Mark 13: 24-37 (links validated 10/17/23)

William Willimon told about a student mission trip to Honduras. A group was working in an impoverished village at a health clinic. Each night they built a fire and sat around the fire singing with villagers. One night a student had the bright idea that they all go around and share their favorite Bible verse. Of course, some didn’t have much of a favorite verse – some mentioned John 3:16 or “The Lord is my shepherd.” And then a Honduran woman said through an interpreter that her favorite verse was from Mark 13. “Not one stone will be left, there will be earthquakes and famine and fire.” She said, “That passage has always been such a comfort to me.” Willimon was stunned. How could this possibly be a comfort? It sounds more like Jesus having a really bad day. How could a warning of coming apocalypse be comforting? But then a nurse told Willimon, “I was talking with that woman. She has given birth five times and three of her children have died due to malnutrition.”...

(lots of Greek exegesis!)

("A young man appeared at my office door. Already a sign that something was up, as today's students prefer to approach life electronically. Why talk when you can text? Even more ominously, he had lowered his headphones. Though I don't know him well, he wanted to ask about his grandfather, who is dying. He'd been giving that a lot of thought. What does his grandfather's death mean, if there is no afterlife?...")

(always good insights!)

(excellent exegesis)

While it may have been used before, the phrase “too big to fail” wasn’t as familiar to most individuals until 2007-2008. That’s when the Banks in the United States and around the world found themselves amid a financial crisis that some claim was as severe as the Great Depression. To avoid a further economic catastrophe, arguing that because these different financial institutions were so intertwined with so many other businesses, it would have this domino effect, causing other companies and industries to face potential ruin, these banks were said to be “too big to fail.” Which meant the government had to bail them out. Well, more specifically, all of us taxpayers had to bail them out whether we wanted to or not. That phrase, “too big to fail,” seems to be getting deployed more frequently in the years that have followed. The other night, on this podcast, which had a bunch of individuals discussing marketing, entertainment, and financial issues, they talked about how Disney, in one year, has lost close to $200 billion – and how Anheuser-Busch has lost over $27 billion in just four months because of both companies inserting themselves into political, cultural issues that are controversial. One of the guests speculated that there were executives who must have thought they might upset some people but that both companies had been around for so long that they could weather whatever fall-out they might receive. Yet now, both examples were being cited as contenders for who committed the greatest act of brand suicide...

I remember the testimony of Algerian Trappist Monk, Christian de Chergé, which he left to his family to be opened upon his death. After Christian was taken from his monastery on March 27, 1996, at 1:45 a.m., and beheaded by Muslim extremists, his loved ones opened his testimony to these words, …my death will satisfy my most burning curiosity. At last, I will be able – if God pleases – to see the children of Islam as He sees them, illuminated in the glory of Christ, sharing in the gift of God’s Passion and of the Spirit, whose secret joy will always be to bring forth our common humanity amidst our differences...

The FX comedy What We Do in the Shadows is about four vampires who live on modern-day Staten Island. (They’ve been vampires for centuries, so their clothes and manner of dress is from bygone eras.) The first half of season one is all about the Baron (head vampire) coming to visit them from the Old World (Europe) and at first, they can’t figure out why he wants to see them. But then, they remember that he told each of them conquer the New World (North America). Having forgotten that they were supposed to be doing that, they try to get started on a world domination plan while the Baron sleeps in the attic. It’s the opposite of the servants in our passage, and a play on the “Quick! The boss is coming, look busy!” that, obviously, backfires with comedic effect. The stakes are also quite high; they fear that the Baron will destroy them for not being obedient. If vampires aren’t your thing as a sermon illustration, I get it—maybe try playing with the “Quick! Look busy!” motif—kids who are supposed to be cleaning their rooms… employees on the job site… the classroom where a teacher has stepped out for a moment…

“Woke” is a word that has become very loaded in recent years, often used as an insult, said with a sneer. For Christians, though, wherever we stand politically, this negativity about “wokeness” poses a bit of a problem because in today’s Gospel reading Jesus tells us very clearly and urgently that we should “stay awake”, and it’s probably this passage which gave rise to the slogan “stay woke” in the first place. It's a slogan that’s been in use in the Black American community as far back as the 1920's, a community that was historically steeped in the scriptures, and it has a double meaning. It was partly a warning to be aware of the danger you might be in if a white person thought you’d stepped out of line. You had to “stay woke”, be vigilant to what they might be thinking. But “staying woke” was also about being aware that to be treated like this was not ok. If discrimination is embedded in society, people often don’t see it or name it, just as a fish isn’t aware of the water it swims in. If you are on the receiving end of prejudice constantly it’s really easy to internalize it, to start thinking it’s your fault or that “it’s just the way things are”. That’s true not just of racism, but of any kind of injustice...

