The Rev. Canon Dana Colley Corsello: The Pain of Living Between the Incarnation and the Apocalypse
I am not a big fan of daylight savings, especially when it ends in the fall. While I don’t enjoy losing an hour of sleep in the spring either, it’s worth the sacrifice to get more daylight hours after a workday because I can go for a walk or meet friends at an outdoor café for drinks. For some reason, the hours after work in the summer feel more leisurely. But my dissatisfaction is really related to our pets. They don’t “get” that the clocks fall back an hour to give us humans an extra hour of sleep. Oh no. They’re ready to party at 5:30 a.m. They’re ready to be fed. Attention must be paid.
But one of the consolations about our days becoming shorter in the winter is the season of Advent—the season of deepening darkness, when we remember that we measure time differently in here (pointing to nave) than they do out there (pointing outside). Our sacred time begins when the days become shorter and darker, not lighter and longer. We count sunset as the beginning of a new day. I can’t imagine the new church year beginning in the height of the summer solstice. It’s worth knowing that the word “solstice” combines the Latin words sol for “sun” and sistere meaning “to stand still.” Advent is a time set apart to still ourselves, to breathe with intention, and wait.
Our lessons this morning are the kind that make the hair of your neck stand on end—and not in a thrilling way. There are no “feelies” this morning, no sappy Hallmark endings in our Gospel, and no hint in our hymns of what Mariah Carey may want for Christmas. No, we must accept that the theology of the scripture for the next three weeks calls us to set our paths straight, to remember the darkness of the world into which Christ was born, and to connect the scriptural dots between remembering Jesus’ first coming in humility (his birth in the manger) and awaiting his second coming in glory (his apocalyptic return).
But how do we live with this contradiction? How do we await the birth of the Christ child with happy, hoping hearts while the psalmist speaks of the “bread of tears,” and Jesus himself is telling us how “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven” (Mark 13: 24-25). All this despair, all this fear—it’s not just in our scripture, is it? We now witness Godforsaken catastrophe every time we look at our phone, open the newspaper or turn on the news. The horrors in Ukraine and in Gaza. We lament; we use our voices in protest, we beg for God’s intervention in defense of life. Advent is the perfect season to cry and shout to God when it all comes crashing down, when our sin feels heavier than what the world’s foundation can bear.
The Prophet Isaiah laments, “…you were angry, and we sinned…We have all become like one who is unclean, and our righteous deeds like a filthy cloth” (64: 5b,6). Ah, the heralding Advent prophet says what no one wants to hear, what no one wants to believe, pointing in a direction no one wants to look. Isaiah implores us to ask, “Who is really the angry one?” Is it God? Or is what we call God’s anger really just our own shame revealing itself? Shame born of our own anger, fear and hurt; shame born of what has been done to us, and by and what we continue to do one another.
My friends, if you’re wondering what in the world you’ve gotten yourselves into this December morning, well…what you’re listening to is the truth that our world—and perhaps your world, individually—is not okay. Where is God in all of this mess, you ask? God’s absence feels like abandonment and perhaps makes us question if God has ever been present. The truth is it hurts. It hurts so much we can barely breathe from the agony of it. We are surrounded by evil and suffering. We’re not sure our faith can endure what our eyes reluctantly witness each day. And though we long for a Savior to rend the heaven and quake the mountains the very act of that longing has worn thin. There’s no more longing to cling to. Our weariness has evolved into hopelessness.
This is the deeper and more terrifying mystery at the heart of Advent. And I have to admit using the word “apocalypse” to make sense of Advent is not exactly helpful since most people now associate the word with zombies more than with Jesus. Two thousand years have put a lot of baggage on the word apocalypse. But at the root, its meaning is simple: Apocalypse comes from a verb meaning “to uncover.” An apocalypse is a revelation. Think of it this way: During Advent, we are hoping against hope for a big reveal. But if we’re waiting for an uncovering, shouldn’t we rightly ask: What or who is being hidden right now? And what are we hiding that needs to be uncovered?
What are we to do when this God of ours hides and is nowhere to be found? It is an agonizing question, asked over and over in Scripture. “O Lord,” cries out the suffering psalmist, “you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity” (Is 64:7b). And where is that savior who is appear in cinematic fashion and save us from ourselves? We know that Christ has died. We know that Christ is risen, and we proclaim that Christ will come again, but when is that exactly?
It is this hiddenness, this mysterious absence, we confront during Advent. Can we trust a God who’s gone AWOL? As much as the scenes described in the Book of Revelation might confound and frighten us, we long for a true apocalypse: a time when what is lost and mysterious and buried will be found and explained and resurrected. But this won’t happen until life becomes almost unbearable. Things must get worse before they get better. Apocalyptic theology implores us to hang on just a little longer, because just when we’re certain we cannot endure one more second, God will intervene to set the world right.
This last-ditch rescue requires the most our faith can bear. Belief in a divine invasion into the present world is the essence of what being a Christian means. The God of the cosmos who became incarnate for us out of love, the God who rescues us out of love, the God who consumes us into eternal life, relies on us to do our part. To reveal our sins and come clean—to reveal the hidden parts of the worst us trusting that Christ loves us still.
We celebrate Advent because a revelation is coming. As Amy Crouch wrote, “In the Incarnation, God became a tiny baby in a tiny town from a tiny tribe. He is covered in our flesh. And while there was spectacular fanfare in heaven, his birth barely registered on earth. Yet this Incarnation—as un-apocalyptic as it may seem—is a blinding, curtain-rending revelation. Our invisible God, captured by no picture or statue, becomes a living image walking on the earth, teaching and healing, loving and weeping, dying and rising again.”
With the season of Advent we wait and grieve the hiddenness of God. And we ask, “When will this divine invasion turn the world right side up and mend the brokenhearted and throw the mighty from their thrones?” I want to be there for that unveiling. As we prepare for Christmas, we look for both the birth of the tiny child, and the return of the mighty King. Incarnation and apocalypse.
So. Here we are. Exactly where we need to be. Here we are, wrestling with the brokenness of the world and the hiddenness of our God. Here we are, voicing our laments and registering our yearnings. Here we are, waiting in lonely exile. A darkness that is not presided over by an indifferent God. Here we are feeling our way by faith and not by sight. And, here we are, preparing ourselves for the God who is coming… again. “As much as we can, let us hope fiercely, because deep in the womb of darkness, something tender is forming. Something beautiful — the redemption of the world— waits to be born.”2 Amen.
1 https://www.cornellclaritas.com/blog/the-christmas-apocalypse
2 This sentiment or sentence was based on Debie Thomas’ last sentence in her essay in Journey with Jesus, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/3637-naming-where-we-are. I tweaked it.