Keep Awake! [Instructions to the Chosen]
1 December 2014 | I Advent
Mark 13:3-4, 24-37
The Marcan Apocalypse
There is a quality to the light in the Northern Hemisphere in December, even at mid-day, which is haunting, deep, and reflective. The light is low and long. The sunsets have a particular golden quality. The days are shorter and shorter. It is Advent. And we are drawn into reflection.
This is the season in which we are invited to reflect deeply on the Long story, … the ultimate intent of God for us and for the world, the journey from darkness into light. In tonight’s Gospel reading, we are given for our study the most fundamental injunction of Jesus to his disciples:
Keep awake!
Today, December 1, is a particularly important day to the Community of Richmond Hill. It celebrates the first day of our stewardship of this Monastery and Garden. On November 30, 1987, in the law offices of McSweeney, Burtch, and Crump on Main Street, we closed on this property; the title transferred from the Sisters of the Visitation of Monte Maria to a new non-profit corporation called Richmond Hill.
In those days, we were affected by the knowledge that December 1 was also, in the ecclesiastical calendar, the feast day of a man named Nicholas Ferrar, who may have foreseen the establishment of Richmond Hill almost 400 years ago. Nicholas was a theology student and the Secretary of the Virginia Company, the public-private partnership which sponsored the British settlement on the James River in Virginia. Most of his colleagues were interested in building the colony to be a major economic asset for England, and to provide a barrier against complete Spanish conquest of North America. Nicholas’ father, a London financier, was one of the largest investors in the company.
Nicholas, however, was interested in cross-cultural relations and education. He was one of the major sponsors of a proposal to build a university for both native people and the sons and daughters of English settlers right here on the north bank of the James River between Varina – where the new town of Henrico was located — and the Falls – here at Richmond Hill. 10,000 acres on the north bank were set aside to provide the location and the endowment of the university. In 1618 the Company persuaded King James to call for a collection in all of the parishes of England to support the university. The Company sent a representative named George Thorpe to work on inter-cultural relations, negotiate with Powhatan’s chief warrior Opechancanough, and establish the university. They sent Pocahontas to England to promote the cause.
But Ferrar’s vision could not compete with the geopolitical realities of racism, economic exploitation, and conquest being played out in Tidewater Virginia. The English settlers continued to take Indian lands by force, moving up the peninsulas. In 1622, Opechancanough’s men attacked those who had settled here on the college lands, killing Thorpe, and driving the English back to Jamestown. The Virginia Company collapsed, and with it any dream of a university for both Indians and Englishmen.
Ferrar moved to a village in Yorkshire called Little Gidding, and there established a religious community which included men and women, married and single, and which joined in daily prayer. There he was joined by the great English 17th Century poet George Herbert, who became pastor of the local church.
Three centuries later, T. S. Eliot, the great English and American poet of the 20th Century, visited Little Gidding, and from that visit wrote one of the most powerful descriptions of contemplative prayer in the English language. Perhaps you know the extended poem – it is called Four Quartets. The fourth section of the poem is called “Little Gidding,” and among its best-known stanzas is this one:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
These are the things we were talking about when, 27 years ago yesterday, we closed on the property called Monte Maria and gave it the name Richmond Hill. Much has happened since that time – so many things that we could not have known or predicted. On that December 1, 1987, the light was long, just as it has been today. We could feel and know that we were a part of something far greater than we were, of which we knew neither the beginning nor the ending.
Keep awake! This is Jesus instruction to his disciples, to his elect, to his chosen ones. What does it mean to be chosen? It is not a place of special privilege or special virtue. It is not to be the only ones whom God loves. But it is to be a part of the great Backstory of human history – the story of the coming of the Kingdom of God. Are you one of the chosen? Are you one of these elect? If you’re asking the question, you’ve already got your invitation. All you have to do is say yes. And you have to…
Keep awake! Be alert! Be expectant! Immerse yourself in the Backstory! Pray! [and] Respond Attentively!
Be alert! Be expectant!
Here at the end of one year and the beginning of another, Jesus instructs us to open our eyes and hearts and be alert. We need to be alert not only to danger, to catastrophe, or to random opportunity. We need to be alert to the action of God – to life that has the quality of God’s action – new birth, resurrection, healing, reconciliation, justice, encouragement, love, forgiveness. These things are coming along as the Kingdom comes, but our eyes and hearts have to be open to recognize them and be a part of them. Or, in our futility and unfaith, our buried hope, we will not see them at all.
Be alert! Be expectant! Immerse yourself in the Backstory!
In tonight’s Gospel, Jesus paints a dramatic picture. We call it the Marcan Apocalypse. It’s a kind of writing, common at the time, which presents a mythological picture of a deeper dramatic reality against which life is lived. This kind of apocalyptic writing was popular in Jesus’ time, and it is popular now. There is no time when there is not at least one major movie which provides this kind of backdrop – and television is full of them. Currently there are two: Interstellar and The Hunger Games. Fictional and fantastic myth structures, like backdrops on a life-stage, against which human dramas are played out.
The Christian tradition presents us with a backstory for life in a number of different chapters and versions. The entire Bible is an historic backstory for the present, so that we may see our current lives in some relationship to our God’s great drama. The Christian year takes major themes of the backstory and highlights them at different points so that we may see something deeper, and perhaps recognize the moment in which we live. Knowing the scripture, reading the scripture, attending to the curriculum of the Christian year, gives us the opportunity to be shown what we need to see. It is a richness, a wealth. And tonight, the first week in Advent, gives us that powerful topic – the long view, the conflict of light and dark, and the powerful, long-term work of God for salvation and healing.
Be alert! Be expectant! Immerse yourself in the Backstory! Pray!
To be alert may be the same instruction as to pray. Praying is about noticing what is going on, what is needed, and letting it be a part of the deeper, longer-term, powerful conversation of you with God. Pray at all times, in the Spirit. Everything is prayer, and prayer is everything. Nothing escapes God’s notice. He is praying all the time for his creation, and we, as we become his disciples, are drawn deeper and deeper into that prayer.
But prayer is not about being out of the world. Just the opposite. Prayer is about being alert – about noticing things. We cannot notice all that without prayer, because we cannot bear that much reality by ourselves. Only in the context of prayer can we afford to see what is there, what is beautiful, what is broken, what needs to happen, what might happen, what is somehow in beautiful or horrible process.
Prayer makes seeing possible. Prayer is the only way, ultimately, to be alert to this very moment of life.
Be alert! Be expectant! Immerse yourself in the Backstory! Pray! Respond attentively!
The life of the disciple is a life in response to call – that is, it is a response to God and the call of his spirit both within us and outside of us. It is not an isolated life. It is not an invented life. Even when it is initiative, it is response – because it is related to a deeper reality which one senses and in which a deeper response is waiting to happen.
Out of our prayer, out of our expectation, out of our immersion in the backstory, out of our waiting, comes specific and attentive response – not response to everything, — response to the particular call on our lives at that moment and in that day and in that year and in that lifetime and in that place and in that time in history.
The action of the disciple is attentively particular to time, person, situation, and moment. But in it, you can see powerfully that same spirit which weaves itself through the great backstory of the messiah and his salvation of the world.
Keep awake! Be alert tonight. Be expectant. Immerse yourself deeply in this Backstory. Pray. Respond attentively.
AMEN
The Rev. B. P. Campbell
Richmond Hill
Richmond, Virginia
