1st Sunday of Advent - Cycle B 2020

Isaiah 63:16B-17, 19B; 64:2-7 | 1 Corinthians 1:3-9 | Mark 13:33-37

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming so that, gathered at his right hand, they may be worthy to access the heavenly kingdom.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We begin a new church year, a new focus, and the focus is on the Gospel of Mark, and as we begin this season, we’re probably used to hearing a gospel that is about the coming of Jesus and John the Baptist preparing his way, and he says something like, “Prepare the way.  The Lord is coming.  The Lord is coming.”  That’s always been the image of this great season of Advent.  It’s about coming.  It’s about something arriving, something we’ve longed for, something we’ve needed, a Savior, a God person who became human and is like us and able to reach us and awaken us to the truth.  We’re longing for the truth, and Jesus is the key, which is another way to say that humanity and divinity together is the key to finding life.  But in this gospel, we have a story that is clearly important for you to understand, when it comes to being given this command here, which is be watchful, be alert, pay attention. 

And the context of this is, when Jesus is with his disciples, he’s showing them the temple, magnificent temple that took 80 years to build, and Jesus made a prediction about this glorious temple, and he said, “I will destroy it.  I will replace it with something else.”  Of course what he was talking about is this place, the temple, was the image of the power of the religion of the Old Testament, which had lost its way, which had become a kind of control of people’s behavior by focusing primarily on the law and then on justice.  “You do what I tell you to do.  You work up the energy and the power to follow the rules, and then I will give you a reward, and you will be able to step back and say, ‘I, I, I won my salvation by doing exactly what I was asked to do.’”  There’s a way in which this religion of the Old Testament, by the time Jesus came, was so distorted from what it was that it was — because it was doing nothing but feeding the ego, feeding the ego, and just think of this temple, then, as a monument to the human ego.  It’s a great gold dome.  It’s a gigantic, beautiful temple, and the disciples are just marveling at it.  They just say, “Wow, it’s such a gorgeous place.”  And when Jesus said, “I’m going to destroy it,” and literally, it was finished — as I said, it took 80 years to build, and within seven years after it was completed, the Romans came and completely destroyed it.  A fire was set inside of it, and this fire was then melting the gold dome that was so famous and awesome and a sign of worldly power and the ego.  And the reason there was nothing left of the temple was because the gold melted into all the stones, and so they mined gold out of all those stones.  There was not a stone left upon a stone, as it was predicted, and what is all that about?

It’s about what Jesus came to correct.  It was about a way of seeing yourself and the world and God and understanding something that could not be explained by people being told what to do and using fear as the motive for making them into who they felt they had been able to create themselves, into something really powerful.  Think of it.  It’s the most classic problem of human nature.  There’s kind of two of us.  You look at — people look in the mirror, or you hear somebody say, “I can’t stand myself.  I don’t like myself.”  Eckhart Tolle has made a kind of — he started a book called The Power of Now about all that, and he just said, “When I was so depressed and so discouraged about who I am, I was so unfulfilled.  I looked at myself in the mirror, and I said, ‘I hate myself.’”  And he said, “Well, who is the I, and who is the myself?”  And the I was his true self, the thing that God has created us to be, dependent upon something outside of ourselves to be living inside of us and coming inside of us and changing our very nature in the sense of moving it from an egocentric, mind-centered world to the world of the heart, to the world of indwelling presence, to the world of God living inside of us.  That’s the thing that we need to be aware of.  When we are forcing ourselves, because of the pressure around us, to become someone, and that someone that we’ve created is not who we are, there’s symptoms that we should pay attention to.  The symptoms are fear, shame, excessive anger, and where do those come from?  They come from deep within the human spirit that is made for something other than being in control of who we are, being forced to be something that other people will promise us that, if we do what they tell us to do or to be, we’ll be accepted, we’ll be honored, we’ll be lifted up, we’ll become important. 

So funny that fame, in the eyes of the world, is the most elusive, unfulfilling thing there is.  In fact, it has a real negative impact.  You look at people that win the Olympics, and the suicide rate among those people is staggering, because what do you do after you’re the best?  “All right, I am now the best in the world.”  Then what?  There’s nothing else to do if that’s your goal, to be the best.  And what is the best?  Well, the best is what people around you say you ought to be, and somehow there is this image around us.  It’s in us.  Human beings respond very positively to somebody who’s evolved and developed and done their craft so beautifully.  Yes, we do honor that, but that’s not what connects us.  In fact, that separates us.  To be around the perfect one, and you’re the imperfect one, is not going to draw you into a relationship with them.  But the real challenge is not to be better than other people, which the ego loves, not to be the tallest, most powerful building in the world with a gigantic gold dome that everybody is in awe of.  That’s the ego world.  No, but the other world, the other world is what we’re made for.  I swear, when I read this gospel, it’s so clear when I hear the words, “Be attentive.  Pay attention.”  It’s talking about consciousness, that I talk about all the time.  Consciousness is an awareness of the world as it is, human nature as it is.  In that first reading from the Old Testament, a beautiful image of our ego out of control, and the author of that passage is saying there is something in all of us that is just not destined to be anything other than a kind of destructive, empty, mold, rotten — what is it, rotten rags?  The image — there’s something in us that, when the ego is in control, there’s nothing that attractive about us, because we are standing in front of everybody saying, “Look at me.  Look at what I’ve achieved.  I am the best.”  And that’s an abomination, in a way, meaning it’s a complete caricature of who God has created us to be. 

