In the days of Jesus the Temple in Jerusalem was the most magnificent structure anyone had ever seen. Some of the stones were 40 ft long…. JUST ONE STONE. Most of the western wall, plus some of the northern wall, from a later incarnation of the temple, still exists today. Even these remnants, small in comparison to what the disciples are marveling at in today’s Gospel, are pretty impressive. When I touched the Western Wall last January I was moved to tears. It is an amazing and formidable place. To the fishermen, tentmakers and stonemasons from rural Galilee the site must have been equally incredible. But it wasn’t just the site that blew them away, it was Jesus’ outlandish claim that it would be destroyed and rebuilt in three days. It just plain ludicrous.
And ludicrous is exactly what Jesus was going for. Along with awesome, incredible, amazing and unbelievable.
Welcome to pre-Advent, my friends. Years ago, Advent had six weeks, just like Lent, so these two Sundays before the official start to Advent have much the same feel as our Advent readings: lots of apocalyptic, end world imagery, lots of violence, lots of chaos. You see, Advent is all about a beginning emerging out of an end, it’s all about a new creation, it’s all about turning what we know inside out and upside down. Advent is about readying us for the coming of a savior, of The Savior. Advent is about welcoming a new creation.
Now I’ve never given birth but I sure do know an awful lot of people who have and I think I am right in saying that giving birth isn’t pretty. Birthing involves ebbs and flows of pain, fear, hope and peace. Giving birth hurts. And once birth happens, there’s a lot of cleaning up to do. Oh and then there’s that whole utter world changing aspect to bringing a brand new human being, a human being you are responsible for, into the world.
All this apocalyptic literature, the readings from Hebrews, the readings from the 13th chapter of Mark’s Gospel are tools used by the writers of our sacred texts to give us some sense of what the Coming of Jesus meant to the world of 1st century Palestine and what it means to us today. The coming of Jesus then and the coming of Jesus now is mind-blowing, overwhelming and little bit scary. Because the coming of Jesus blows everything else to bits.
Thanks be to God.
You see what the coming of Jesus blows to bits is the business as usual of this world:
Hatred. Fear. Intolerance. Hopelessness.
What the Coming of Jesus brings to us is a clean slate, a fresh start, a beginning to the creation of a world where Love replaces Hate, Courage replaces Fear, Tolerance, Intolerance, Hope replaces Hopelessness.
But getting there? Getting there is just like childbirth---painful scary messy and at times, overwhelming.
Preparing for the messiah is not for the faint of heart.
It requires perseverance, fortitude, grit, spunk and persistence. It also requires faith. Big Faith.
The kind of Big Faith found in Mary, the mother of Jesus, the kind of Big Faith found in Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, the kind of Big Faith found in Sarah, the kind of Big Faith found in Hannah.
The Big Faith of the matriarchs I just mentioned isn’t big in the usual sense. It isn’t loud, it isn’t flashy, it isn’t all that apparent to the casual observer. What makes their faith Big is the breadth and the depth of it. You see these women really got it. They understood that professing one’s faith means nothing if the faith isn’t lived. They understood that shouting their faith from the rooftops meant nothing if deep within their homes, deep within their souls they weren’t living it.
Hannah had that type of faith. Her life wasn’t easy…. each and every time her husband made the obligatory animal sacrifice at the temple she was subject to the disdain and the disgust of his other wife---the one he didn’t love so much, but the one who was fertile. If you’ve ever wanted—desperately wanted---to have a child and were unable too you know the anguish, the deep in your gut anguish of not being able to do so. That was the anguish of Hannah.
When confronted with such a burden, such anguish you have two choices: bitterness or grace.
Hannah displayed some bitterness early on in today’s reading but she seemed to have turned that around fairly quickly when she decided, once and for all, to turn the whole mess over to God. It is a show of great grace, it is an example of Big Faith when Hannah, assumed to be a drunkard by Eli, stands up for herself—and her faith—by telling Eli that what he assumed was drunkeness was, in reality fervent and faithful praying. Hannah, in the same vein as the Woman with the Hemorrhage and the Woman at the Well---very familiar stories we heard earlier this year in Mark’s Gospel--- teaches the judgmental male in the story a thing or two.
That’s actually what makes faith Big. Faith is Big when those who witness it are changed by it. Eli was changed by Hannah’s faith, Jesus was changed by the faith of the woman at the well, the woman with the hemorrhage and the woman who birthed him, to name a few.
So welcome to this season of pre-Advent, the season of expectation, the season of apocalypse, the season when Big Faith comes to us in the unexpected person of a peasant baby who turns everything, from that magnificent temple to you and me, upside down and inside out.
Amen.
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