In his autobiography, Report to Greco, Nikos Kazantzakis recounts a conversation he once had with an old monk. Kazantzakis, a young man at the time, was visiting a monastery and was very taken by a famed ascetic, Father Makarios, who lived there. But a series of visits with the old monk left him with some ambivalent feelings as well. The monk’s austere lifestyle stirred a certain religious romanticism in Kazantzakis, but it repelled him too; he wanted the romanticism, but in a more-palatable way. Here’s their conversation as Kazantzakis records it: “Yours is a hard life, Father. I too want to be saved. Is there no other way?” “More agreeable?” asked the ascetic, smiling compassionately. “More human, Father.” “One, only one.” “What is that?” “Ascent. To climb a series of steps. From the full stomach to hunger, from the slaked throat to thirst, from joy to suffering. God sits at the summit of hunger, thirst, and suffering; the devil sits at the summit of the comfortable life. Choose.” “I am still young. The world is nice. I have time to choose.” Reaching out, the old monk touched my knee and said: “Wake up, my child. Wake up before death wakes you up.” I shuddered and said: “I am still young.” “Death loves the young,” the old man replied. “The inferno loves the young. Life is like a lighted candle, easily extinguished. Take care—wake up!”...

Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection shares a story of green shoots in his spiritual memoir, “The Practice of the Presence of God.” Lawrence Herman lived through the 30 Years War between 1618 and 1648. It was one of the most destructive European conflicts, with more than 4 million people killed. We think our times are uniquely partisan, but we can’t touch the ferocity of 17th-century Europe. Lawrence grew up poor and enlisted in the army for six years. He was captured in battle spent time as a prisoner of war, and a wounded leg gave him a lifelong limp. A moment of spiritual insight sustained him through these difficult times. On a shivering winter morning, Lawrence observed a tree standing leafless in the snow. I can imagine that tree as a metaphor for the cold-hearted battles of the day. It suddenly occurred to him that the tree would soon spring back to life, and he saw the coming flowers and fruit in his mind. At that moment, he sensed God’s presence pouring into him. He felt great love surrounding him and a faith that God worked towards the fruitfulness of all things. Later, he said that moment converted his heart and never left him. I love this spiritual metaphor since it is Hanging the Greens Sunday to remind us to watch for God’s presence...

One of my favorite films of all time is the great epic, Ben Hur, perhaps it's because of its epic chariot race. When filming Ben Hur, an enormous set was constructed for this very special race and teams of stunt men were trained to drive four-horse chariots for the race sequence. Charlton Heston, the star of the film, was among the first to arrive for training, and was quick to grasp chariot-driving techniques. Nevertheless, Charlton Heston was concerned - concerned that in the actual filming of the race, he might not be able to pull off a victory. And so, he went to the director and he shared his concerns and the director responded to Charlton Heston, "Charlton, you just stay in the chariot and I'll guarantee you win the race."...

One example that our speaker shared at the Newman Night, was the story of an 11-year-old who lived and died within the last century. Maria Goretti, whose father had died of malaria when she was 9… whose family was poor, barely able to make ends meet. Little Maria had this purity and love for Jesus that was utterly remarkable. This one summer day, while babysitting one of her younger sisters and attending to chores, her 18-year-old neighbor Alessandro knowing she was alone, came to the house and threatened to stab her if she did not do what he said; he was intending to rape her. She resisted him – not simply out of a desire for self-preservation but even more fighting for his soul telling Alessandro what he wanted to do was a mortal sin and warning him that he would go to Hell. She kept crying, “No! It is a sin! God does not want it!” He first choked her, but when she insisted she would rather die than submit to him, he stabbed her 17 times before running away. She was rushed to the hospital, where she lived only for another 24 hours, with one of her last acts saying she forgave Alessandro and wanted him to be in heaven with her. Just hearing that story, I was struck wondering- would I be able to do that? Would I be able to lose my life for the faith… would I be able to offer that as a prayer for the one who was killing me? More than likely I’d be praying that God would get vengeance for me...

In one of his sermons, Fred Craddock told a story about something that happened many years ago while he was driving by himself cross-country. He had stopped at a small diner somewhere in the South to refresh himself with an early breakfast and some coffee. He had been driving through the night and now it was getting close to dawn. So before he got too sleepy, he stopped for a while. As he waited for his breakfast order to come, Craddock spied a black man who had just come in and had sat down on a stool up by the lunch counter. The diner’s manager then began to treat the black man with a contempt that was clearly borne of deep-seated racism. The manager was rude, insulting, demeaning toward his black guest. As he sat in his booth a little ways away from the counter, Craddock wrestled with saying something to chide this manager for his shameful, racist conduct. Eventually the black man quickly slurped down some coffee and then fled the diner. Craddock meanwhile remained silent. “I didn’t say anything,” he confessed. “I quietly paid my bill, left the diner, and headed back to my car. But as I walked through the parking lot, somewhere in the distance, I heard a rooster crow.”...

