Signs of Endings All Around Us
Dear Friends,
This Sunday, we begin the season of Advent, a word derived from the Latin “adventus,” which means “a coming, an approach, an arrival.” This is the season when we await the coming of Christ and watch for God to enter our lives in ways we might have missed before.
It used to come as something of a shock to me that a season commonly associated with joy and peace always begins with the end of the world. Every year, on the first Sunday of Advent, the lectionary gives us what is known as the "Little Apocalypse," the name given to Jesus’ discourse on the Mount of Olives, where he describes to his listeners the events that will take place as he returns.
The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. (Mark 13:24).
This year, as Advent approaches, Jesus’ apocalyptic talk comes not so much as a shock as it does something that feels quite familiar, as we hear week after week of the war in the Holy Lands. While we know that the Gospel of Mark was written near or after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the words he uses to describe the event sound almost as relevant today. Especially when coupled with the looming consequences of climate change and lasting effects of economic inequity and social unrest. Some of you have shared with me your anxiety over these events, even as you experience your own, personal apocalypses — the death of a loved one, the end of a career, the medical diagnosis that has changed your life forever.
The ending of one’s personal world is not the same, I know, as The End of the World that Jesus describes in our gospel reading for Sunday. Yet the first Sunday of Advent invites us to recognize that these endings are connected; that the Christ who will return at the end of time somehow inhabits each ending we experience in this life. Every year, Advent calls us to practice the apocalypse: to look for the presence of God’s life giving, liberating love as it enters into our every loss, comes to us in the midst of devastation, gathers us up when our world has shattered, and offers the healing that is a foretaste of the wholeness that God is working to bring about not only at the end of time but also in this time, in this place.
As Advent begins, is there something in your life that is ending? How might you look for the presence of the Holy One who comes to you in that place? Can you welcome the possibility of being blessed by these endings even as you prepare to begin again? As you ponder your own answers to these questions, I offer you the words of poet Jan Richardson, as she considers the unique blessing of her own endings:
This blessing will not fix you, will not mend you, will not give you false comfort; it will not talk to you about one door opening when another one closes. It will simply sit itself beside you among the remnants and gently turn your face toward the direction from which the light will come, gathering itself about you as the world begins again.
In Christ,
Amelie+
