Mark 13:32-47
Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king.
Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king.
Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king.
Hallelujah, hallelujah, we’re going to see the king.
Welcome to Advent, and to a new church year!
We are living now in what I have been calling “a slow-motion apocalypse.” The weather is getting very weird, and so Jesus’ words, “the powers of the heavens will be shaken”, sound ominously real. Wars and rumors of wars, false messiahs rising with promises of salvation, the sabre-rattling of superpowers, the horrific violence in the land of Jesus’ birth, the bodies of men, women and children of the global south who die trying to emigrate to the global north, the earthquakes in Afghanistan, the advent of artificial intelligence, even the plague of Covid, all sound terribly apocalyptic, as if Jesus were here right now, commenting on current affairs. (Which, by the way, he absolutely is.)
But the key to this text is the surprising sentence that Mark includes: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away before all these things have taken place.”
Mark saw in Jesus’ words the prediction of exactly what he and thousands of other Jews and Jewish Christians had actually experienced in their own lifetimes, that Jesus was not so much predicting the end of time, but rather the horrifically bloody Jewish war, the exodus of Jews and Jewish Christians from their homeland, the fall of Jerusalem and the end of the Jewish state. And his promise was that, in that very disaster, he would be very close to them, at the very gates, is the good news of hope that is hidden in this dark chapter.
Mark’s congregation would have drawn from these words the hope that, soon and very soon, they were going to see the king.
There is an historical precedent that it would be good to remember. Humans, particularly when they organize into very large groups, are prone to go blindly marching into disaster. Nearly every generation throughout history lived in what the Chinese proverb calls “interesting times.” Each faced its own apocalypse, its own terrible moment of reckoning.
In such moments of stress, people showed themselves as they really were. Unprepared people found themselves in the outer darkness, weeping and gnashing their teeth. If they had been hiding any darkness within themselves, the stress of disaster would bring it raging to the surface.
But there have always been others who faced the disaster with fortitude, character, and grace. In the face of stress, they seem to have bottomless strength to endure, and in a time of trial, they seem to have some secret source that gave them just the right words to say, the right deeds to do.
This is what apocalypse really means: a time when what is hidden, whether evil or good, will be exposed.
And in the case of every one of history’s great disaster, there emerged on the other side a kind of springtime, a rare moment when humans were chastened and humbled enough to spiritually blossom, a general, widespread repentance leading to a new time of shalom.
I mentioned in this week’s study of Acts, in discussing Paul’s journey to martyrdom, that recovering people in the twelve step fellowships sometimes can be heard to say they are grateful for their disease. Newcomers are shocked. How could one be grateful for the misery of addiction? The answer, of course, is that it was only in that pit of suffering that we met God.
In my own case, I just about literally saw the coming of the Son of Man in glory. It was a vision I had during early recovery when I was still homeless and living on people’s couches. I saw, in my mind’s eye, a cross hanging over a turbulent, stormy sea, with Jesus’ living body suffering upon it, and I heard a voice that said, “This ocean was made by human tears.” I felt a presence in the room with me, and the voice said “I have always been with you, and I will always will be with you.”
That was my apocalyptic vision, my wake-up moment. And so it is that I can say that I am grateful for my time of suffering, for it led me to my own personal shalom, my own time of peace and prosperity, because the Lord came and showed himself to me.
And then, long after the disaster has passed, it always seems to happen that we fall asleep, and the powers of darkness rise without our noticing, and we find ourselves tumbling toward disaster once again. As I preached last week, this is why we who are in recovery maintain our spiritual practice even after we have long been sober. Because you never know what’s coming.
Jesus tell us today we must wake up from our happy dream, and recognize that, as we face the unraveling of our own world in our own time, our spiritual condition is the most important thing we need. In this same chapter, Jesus says, “the one who endures will be saved.” The hardest time to keep hope alive is in the midst of disaster. Jesus is telling us we will be incapable of doing so, unless we make ourselves ready.
Just as I face my personal apocalypse, so there are those who today may be facing theirs.
Anyone among who has fought in a war has faced an apocalypse. Anyone suffering the trauma of grief has faced theirs. How we manage these times will absolutely depend on our spiritual condition or lack thereof. And today’s message is that doing so will depend on our hope that the more unbearable the situation, the closer to us the Son of Man comes. That when we have hit the very bottom, soon, and very soon, we are going to see the king.
This is why the Spirit has led me to believe that a significant mission of Philippi in coming years, must be to young adults and families. Those of us who are in our twilight years have already faced our own times of trial. At our time of life, the only apocalypse we face, and the only one we really talk about, is the trial of aging and dying. But the young people all around us are looking into a much longer future that looks quite dark, and I believe they are hungry to be gathered into the arms of Christ, and signs point to Philippi becoming such a community.
Many have complained that younger people in our community are unwilling to volunteer or step up to take the places of older folks who have kept our community organizations functioning. There are lots of opinions about this, but I think the answer is to connect them to God. No amount of finger-wagging and shaming is going to inspire them to change. They will have to find their own way, and the richest and most beautiful gift we can give them is a relationship with Jesus Christ, who can give them all the wisdom and strength they need to face the great disasters that loom in their future. Young people need the hope that, the harder things get, the closer the Lord comes. They need to have that hope that, Soon and very soon, they are going to see the king.
And by the way, the apocalypse that is coming for them, you can be sure, is not any of the ones everyone is predicting. This is the nature of apocalypse, as Jesus teaches us. It will come as a complete surprise, possibly predicted by a few small voices no one ever listens to, just as the people of Israel failed to listen to the prophets in their times.
I do not doubt that committing ourselves to this mission will be hard. It will require us to consider the needs of people who are not like most of us, who are working demanding schedules, who struggle to pay their bills, who worry for their children or the survival of their marriage, who are depressed or even suicidal, who need the strength to raise a child without a partner, or who suffer with addiction. They will need different forms of worship, different ways of forming disciples than we are accustomed to.
But Philippi went through its own minor apocalypse in recent years, and in a certain sense, the old Philippi is gone. We are experiencing a new life, just as all every apocalypse seems to bring about. We are far more open to new ideas and approaches than the old Philippi I remember. More people in their twenties are beginning, in an admittedly sporadic way, to come into relationship with our church family, something I don’t remember happening much at all in my first six years with you.
Do we have the courage and the willingness and the devotion to Christ we need to face this crucial mission?
Learn from the fig tree its lesson. When the signs are the most dire, when our world seems to be unraveling, when disaster looms, watch and wait, for the Son of Man is very near, at the very gates. At just such times, we can say, “soon and very soon, we are going to see the king.”
That marvelous hymn was written by Andre Crouch, and he included the following break, rarely sung now:
Should there be any rivers we must cross,
Should there be any mountains we must climb,
God will supply all the strength that we need,
Give us grace ’til we reach the other side.
We have come from every nation,
God knows each of us by name.
Jesus took His blood and He washed our sins,
And He washed them all away.
Yes, there are some of us,
Who have laid down our lives,
But we all shall live again,
On the other side.
Amen.