A university student named John was on the side of the road hitch hiking on a very dark night and in the midst of a storm. The night was rolling on and no car went by. The storm was so strong John could hardly see a few feet ahead of him. Suddenly he saw a car slowly coming towards him and slowly it stopped. John was desperate for shelter and without thinking about it; he got in the car and closed the door. It took only a moment for John to realize that there was nobody behind the wheel and the engine wasn’t on! But the car started moving slowly. John looked at the road and saw a curve approaching. John was so scared, that he started to pray, begging for his life. Then, just before he hit the curve, a hand appeared through the window and turned the wheel...

the story which our Scripture brings to mind this morning is an American fairy tale, written by the imaginative author, Washington Irving. No, the story is not “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” which is a good one. No, the story is a story about a New York farmer of Dutch descent, who falls asleep one day while hunting and sleeps for twenty years. Have you ever thought what it would be like to go to sleep and wake up twenty years later? Just think if you would have fallen asleep in 1980 all the things you would have missed? Ronald Reagan, the Berlin Wall, Princess Diana, cell phones, lap-top computers . . . Or think about how people have changed . . . what they wear, how they look . . . You’re different than you were 20 years ago, aren’t you? This story is about a man who went to sleep and didn’t wake up for 20 years, and the world had changed. The man’s name was Van Winkle, Rip Van Winkle...

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the four main characters, siblings Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy find themselves in the magical world of Narnia. They’re eating at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, and the beavers are telling them about their hope that Aslan will return soon. Aslan is the Christ-figure in the books. The children ask the beavers who Aslan is. The beavers answer, “Aslan is a lion – the Lion, the great Lion." "Ooh" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” "Safe?" said Mr. Beaver, "Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.”...

Why doesn’t God make things easier? Perhaps the most vexing faith-question of all-time is the problem of God’s silence and his seeming indifference: why does God allow evil? Why do bad things happen to good people? If there is an all-powerful and all-loving God, how do you explain that millions of innocent people can suffer and die under Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, in massacres in Rwanda, Algeria, and the recent terrorist killings in the USA? Where is God in all of this?...

In the Disney movie The Lion King, Scar lays out a hopeful future for the hyenas in the song “Be Prepared” If you have seen the film, you know that the temporary rise to power of Scar and the hyenas is short-lived. Scar’s dream of being king ends in death and disappointment. Simba, who is the heir to the throne, becomes a pawn in Scar’s plan and in the process denies his own future. In this story, and in many stories, a plan is not enough but a lack of planning does not always pan out either...

There is a short detour called Firehole Lake Drive off the Grand Loop in Yellowstone. This three-mile winding road twists past small hot springs, bubbling mud pools, and steaming mineral streams. Here, out of the way, is one of my favorite sights in the park. Just to the side of a wooden walkway is a small geyser. Called Young Hopeful Geyser, it spits and shoots its hot stream of sulphury water constantly. Actually erupting on a very irregular schedule, Young Hope­ful keeps churning and responding to the conditions underneath and around it. I love Young Hopeful because it reminds me that not everything, nor everyone, has the capability of being Old Faithful Geyser. There are those among us whose work is predictable, powerful, and admired. Most of us, however, are Young Hopeful Geyser...

There’s a documentary called The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young. It’s a 100+ mile endurance race in the Tennessee mountains. It includes five loops of 20 miles, though the participants will tell you that the loop is actually closer to a marathon, or 26 miles. The race is 1/3 on trails and 2/3 off trails, and runners often get lost. The loop goes over mountains and through huge briars, and over the course of the race, runners gain and lose 60,000 feet of elevation, for a total of 120,000 feet of elevation change. Completing the race takes five loops, and almost no one finishes. Runners run day and night, and they have only sixty hours to complete the race. If they sleep at all, it’s only for an hour or two over the course of that sixty hours. Talk about keeping awake...

In 1949, the then-Soviet Union successfully tested an atomic bomb. The United States, which, just four years earlier, had used nuclear technology to unleash immense death and destruction, now knew for certain that it could suffer from the same weapon it had detonated so boldly not too long before. The initial post-War euphoria quickly transitioned into Cold War fear. How long could peace last? Would Americans finally experience violence here at home? Would the world survive the threat of complete obliteration? A man named Lee V. McCullom responded to this anxiety by writing a song...It began and ended with this refrain: Everybody’s worried about that atom bomb; well, no one seems worried about the day my Lord shall come; you better set your house in order, for he may be coming soon, and he’ll hit like an atom bomb, when he comes, when he comes.

A few years ago, some cognitive scientists came up with an experiment called the invisible gorilla test. In the experiment, the test subject is shown a video in which there are 3 people dressed in white, 3 people dressed in black, and each group is passing a basketball among themselves. The objective for the test subject is to count how many times the people in white pass the ball to each other. Now most people are perfectly capable of doing this task and can come up with the correct answer of 15 passes. However, it turns out that around 50% of the people who watch the video fail to notice that halfway through it, a person dressed as a gorilla casually walks into center view, beats his chest a few times and then casually walks off. The point of the experiment is to demonstrate that there’s a lot going on around us which we fail to notice, especially if we’re engaged in some specific task...

Aunt Lillian, who lived in Blowing Rock, had a to die for view of Grandfather Mountain, lots of beautiful land, and a three story home with a big screened-in back porch. While Aunt Lillian had indoor plumbing, upstairs and downstairs, she maintained an outhouse. If you had to do the stinky, the number 2, you had to go to the outhouse. Now, the interesting thing about the outhouse was that it was a two seater AND it was wallpapered...

Scroll down the page for this resource.

