that space of not knowing. Of being uncertain. Of straddling that line between being comfortable and being uncomfortable. Of living in the certainty of absolute, and in the futility of knowing nothing.
Because one of the unshakeable, core tenets of Christian faith is recognizing that God is eternal, God is lord of past, present, and future. And that as his son, Jesus Christ, walked the earth 2,000 years ago, lived and then died, that he lives again. And that he will, in God’s eternal presence with us, return to be God on earth once more.
Of that, we have no question. No doubt. No hesitation. Even if we don’t understand the mechanism or if we wonder about the manifestation, the core truth that God is eternal and that Christ will return to us is central to our faith. Because we know that Christ has died. Christ is risen. And Christ will come again.
What we don’t know, however, is when.
And as servants called into God’s kingdom, to serve and attend to the Lord’s work, we have absolute faith in God’s timeline and we know and understand that Christ’s return is known only to God and not to any mortal man or woman on earth.
And yet, as people created out of the dust and ash of the earth, with all the flaws and blemishes of any other people… we are impatient.
We want to know the who, the what, the why, the where, the how, and especially the when.
And lots of people, from esteemed biblical scholars to half-baked crackpots have dedicated a lot of time and energy into trying to guess the when. Using everything from philosophy and linguistics to try to parse out exactly what is meant by Christ’s thousand-year reign of peace and justice and to figure out what that might mean… to looking for numerical codes in the scripture verses themselves, which while I’m sure it’s a fascinating endeavor, it’s also one that is entirely fruitless.
Because if there were some cryptogram hidden in the Hebrew texts, it would have to be so insanely difficult to figure out, we’d have no way of knowing if we were right or not, and the only way to find out if we’re right is to make a prediction and see if it pans out and lots of people of done that and none of them have been right. So I don’t hold much stock in predicting the when.
We’re not meant to know the when. That uncertainty is part of the mystery of the faith. We don’t know the where. Jerusalem seems a good guess. Or maybe Bethlehem or Nazareth again. Rome, maybe, or Istanbul. Or it could just as easily be someplace completely unexpected. Some backwater town in the Australian outback, some isolated village in the Amazon rainforest… even a small commuter town in suburban Monmouth County, NJ. We have no idea. And that’s ok.
Because as much uncertainty we have with the where or the when, we have equal, if not more certainty – CERTAINTY – of the who and the why.
We can be absolutely sure in the season of Advent that the “who” is Jesus Christ. That he is the light of the world, the living Word of God made flesh. It is no coincidence that as we worship before the Advent candles this season that the candle we light first, the flame that burns the longest – is hope. That we live in eternal hope. Glorious hope. Fantastic hope. In the promise of our Lord Jesus Christ.
I titled this sermon, “Gathering Clouds.” Which may sound ominous at first. Because when we think of clouds gathering, we think of stormclouds. Rain and lightning and thunder on the way. Gathering clouds is a sign of trouble – of upheaval – we don’t like gathering clouds.
And in Jesus, there certainly is a storm coming, there is upheaval. But it’s a storm we should welcome. As he calls the angels together on the four winds and Christ himself comes in clouds of glory, Jesus’s promise is a storm of renewal, rains of rejuvenation, an upheaval of our lives, where we are burdened with pain and death and sorrow, and brought into an everlasting kingdom of peace, joy, and love.
Jesus is the “who” in which we can put our total faith and trust. In Christ our hope is realized and never forsaken or forgotten.
God makes a promise to his people. Not that our earthly lives will be easy. Not that we’ll never have pain or suffering. Not that we’ll never have doubt or have questions.
But God makes us a promise of hope. The hope of his kingdom. The hope that as we move through the ups and downs of our lives that he is with us. The hope that at our best and at our worst, God’s love for us will never diminish. Mark does us a favor in getting straight to the point with us – that even if the heavens and the earth should pass away, the words of hope that Jesus gives us will never die.
That is the hope of Jesus Christ. That is the hope to which we are all invited. To God be all glory, praise, and honor. Amen.
Let us pray.
Gracious God, the mystery of your ways is unknown to us. But while we cannot understand your movements or mechanisms, you give us lives lived in the certainty of your promise, your love, and your hope. Keep us asking the questions. Keep us testing our faith and pushing it further. Make us ever more confident in your eternal love and endless grace. We pray this in the name of our transcendent hope, Jesus Christ. Amen.