First Sunday of Advent, rcl year b
Sunday, December 3rd, 2023
ISAIAH 64:1-9; PSALM 80:1-7, 16-18; 1 CORINTHIANS 1:3-9; MARK 13:24-37

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down

We begin today a new liturgical year with the Advent season. And just like last year, Christmas will follow Advent, the Epiphany season will follow Christmas, then Lent, Holy Week, Easter and the Season after Pentecost.

And so we start again, not so much the beginning of a new cycle, as though we were all running in liturgical circles for the rest of our lives—the cycle of the church year digs us deeper, like a corkscrew. As we turn with the rotating seasons of the church’s calendar, like a corkscrew, we are drawn deeper, each year, into Christ’s own life and death; as we turn with the rotating seasons of the church’s calendar, we are drawn deeper into the life of the Spirit that makes our transformation into Christ’s likeness possible.

But even as we are drawn deeper through the cycle of the church’s seasons, we are also lifted higher, in a continuing tornado-like spiral that draws us upward. And this drawing upward that becomes a bit more clear today. Isaiah begins, after all, in the first words of the first reading  we hear at the beginning of this new year, Isaiah begins with a prayer  that the Lord  “would tear open the heavens.” And Mark’s Gospel speaks too of the heavenly, of a “sun [that] will be darkened, and [a] moon [that] will not give its light, and […] stars that [will] fall from heaven, [and that] the powers [of] the heavens” themselves “will be shaken.” Advent begins on the largest stage we can imagine—the stage that is the whole of the cosmos, the whole created order—and this is where our eyes are drawn first.

This tornado that draws us upward, though, has yet to touch down. Isaiah prays, asking that the Lord  “would tear open the heavens  and come down,” to “come down so that the mountains would quake at your presence.” And Jesus, too, in Mark’s Gospel, speaks of a heaven broken open not that we might first ascend, but in order that the Son of Man would descend from the clouds, with great power and glory.

Our eyes may be lifted heavenward, but we have yet to be drawn heavenward, because there is something that yet needs to take place, and that’s that the Lord would come; for if we are to be drawn heavenward, it would be by the Lord’s work, with Christ the Son of Man carrying us up with him, bearing humanity aloft as he does later in the Ascension.

For now, though, in this season of Advent, as the church year begins anew, we pray that we will be carried upward, and that as we are carried upward we will be drawn deeper, too, but for now, though, in this season of Advent we wait.

We wait for the Lord’s coming in glory.

The descent of the Lord in Isaiah, though it begins in the furthest reaches of the cosmos, this descent of the Lord slowly begins to narrow down. And as we see in our mind’s eye this Lord that comes down, as this Son of Man descends, our eyes are drawn to a narrower horizon: Isaiah speaks of the earth itself, that mountains would quake in response to the Lord descending. Even this ball of water and dirt we call home looks forward to the descent of the Lord.

And as we imagine the heavens torn open, and the mountains quaking, we see that humanity, too, is drawn into this drama. The nations, Isaiah tells us, will tremble at the nearing presence of the Lord. Jesus tells us in Mark’s Gospel that the Son of Man, with the help of his angels, will gather his people to himself, from the ends of heaven, and the ends of the earth.

Which is terribly Good News, as ceasefires are broken in the Holy Land, and as the war in Ukraine sees no end. The Lord is coming. And even the unjust among the nations of the world will take heed.

The descent of the Lord, the coming of the Son of Man, does have a sort of violence of its own. The heavens are shaken. Stars fall. The mountains quake. Fire kindles the brushwood. Fire causes water to boil. The nations tremble as God’s adversaries are made known. God is angry on account of sin. “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.  We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”

And thus, as the Lord comes down, and the Son of Man descends, and even as the whole cosmos is caught up in all of this, and even as the planet is caught up in all of this, even as the nations of the world begin to wake up to God’s justice, the Lord comes also for you, and for me.

Of course there’s an analogy of violence here. Because this is about our conversion. If you’ve seen a tornado, tornadoes are exhilarating to see  when they are above the horizon; but as the descend and come closer, they are terrifying. Conversion is like this: this kind of conversion, the sort of conversion that is like being swept up by the Lord, is about the state of our hearts, but hearts encysted by sin, hearts that need tearing open—just as the cosmos, the planet, and the nations are torn open, so are we.

Perhaps you’ve experienced a conversion like this. And we should all, probably, experience this at least once. If it is the Lord at work, this conversion will be a consolation, to be sure. But if it is the Son of Man descending on the clouds, the Lord of Hosts that commands the heavenly powers, the Lord of Hosts that commands the angels and the archangels, it will also be absolutely terrifying.

Because to be converted in the way that Advent preaches is to be entirely unmade by the Lord of the Cosmos and all the heavenly powers, only to be remade again in the likeness of the most kind.

And so, for now, for a few weeks, we keep awake, and we watch. And we wait. We wait upon the Lord who descends from a heaven torn open, we watch for the Son of Man descending upon the clouds. We watch with the planets and the stars, we watch with the mountains and the trees of the field, we watch with the nations that spit and seethe. We watch for the Lord that brings peace to a fallen cosmos, peace to a furious planet, peace to the raging nations.

A peace that comes with being brought deeper yet into the Lord’s own life; a peace that comes with being raised up with Christ; the peace of our own conversion that comes with terror and delight—a terror and delight in the Lord that is tearing the heavens open that he might crack open our hearts, making himself known most intimately to you, to me, and to us together.