(" varies according to the 'chef'. Different chefs have different recipes, but most contain at least a modicum of these basic ingredients: The sun will not shine. The stars will fall from the heavens. Earthquakes. Famine. Smoke. Apocalypse. Armageddon. Heaven. Hell. A great tribulation. The 'rapture'. Floods. Destruction. Book of Revelation. Left Behind. The Second Coming. The Son of Man coming in clouds. The 1000-year reign. Great pain and suffering. And to add a little spice - teeth gnashing")

(Scroll down for these reflections.)

"All of his family members were asleep in the car. Jim was driving the lonely hours of the night without anyone's company to help him as his family traveled north for his grandfather's funeral. The day had long been expected, 'Granddad' had been suffering for a long time from heart disease. Yet it seemed that when the day came the family was ill prepared..."

("in his novel Love in the Ruins and its sequel novel The Thanatos Syndrome, Walker Percy tells about a small, remnant church out in the woods of Louisiana. They are fragile and exiled from the mainstream, conventional and successful American church. They have a small AIDS clinic where they care for the sick and dying and care for each other. Their priest, Father Rinaldo Smith, is eccentric and helps pay the bills by hiring out as a fire-watcher. It is his job to climb the fire-tower by night and watch for forest fires below...")

He’s known as a master of the legal thriller, producing books at the rate of one a year, and they keep becoming best sellers. John Grisham’s success is due in part to how he is an attorney himself; he knows what it’s like to work inside a courtroom, inside a legal office. This, and his skill as a writer, help him produce legal thrillers that keep his readers fascinated. The books John Grisham writes are fiction. Here is a story he tells, a story about himself, which is not fiction, but fact. When he was a student at law school, a friend–another young man– called Grisham and invited him to lunch. At lunch, he told Grisham that he had cancer and that he did not have long to live. Grisham was stunned by this news. Then he asked, “What do you do when you realize that you are about to die?” His friend replied, “It’s real simple. You get things right with God, and you spend as much time with those you love as you can. Then you settle up with everybody else.” He added, “You know, really, you ought to live every day like you have only a few more days to live.” “You know, really, you ought to live every day like you have only a few more days to live.” Grisham’s dying friend gave him good advice, and he has never forgotten it...

("It is late November. Every year at this time it is a challenge to get the leaves raked and bagged or pushed to the curb before the city's December 1st deadline for removing them. One year I simply waited too long and was left with a dozen bags of leaves still sitting at the end of my driveway the morning after I thought they would be taken away. While that year I had only my own procrastination to blame, it is so that I have one tree which always refuses to finish dropping its leaves until it's almost 'too late....")

You cannot see what you do not picture. Meaning that, you need some idea of what you're looking for if you're going to find it. A great challenge of the Christian life is imagining the life to come. Our contemporaries, rightly, judge popular pictures of heaven to be silly. Why would anyone want to sit on clouds, play a harp, and eat Philadelphia Cream Cheese? The challenge of contemporary evangelization is providing a more adequate picture of eternal life, eternal damnation as well...

("Doomsday Stew varies according to the 'chef'. Different chefs have different recipes, but most contain at least a modicum of these basic ingredients: The sun will not shine. The stars will fall from the heavens. Earthquakes. Famine. Smoke. Apocalypse. Armageddon. Heaven. Hell. A great tribulation. The 'rapture'. Floods. Destruction. Book of Revelation. Left Behind. The Second Coming. The Son of Man coming in clouds. The 1000-year reign. Great pain and suffering. And to add a little spice - teeth gnashing")

(Scroll down for these reflections.)

Stars had meaning for Van Gogh. He wrote to his brother Theo, '...the sight of the stars always makes me dream in as simple a way as the black spots on the map, representing towns and villages, make me dream. Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France?...

("Human beings suffer, They torture one another, They get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song Can fully right a wrong Inflicted and endured. The innocent in gaols Beat on their bars together. A hunger-striker's father Stands in the graveyard dumb. The police widow in veils Faints at the funeral home. History says, don't hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme...")

("I weary of waiting to be healed. First, I'm talking about my body. Once, as a youth, I felt immortal. I did. Embarrassing confession: in my twenties and thirties, I didn't think I'd age like others. Even after a wrenching broken leg, even after a first and second knee surgery by my late forties, I thought I'd be . . . different. I'd never be the one with the cane or walker or the one whose doctor warned you have to count calories or reduce cholesterol...")

(includes several quotes)

("Sylvia Plath calls us into Advent in her poem, Black Rook in Rainy Weather: I do not expect a miracle Or an accident To set the sight on fire In my eye, nor seek Any more in the desultory weather some design, But let spotted leaves fall as they fall, Without ceremony, or portent.....")

("Annie Dillard shares this story about proper waiting: She had been watching a butterfly emerge from its cocoon and was fascinated by the process until she grew impatient with how long it was taking and, to speed things up, took a candle and heated the cocoon, albeit very gently. The experiment worked, but it was a mistake in the long run. The butterfly emerged more quickly; however, because adding heat violated something within the natural process, the butterfly was born with wings too weak to fly...")

Why doesn't God make things easier? God doesn't make things easier because God can't make things easier, at least not without making us and the world into something far less than we are. When God made us he gave us as much freedom, creativity, and spunk as was possible. He didn't play it safe, but gave us as much godliness as he could without making us into gods ourselves...

