"Ask the Horse"
Mark 13:23-27 and 32-37
First Sunday in Advent + November 27, 2011
Reverend Dr. David C. Brown
Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ
400 Glenwood Drive, Chattanooga, TN 37404
Dainin Katagiri, a contemporary Zen Buddhist storyteller, says that contemporary civilization is like a rider who storms through a village on a runaway horse. People shout, “Where are you going?” He yells back, “Ask the horse! Ask the horse!”
What a perfect description of life today. The past and the future have become mirrors of our present turmoil. Looking backward we see gunslingers and brawlers. Looking forward we see Battlestars and Terminators. Assisted by violent video games, the next generation is becoming acclimated to warfare on an interstellar basis. Young people under the age of thirty have never known a significant period of time in their lives when the threat of terrorism was not just “over there” but very close to home.
Once upon a time – and some of us can remember it – we felt confident that the future would be better than the past. Our leaders and people seemed united in a common purpose: to create a better world for our children and grandchildren. That was our destiny. We trusted the advances won by education, the marvels created by technology, and the idealism generated by liberal faith.
Those days are gone forever. Our confidence in an ever-more-hopeful future has been shaken, if not broken altogether. The vast gains of knowledge, our technological strides, the rich accumulations of centuries of cultural development – these only make more tragic our present disarray. Today we find that science itself leads only to uncertainty. Contemporary faith appears to be dominated by those who celebrate their uncritical acceptance of the most absurd convictions. At the other extreme, even atheism is losing its appeal. Those who profess a humane religious outlook sensitive to the divine call to be involved in bettering our world and all its diverse peoples have become weary in the never-ending struggle to push back callousness and cruelty. Those who struggle for revolutionary change are ignored or beaten down by the powers-that-be.
J. T. Fraser (“Of Time, Passion and Knowledge”) observes that today we find ourselves surrounded by problems we can neither fully understand, not reject as unintelligible. We are driven by aspirations whose goals we cannot hope to reach, yet cannot accept as finally unreachable. We feel torn between an almost limitless faith in our own abilities and a disgust at the pettiness, the stupidity, and the cruelty of a race that seems bent on its own destruction. Stephen Hawking, one of the great theoretical physicists of our time recently suggested that given our problems here on earth, we should try to discover and inhabit another planet. What makes him think we wouldn’t foul up that world as much as we have this one?
Undeserved suffering has become so widespread in our world that it is commonplace. Violence surrounds us – the overt violence of terrorism and warfare, and the covert violence of hunger, poverty and prejudice. How can we hope to celebrate Christmas in a world like ours?
In such a dark mood, I find myself turning again and again to The Psalms, the biblical book which honestly confesses our human predicament. Listen to these words from Psalm 69:
“Rescue me, God, for the waters have come up to my neck.
I have sunk in the slime of the deep, and there is no place to stand.
I have stepped into deep water and the current is sweeping me away.
I am exhausted from calling out.
My throat is hoarse.
My eyes fail looking for help from God”
Christian family, it is to this kind of world that the Advent message of hope is addressed. “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her sins are pardoned.”
What is at stake for us is not finding a few days respite from the real world, a brief escape into charming holiday irrelevance. Christmas forces us to ask whether philosopher Thomas Hobbes was correct that human life is short, brutish and mean, or is there another truth hidden beneath the tinsel and trappings, the cacophony and commercialism of a contemporary Christmas. Could it be, could it just possibly be, that Christmas comes every year to remind us that one world is always ending and a new world is always beginning? That, I believe, is how we should read these grotesque end of the world biblical passages such as the one we heard this morning from the Gospel of Mark. We should read them not as chronology but theology. They remind us not how God will end the world but how God will redeem the world.
Christmas comes to remind us that all the suffering, pain and death that are so much a part of our world are not the last word. What we see all around us is a call to look more deeply into the true nature of reality. Christmas reminds us that there is another power at work among us greater than any earthly power. Christmas reminds us that truth will finally be known, human divisions will be overcome, our warfare will be ended. Do you understand what I am saying? Christmas is not an escape from a ghastly reality that will only get worse, but a vision of a deeper reality, of a redeemed and transformed world!
Christmas means that a time is coming when the poor in spirit will receive the kingdom of God, the gentle will have the earth for their heritage, those who mourn will be comforted, and those who hunger and thirst after righteousness will be satisfied. Christmas means that the time is coming when the merciful will have mercy shown to them, the peacemakers will be called the children of God, and the pure of heart will see God. Christmas means that we do not bear the whole responsibility for a redeemed human history. There is one coming among us who will help make that happen.
Christmas means the fulfillment of the oldest, strongest, and most urgently felt wish of humankind. Christmas means that we can hope again. That is the message of the old hymn:
God is working his purpose out
as year succeeds to year;
God is working his purpose out,
and the time is drawing near;
Nearer and nearer draws the time,
the time that shall surely be.
When the earth shall be filled with the glory of God
as the waters cover the sea.
I believe that. I hope you do, too.