There’s a beautiful line attributed to Saint Bonaventure.  It says that the reason God created human beings is because he was lonely, which means he wants a relationship with us.  That’s all Bonaventure is really trying to say.  He’s not really saying God was sitting around saying, “I’m miserable.”  No, he’s just using that image of saying that there is something within God’s nature that longs to be connected to everything he creates but, most especially, the thing that is like him.  He wants a relationship with us, but he will not force himself.  He will not push himself into us, but this author of the first reading is saying, “Why don’t you do something to get our attention?  When we separate from you, when we’re working out of our ego, we’re a disaster, a disaster, separation from our destiny.  We’re miserable.  So come on down and do some magic, wonderful, powerful thing and slap us around and get us to trust in you.”  And you often wonder why God doesn’t manifest himself more often like that.  Why doesn’t he?  Because he wants you and me to figure this out.  He wants us to grow up, to be conscious of who we are and make a free decision that, “I want God in my heart, in my life.  And I need an ego to get around the world, but I will not feed the ego in a way that it is designed to be fed to become the source of everything.”  It’s weird.  It’s almost like you have this person living inside of you who wants to be the best and wants to be honored and wants to be the center of attention or wants to be the most — the smartest man in the room or the most cautious man in the room or the most — all the different personality types we have.  You can narrow them down to — the shadow of every one of them is when it wants to become the center, and what is in the center?  Really, what’s in the center?  It’s our heart.  The heart is the essence of who we are, and the heart is made to be a container of a presence, of a God who said, “If I could just befriend you and you would befriend me, we would be in a relationship where we would work together, and I will lead you into a place that frees you from excessive fear that the world is not —” 

Fear is something terrible is going to happen to us.  Well, if we’re relying upon our ego, we know that there’s always going to be somebody better.  It’s so fragile.  There’s nothing there to hang onto, so yes, there’s going to be a lot of fear, and because you’re not really who you know you should be, there’s a lot of shame.  And then there’s a lot of anger, because there’s something wrong, because you can’t find any kind of satisfaction.  Those are all the signs of an egocentric human being, and the frightening thing to me is, when you’re caught in that and you don’t realize that there’s another way to live, there’s another way out of that, what you end up being caught up in is a very destructive way of life, and it leads to suicide.  And it’s so interesting to me.  When the world gets really crazy and starts honoring nothing but the ego — and we’re in a world like that.  We’re in a world that honors people powerful to the extent that they get things done, even if it cost lives of people or threatens their well-being, people that are so drawn to their positions of authority and power that they forget about the ordinary needs of a human being.  We’re living in a kind of world like that, and the more that world is exposed, we begin to be afraid.  And that’s when we should turn to something more, more life-giving, authenticity, our truth, who we are, God living inside of us, each of us knowing we have a responsibility to take care of people.  Why is it so hard for the ego to realize the core is to take care of another, not self?  But it is so self-driven, and all that we’re invited to do, it seems to me — because we are made in God’s image, he’s created us this way, and he’s going to work with us.  And I believe with all my heart, when he promises that he is going to get to all of us somehow, he’s going to save all of us by opening us up to the relationship that we’re made for, his presence living inside of us, balancing our ego and our hearts so that we are strong and effective in many ways but also always with something like the focus is for the good of others.  And whenever you do what’s best for others, you’ve done the absolute best thing for yourself — so simple, so clear. 

So being watchful, being attentive is really the challenge, and how do you do it?  How do you become attentive?  Well, you live in the present moment, meaning you live in an awareness of what’s really going on.  Human nature is amazing if you just slow down and step back and try to look at it as it is, and that prayer to God, “God, show me how I am.”  We pray to God for that.  We pray to the deceased for that.  “Show us what you know.”  We ask angels, “Show us what you can do for us.  You are our connection with God.  Show us.  Reveal it to us.”  That prayer is always answered, and yet do we ask for it?  Well, it seems that, when we don’t, there’s something that’s going to destroy us, and if your life is built upon the power of the ego, the power of the mind, it’s going to be destroyed.  And the scary thing, when I was talking about depression that comes when there’s too much anger, especially too much shame, it leads to suicide, and the second largest cause, the second greatest cause of death between people aged 10 and age 32 is suicide.  The first, accident, then suicide, then homicide, but think of it.  Why would anybody, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 years old take their life?  It would have to be that whatever is presented to them is life is so frightening and so unattractive on some deep, deep, deep level.  They say, “I just don’t want to be here.  I don’t want to be in a world that focuses only on the ego.  I want to be in a world where I want to be with God.  I want to be free of this.”  It’s amazing, the human drive and longing for truth.  It’s so real, and if you just pay attention to it inside of you and connect with it, you will find life.  You’ll find a new life coming.  Advent means coming, and we pray for that new life now. 

Father, our nature, our loving nature is a reflection of who you are, yet we are able to create another world, another person, another way of being in the world, and it’s what you’re here to help us see and to free ourselves of that.But to choose it ourselves, to be authentic to who you’ve created us to be, that’s the gift.And that authenticity is a connecting with you that is so life-giving, yet the ego thinks we should do it on our own.So bless us with being alert to this very, very important way of seeing ourselves in the world and you, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.