"Phillip Yancey tells a story in one of his books1 about a young man who went swimming in a lake like he had many times before. But while he was not very far away from the shore, a freak fog rolled in and obscured his ability to make out any sort of landmark he had previously relied on to make it back to the shore. Frantically, he swam in a direction, stopped and then swam in another hoping that the mist would lift just enough that he might be able to make out the ledge of the lake and safely swim back to shore..."

("On Thursday: I am with our granddaughter. She is seven months and full of wonder. Her excitement expressed with squeals of joy. "Wait and Watch" I read. I watch and wait for her to show me the new unveiling that has come to her. She chatters on, tries sounds. She speaks a magical language as she brings form and connection to the sounds that may, no will, I trust, become words...")

In The Matrix, the main character is offered a red pill and a blue pill by a character who has just revealed that humanity is actually enslaved by technology and that everything he has ever seen his whole life is a lie — an illusion of this complex computer system. If he takes the blue pill, he will wake up and everything will go back to normal and he can pretend that he doesn’t know. If he takes the red pill, everything will change, and he will begin to fight the technology that has enslaved humanity. These days, extremists with various pet causes have used “taking the red pill” or “red pilling” to describe “waking up” to a vast conspiracy to deceive them their whole lives by some target: the news media, the larger culture, whatever. Those who “take the red pill” feel liberated to spew their unfiltered anger all over the internet and even into the streets in violence. Frankly, I believe it to be quite childlike. It’s inventing a story, or imagining yourself in someone else’s invented story, in order to make yourself the hero. I’m here today to advocate for the Blue pill. The Advent Blue pill, specifically. Advent calls us to a different kind of waking up...

("Three weeks ago, a 16-year-old boy from my daughter's high school went down to the local train tracks shortly after midnight, waited for an arriving train, and ended his life. Since 2009, seven teenagers in this town have committed suicide on the tracks, and as a community, we are reeling. Fearing another cluster, the town has stationed police officers at the site, who scan the tracks each time a train approaches....")

("The question in my mind is this: are there truly such realities as time and divisions of time, or are these simply a fabrication of our own imagination and construction? And surprisingly, I found a hint of an answer in several quotes from the pen of T. S. Eliot: 'Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future and time future contained in time past....")

("It is some time in the future. World War 3 had begun with a nuclear attack by Albania on Italy, and then escalated with Egypt bombing the United States and the United Kingdom. Russia and China become involved. The war ended with both sides being wiped out but now there was a huge nuclear cloud that was slowly moving southwards and would eventually engulf the whole world...")

("There are several wonderful stories about the great, yet incredibly humble, Ignace Yan Paderewski, the Russian composer-pianist who died in 1941. It seems one evening he was scheduled to perform at a great concert hall. In the audience of black tuxedos and long evening gowns was a mother with her fidgety nine-year old son...")

("Elam Davies, long-time pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, tells of a time when he and his wife visited a spot on the coast of Wales called the Great Orme. The Great Orme is a giant rock, right at the seaside, and people gather on it to watch sunsets. On clear evenings, people watch the yellow sun drop into the sea...")

("Once I anticipated a fly ball. Now, with cranky knees and gray, thinning hair, I still claim that longing. My Advent prayer is to long to help another, to grow in my faith, to sense God's presence in the stranger, to race across the dew-laden grass of life and serve my neighbor. I will often fail. But I will, if I'm alert, sometimes succeed in bringing the beginning of time to another...")

("About eighty years ago, an American author called Myles Connolly wrote a novel called Mr Blue. In it, the eponymous protagonist Mr Blue, begins to tell a story about someone he calls 'Prisoner 2757311'...")

("As night falls in the centre of Nottingham a street performer entertains the crowds of shoppers with a hoop of fire, whilst her colleague takes a break from juggling flaming torches. Her dexterity with this whirling ring of six flames attracts a circle of fascinated onlookers and holds their rapt attention...")

("On the bike, you have to keep an eye on the traffic. Sometimes it doesn't see you. You have to watch for potholes. A pothole that would simply make a car bump, can throw you off, and break your shoulder. You have to watch out for kangaroos; one nearly hit me in the middle of the night. You have to keep alert to little numb places starting in your hands...")

("The poet, Rainer Marie Rilke, at the height of his fame, was once contacted by a young man from a small, provincial town. The young man expressed his admiration for Rilke's poetry and told him that he envied him, envied his life in a big city, and envied a life so full of insight and richness...")

("This is the major critique that Bill Plotkin, an important new voice in spirituality, makes of what he sees happening in much of Christian spirituality today. From our church programs, to what happens in our retreat centers, to the spiritual quests people more deliberately pursue, Plotkin sees too little connection to nature, to the sun, to storms, to the wilderness, and to the desert that Jesus himself sought out....")

("I was in New York City during hurricane Sandy. The day after the hurricane the New York Daily News had a front-page spread picturing the hundred homes at Breezy Point destroyed by fire during the storm. The headline read, 'Apocalypse New York'. People may not be biblically literate, but when life throws disaster and distraction our way, we often call up such language from the Bible...")

