The Dark Season

Advent begins in the dark. When the ground is frozen and the days are short. The church year begins when the trees are bare and the wind blows until the windows rattle.

The pastor, desperate for a word for these dark days, turns to the lectionary. As she reads the text she rubs her eyes. Surely, she murmurs, there is some mistake. Maybe, she thinks, I have the wrong year. But it doesn’t matter—whether the lectionary cycle is A, B, or C. Each gospel text is essentially the same. The second coming of Christ. Apocalyptic literature. Old Noah and his family and the waters that swept everything away. Christmas, where is Christmas? She reads on: sun darkened, moon turning to blood, family members turning against family members. The preacher has suddenly stumbled on another world: the end of time, earthquakes and famine, wars and rumors of wars, people’s hearts failing them for fear. And, in the middle of it all, Jesus coming in the clouds with judgment. What, she wonders, does all of this have to do with Christmas?

As a little boy I found this talk of second coming scary. I remember the preacher saying that two would be in the field; one would be taken and one left. I always knew who would be left. The Evangelist would whisper: “What will you be doing when Jesus comes back? Do you want to be caught…?” and then it was left to our imaginations to fill in the blanks. And fill them I did.

Later, much later I discovered that the early church included apocalyptic literature like Mark 13 as a catechism for new converts. This doctrine, they felt was basic to understanding the faith journey. He who once came will come again. The Lord they served really was the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

The trouble with this doctrine of the second coming is that the church often confused the underlying theme with the window dressing. In hard, hard times the believers would mutter: “Surely he will come soon!” But the Lord did not come back in their lifetime and this became the first great crisis in the church. People fell away in droves disenchanted with disappointment.

Why do we keep reading these gloomy words like: “The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from the heavens…?” (Mark 13.25) Maybe they kept the second coming stories for the same reason they kept those dream-like words of that first coming: angels, a mad King, shepherds tearing through the fields with joy, a tiny king born in the unlikeliest of places. Maybe first and second coming may have the same purpose. Underneath the words they try to explain the unexplainable. Both accounts may be the church’s way to try to touch a mystery that is always hard to comprehend. How does one put the glorious impossible into words?

And so the church kept these words and has tried as best they could to interpret them for their particular age. Buried underneath all the rhetoric is the admonition to watch, to wait, to keep your eyes open lest we miss the bridegroom when he comes.

So year after year, like our forebears, we light a candle when the days are shortest and darkness comes too quickly. We open the book again to pages we scarcely read any other time. Toppling kingdoms, rivers of blood, clouds and angels. We hear again the admonition to watch, to wait, to listen—to keep our lamps filled with oil, never knowing when the great Lord of glory might just walk down our street and stop at our door.