("When work began on making the Ben Hur movie, Cecil B. DeMille talked to Charlton Heston about the chariot race at the end. Heston finally agreed to take chariot driving lessons rather than using a stunt double. Learning to drive a chariot drawn by four horses was not easy for Heston..." and other illustrations)

"In recent years, I've come to know and represent a Christian artist from India who works in batiks and woodblock prints, Dr. P. Solomon Raj. Raj, who himself is a Dalit or untouchable, the lowest and unchangeable class in a society that is 87% Hindu, wants with his art to answer the question, 'What kind of God is this Christian God?'..."

("Dr. Louis Pasteur developed the rabies vaccine. In July of 1885 a family brought him a boy named Joseph Meister. A rabid dog had bitten Joseph and they begged Dr. Pasteur to help him...")

("There is a little-known fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm entitled "Der Mond," or in English, "The Moon." It is a short tale that was adapted by the German composer Carl Orff into an opera in one act. It involves four young rowdy misfits from a land where there is no light...")

My best friend in elementary school was Katrina White. We loved to have sleepovers. We would make up plays, sing our favorite songs, create art projects—there usually wasn’t much sleeping involved. But we did at least go through the motions by laying down for awhile. And one night, Katrina refused to lay on the floor by the bed. And she refused to lay on the floor by the closet. It seems that she had seen the movie Poltergeist in which, apparently, some scary something comes from under the bed and out of the closet. I distinctly remember thinking that if a scary movie could make someone too scared to sleep on the floor, I would just avoid scary movies... It seems that she had seen the movie Poltergeist in which, apparently, some scary something comes from under the bed and out of the closet. I distinctly remember thinking that if a scary movie could make someone too scared to sleep on the floor, I would just avoid scary movies...

("In one of his sermons, Fred Craddock told a story about something that happened many years ago while he was driving by himself cross-country. He had stopped at a small diner somewhere in the South to refresh himself with an early breakfast and some coffee...")

("I was looking for something on the internet the other night and because I am still waiting for Robert Ghiz, the Premier, and Aliant, the phone company, to come up with high speed at the same rate everyone else on PEI pays, I am still on dial-up...")

("I don't know about you, but I've been subjected to judgment before – times, say, when my work has been scrutinized and closely evaluated – and I found that to be an excruciating experience, anything but joyful. In music school, for example, we'd end each semester by playing a solo or an etude before a small panel of faculty members. We called them 'juries' and that was a pretty good name for it. We were on trial, and our semester grade depended on how well we played...." and other illustrations)

I’d like to share a brief passage about looking for and finding God. It’s from a book with a good Advent title, Night, for it describes one of the darkest places ever known on this earth: the Auschwitz death camp. There’s an earth-shattering event if there ever was one! Elie Wiesel is a Nobel Prize winning author who survived Auschwitz and recorded many of his experiences in this book. If ever there has been a place on earth where we are justified to cry out, “Where are you, God?!” Auschwitz is the place. One particularly well-known passage from this book asks just this question. It describes the Nazis hanging three of the Jewish inmates, one a young boy: The victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. “Long live Liberty!” cried the two adults. But the child was silent. “Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked. At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over. What happens next is difficult to tell you. The two adults died rather quickly. But the young boy wasn’t heavy enough for his weight to mercifully kill him, so he hung there struggling for more than an hour, as his Jewish comrades were forced to stand and watch. Wiesel writes: Behind me I heard the same man asking: “Where is God now?” And I hear a voice within me answer him: “Where is he? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows...”

("In many ancient churches, fragments of medieval stained glass are incorporated into a new ensemble and replaced in a window that each piece might once have filled rather differently. Panels like this can portray to us a number of ways in which the themes of Advent illuminate our faith and our lives")

(includes several quotes)

("Down in Memphis, Tennessee, a man named Foster Walker accidentally strolled into a store during a robbery. The gunman pointed his pistol at Walker and ordered him to hand over his money...")

("A Holy Family parishioner who died last May vividly illustrated the drama of human life. I quoted him above: Life is an adventure or it is nothing at all. Steve was a bright man with many beautiful gifts...")

("Some years ago comedian Bill Murray starred in a movie that was one of the many, many take-offs from Charles Dickens' story A Christmas Carol. Murray was the Scrooge figure in the film as he played a hard-nosed television executive who disliked everything about Christmas except for the fact that his TV network could make a lot of money off the holidays...")

("A loose comparison might be the day of October 19, 1989, 5:04 PM in San Francisco. When the Loma Prieta earthquake rumbled, my uncle was on the 32nd floor of a swaying high rise. Of course the phones went dead, so he couldn't call to make sure his daughter was safe...")

("Not long ago I came across a movie with a story line that might help us view this text in a fresh way. The story set up a situation that parallels, in several ways, the theology pertinent to the text we have from Mark, and others like it. The name of the movie was Jakob the Liar. The story was about Jews living in a Ghetto in Poland in the waning days of the Second World War...")

("It was Thanksgiving time in the first grade, and the teacher asked each of the students to draw a picture of something they were thankful for. Predictably, some of the children drew pictures of turkey dinner they were looking forward to...")

("There was a mother mouse who was scurrying across the kitchen floor with her brood of six little mice in tow. All of a sudden she came eyeball-to-eyeball with a very large and very mean-looking cat...")

("We have a friend who has started an orphanage in Ethiopia especially to house young girls. With AIDS taking the lives of so many in Africa, and leaving so many children to wander the streets his heart would not allow them to have no chance at all. His eyes always tear as his heart aches when he tells the story of seeing three year old children on the streets fending for themselves...")

("Once upon a time years ago a teacher had a very difficult time controlling her class. The students were bright, and for the most part, not trouble makers. They had behaved well for their previous teacher and were prepared to do the same for this one...")

("The Rev. William Peake in Iowa once wondered HOW THE MEDIA WOULD HANDLE THE END OF THE WORLD and he put together a few possible headlines. Here is a sample of what he wrote...")

("Groundhog Day is a film in which Bill Murray plays a rude, self-centered weatherman, who finds himself in a bizarre time warp, re-living the same day over and over again. He wakes up each day and hears exactly the same idle talk on the radio, has the same meaningless interactions and the same arguments with his colleagues...")

("Waiting is not a popular past time in our culture today. We have our photos developed at a One Hour Photo Shop, take our clothes to Same Day Dry Cleaners, and buy food at a drive thru. We pay our bills over the phone and do our banking on the internet where there are no long lines of waiting people...")

("It is some time in the near future. There has been a war in the northern hemisphere and both sides used nuclear weapons. The war ended with both sides being wiped out but now there was a huge nuclear cloud that was slowly moving southwards and would eventually engulf the whole world. A novel was written about such an event and how the people in the southern parts of Australia waited for the end...")

("One of my dearest friends applied for a position that required him to instruct and inspire younger people. His interviewer and evaluator asked him, 'Tell me about your walk with Jesus.'...")

("Once upon a time a TV commentator delivered a pessimistic editorial on a Friday evening broadcast. The world was in grim shape, he told the camera. Global warming was worse than anyone had thought it was...")

("Once upon a time there was a teenage girl named Belinda. She was somewhat interested in a boy named Randolph, a nice boy, a smart boy, a respectful boy, a good Catholic and a good dancer too...")

("Once upon a time a mother and father had a wonderful idea for celebrating Christmas. They would take their children and grandchildren to Ireland for Christmas time. Even if it was dark almost all day in Ireland at that time of the year and cold and wet too...")

I’d like to share a brief passage about looking for and finding God. It’s from a book with a good Advent title, Night, for it describes one of the darkest places ever known on this earth: the Auschwitz death camp. There’s an earth-shattering event if there ever was one! Elie Wiesel is a Nobel Prize winning author who survived Auschwitz and recorded many of his experiences in this book. If ever there has been a place on earth where we are justified to cry out, “Where are you, God?!” Auschwitz is the place. One particularly well-known passage from this book asks just this question. It describes the Nazis hanging three of the Jewish inmates, one a young boy: The victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. “Long live Liberty!” cried the two adults. But the child was silent. “Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked. At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over. What happens next is difficult to tell you. The two adults died rather quickly. But the young boy wasn’t heavy enough for his weight to mercifully kill him, so he hung there struggling for more than an hour, as his Jewish comrades were forced to stand and watch. Wiesel writes: Behind me I heard the same man asking: “Where is God now?” And I hear a voice within me answer him: “Where is he? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows...”

("Twentieth century Bible scholar William Barclay, for instance, would get up in the middle of the night to study. He lived on only a few hours of sleep. Evidently for him, as well as for others, keeping awake in the middle of the night made him very productive...")

("The book is by Dr. Seuss, and is entitled One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. The quote to consider today is brief: From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere...")

"A little boy could not wait to get to high school. The high school kids seemed to have so much fun. Once he got to high school however, he noticed that the people, like his sister, who had gone off to college were having more fun than he was..."

I was on the road on Tuesday afternoon, listening to the CBC and the hosts of the show were having a mild disagreement about a certain song: was it Christmas music early, or Remembrance Day music late? The song was Christmas in the Trenches. It tells the story of the famous Christmas Truce of World War I...

("I want to tell you about Queen. Queen was her real first name and she was a senior who lived in an apartment at the Drew Nursing Home. She often got a ride with us to the Westmorland Farm Annex in Dorchester, but she didn't come to the worship service with us she taught prisoners how to read...")

"One of the most moving experiences I have ever had was visiting the Hotel Dieu, the Hospice of God, in Beaune, France. On an entire wall was a picture of the Last Judgment painted by Rogier van der Weyden, the Flemish painter, for this hospital which was founded in 1443..." and another quote by Helen Keller

("One of my favorite movies, one based on an equally wonderful play is Camelot, starring Richard Harris as King Arthur. It is the story of the Knights of the Round Table. It is the story of peace, joy, love, prosperity that once filled the land of England...")

("The TV report featured apocalyptic writer Hal Lindsey, the author of the 1970 hugely-popular best-seller The Late, Great Planet Earth. The book predicted the fiery end of the world based on Lindsey's reading of the book of Revelation...")

("In my office in the manse is a framed needlework which says one word - Camelot. It was a gift from a dear friend many years ago who knew how much I loved that Broadway play (and eventually movie) - wonderful story, marvelous characters, tremendous music...")

("In the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the aliens who came were benign and blessed earth with a vision of gentility and peace. In another movie those who were old rediscovered youth. The dream is that contact with that which is 'other' than ourselves can bring unifying terror or a graced-filled future...")

(includes several quotes)

("futurologists are usually historians, poets, novelists and scientists. They are people like Aldus Huxley who wrote a famous book BRAVE NEW WORLD. In the book, the future was controlled by science and technology. Babies were bottled in test tubes...")

("It was January 27, 1986. We were getting ready. The whole nation was getting ready. It was going to be a great day. All eyes were watching the television sets. It was going to be the 'all time greatest' space launching. We had a schoolteacher; a woman; an astronaut. It was one of the most exciting days in American history..." and other doomsday illustrations)

("When I was fourteen years old, my parents had gone to Chicago, and I was left in my little town of Jackson, Minnesota. My parents left me in charge of the house. ..." and other illustrations)

our Advent prayer is a prayer that patiently waits. T.S. Eliot offered such a prayer, in his Four Quartets, I said to my soul, be still and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God... I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought; So the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing.

Four years ago, Douglas Coupland (a British Columbia author) wrote about a fictitious group of people that work for a large computer company called Microserfs. One of the characters has a theory that "Type-A personalities have a whole subset of diseases that they, and only they share. And the transmission vector for these diseases is the ‘door close’ button on elevators that only gets pushed by impatient, Type-A people." The elevator manufacturers have noted that their short-range vertical transportation devices seem to provoke human beings to raw expressions of impatience. They have noted that a good waiting time is fifteen seconds. Sometime around forty seconds, people start to get visibly upset. Once inside the elevator car, there is another waiting time as we wait for the door to close. This time, know to the elevator engineers as door dwell, is actually only two to four seconds. If you actually look at the buttons on an elevator you will notice that the Door Close button is the one with the paint worn off. It gets used more than any other button on the elevator...

"In the Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis, Wormwood is the protégé of his uncle, Screwtape, who writes him letters coaching him in the art of winning the soul of a young Christian for Satan..." and other illustrations

("C. S. Lewis once wrote: 'God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world...")

("The British writer Arnold Lunn tells about one time he was on a boat trip when a certain lady was plaguing him with theological questions. He answered her with quotes from the Bible and from the teaching of the Church but the woman would not accept what he said...")

("George MacDonald was a Scottish preacher who left the parish ministry and later wrote a great number of novels and stories for children. He published a book of poems, among them one poem which found its way into our hymnals. 'They all were looking for a King to slay their foes, and lift them high...")

("As I see it, the preaching challenge these weeks is to find the grace in apocalyptic texts and Advent pericopes and to preach it in such a way that our hearers do not shut down at the sound of 'second coming'...")

("Our family once had a girl dog named Walter. Don’t even ask. Every time we took that dog to a different Vet and we told them her name was Walter, the Vet would look her over and say, 'You DO know this is a female, right?' Duh...")

("One night, about 75 folks gathered to watch a screening of the first Left Behind movie. In case you don't know about the Left Behind phenomenon, it is a series of twelve books and, as of a few weeks ago, three films which dramatize what will happen to those left behind on earth after the Rapture. Widely read among conservative Christians, the books have been at the top of the New York Times best-seller list...")

("There was a huge pecan old tree down by the cemetery fence. One day, two boys filled up a bucket with pecans and sat down by behind the tree. Out of sight they and began dividing up the pecans. 'One for you, one for me. One for you, one for me,' said one boy...")

(includes several illustrations)

("There is a little piece I was reading this week, entitled Things I Think I Own: Today I stood at my window and cursed the pouring rain. Today a desperate farmer prayed for his fields of grain. My weekend plans were ruined, it almost made me cry...")

("One of the most popular Christmas specials of recent years has been the dramatization of Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory. The very title of that wonderful program tells us something important about the season we have just entered...")

("This time of year people are anxious about many things. When we become overwhelmed there is a tendency to give up or fall into a deep depression. The name, R. Buckminster Fuller probably doesn’t mean anything to you. There was a point in his life when he was ready to end it because things were going badly...")

("Philip Gulley spends Christmas with his mother-in-law, Ruby, who lives in Paoli, Indiana. Each year, Herb, from a local department store, sets up a nativity scene on the courthouse lawn. Each year the Holy family occupies the southwest corner of the square but no one complains...")

("This temptation to fall asleep until the right time is illustrated quite well in a Blondie cartoon. Dagwood says to his wife: 'I'm all ready to go. See… I laid my clothes out and my suitcase is all packed and ready to go.'...")

("For a number of years, our family took vacations in places where people had gathered in communities to wait for the end of the world. They were eschatological communities, communities that anticipated the eschaton or the end of all things...")

("A mother is thinking to herself. 'Here it is the first Sunday of Advent and I still have kindergarten Indians and pilgrims plastered to the windows of my house. It couldn't be time for the candles and the first whispered hope, already. But here I am out in the dark cutting a few evergreen sprigs for our Advent wreath'...")

("In a Peanuts cartoon, Lucy announces, 'Boy do I feel crabby!' Linus tries to help her feel better, and gives her his chair in front of the TV besides fixing her a sandwich, some chocolate cookies and milk...")

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