Each year before Advent, I excitedly look at the preaching schedule to see which week I’ve been assigned. Will I get to preach on John the Baptist, the prophet who prepares the way for the Lord, or on Mary and her Magnificat? And each year, I’m left wrestling with weird and uncomfortable passages like our Gospel reading today, the scripture assigned for this first week of Advent, the beginning of our liturgical year. Perhaps to our surprise, we are asked to begin the new year at the end of the Christian story — with a focus on the second coming of Christ, that is, on eschatology, which means the doctrine of the last things, the teaching about the ultimate promises of God — promises that include that God’s kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven, that there will be a new creation and the restoration of all things. By turning our focus to the end times at the beginning of the year, the Christian tradition is making a rather large and important claim: How we understand the end of the story shapes how we live now, between the times, between the first and second coming of Jesus Christ into the world.

This week’s reading in Mark is often called “the little apocalypse.” It is part of a broader genre known as apocalyptic literature that uses “cosmic imagery to describe the indescribable,” in this case, the second coming of Christ.[^1] Mark borrows apocalyptic imagery from the Hebrew scriptures — from Isaiah, Joel, Ezekiel, and Daniel — to announce the imminence of divine judgment. The Bible speaks of the coming of God into the world as a kind of cosmic crisis — a decisive moment, a turning point — because God breaks into the world as Judge to pronounce a divine “No!” on all the destructive forces that harm us and our world. God’s “No!” to sin and death is in the service of God’s “Yes!” to the flourishing of life, and so it is a crisis characterized by hope for this world. The divine ‘No!’ is not to be feared but embraced, because it’s a word that liberates — that sets us free — from destructive behaviors, attitudes, or forces that bind us.

But I know as Episcopalians we aren’t very comfortable talking about God as Judge, even though each week, the liturgy leads us to connect the second coming with divine judgment as we recite the Nicene Creed, “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” And each week the Eucharistic prayer has us proclaim with confidence, even exuberance, the mystery of our faith, “Christ will come again.” So, our Gospel reading confronts us with this question: Can we affirm that a loving God is a God who judges the living and the dead? How is a judging God good news for us and for our world?

There’s plenty good reason why we don’t talk about divine judgment. Churches like ours need to be a safe space for people healing from religious trauma. Many of us know firsthand that the notion of divine judgment has been grossly misused to condemn our sexuality or gender, to shame us at the core of our being. Moreover, the idea of a judging God has often focused on petty legalism, on individual acts that offend cultural norms more than inhibit our relationship with God. Like Santa, the God of petty legalism is seen as making a list, checking it twice, finding out who’s naughty or nice. Perhaps most significantly, divine judgment is closely tied, in our Western Christian imagination, to the idea of hell as a place of eternal torment, where people get what they deserve.

I know the emotional and psychological hold these ideas can have on us, even long after our minds have changed. I grew up in an evangelical culture where everything revolved around the belief that people were either spending eternity in heaven or hell. It took a research trip to Auschwitz during my PhD studies, in my mid-twenties, to finally dislodge the emotional hold that belief system had on me. As I saw up close and in detail the dehumanization that happened there, I knew — now in a visceral way — that if Christians can agree that those atrocities are the epitome of evil, we can’t then turn around and say that if God does something similar, it is just or good.

It is vital that we move past the emotional and psychological hold these false ideas may have on us, because once we do, we can finally get down to the real work of being Christian. The first thing to make clear is that God’s judgment is not about punishment; it’s about accountability, taking responsibility for what we have done or left undone. God, the loving and merciful Judge, holds up a mirror for us, so that we might face what we don’t want to face about ourselves, so that we might be who we were created to be. God shines a light in the deepest and darkest corners of our lives, so that we might be liberated from whatever has us bound, freed to enjoy right relationship with God and one another.

In the Bible, the idea of a judging God is good news, because it was proclaimed by an oppressed people whose hope was in a God who would liberate them from their oppressors. The divine Judge is good news for the poor and vulnerable, because it is a response to injustice, God’s promise to hold accountable the people doing them harm.

I remember years ago, when I had a volunteer badge at Metro State Prison for Women, I decided on Christmas Day to go unannounced to the prison to see if they’d let me in. Miraculously, I was escorted all the way to the dorm where some of my students lived. I remember sitting on a staircase, as one woman I didn’t know told me, with great anguish, that she couldn’t stop getting in trouble because the officers’ treatment of her made her so mad. She felt like they were egging her on. I told her about the God who is the judge of the living and the dead, and asked if she could find comfort in the truth that one day those officers would be held accountable — not harmed or punished, for that would only continue the cycle of violence — but that in the presence of a loving and merciful God, they would one day have the opportunity to face what they had done to her, be sorry, and repent. She received those words as a comfort and told me she felt strengthened to stay calm and avoid trouble.
That God is the judge of the living and the dead is not just good news for the oppressed, it is also good news for us, since we are all, at different times and in different scenarios, both people who have sinned and people who have been sinned against. When we are the ones who have been sinned against, our divine judge promises to create justice for us through acts that deliver us from harm, heal us, and restore us to new life. When I am the one who has sinned against others, God saves me by helping me face the harm, holds me accountable, forgives me, and puts me back on the right road.

I’ve come to believe that we won’t have the courage it takes to face ourselves unless we are deeply grounded in God’s love. This is one reason why having a daily prayer life, an active relationship with the Living God, is so vital. One of the greatest gifts of my life is my marriage to Thomas, who loves me completely. Because I never doubt that he loves me, even as he knows the whole of who I am, he can, on occasion, point out something I need to face. I might be embarrassed to hear it, but I never feel a crippling shame. I receive it as news I want to hear, because I don’t want to walk around being a jerk, especially a noticeable one! I want to know when I’ve made a mistake or hurt someone, so that I can get back into right relationship with them.

In typical Advent fashion, our Gospel reading today implores us “to keep awake,” because we don’t know the day the Lord is coming. Since it will be an unexpected hour, we are to “develop the art of watchful living.”[^2] We are watchful when we establish a habit of honest self-reflection that includes confession of sin and repentant acts, when we regularly confront patterns of behaviors or mindsets that aren’t serving us well. As we go about our days, we are to hold in view the end of the Christian story — that all things are heading toward restoration, that summer is near, and that we are called to start that work of restoration now, by staying awake to who we are.

The call, in other words, is to grow in Christian maturity. One of the most powerful letters sent by a religious leader during our advocacy campaign for my student Kelly, who was about to be executed by the state of Georgia for planning the murder of her husband Doug, referred to the deep transformation she had early in her sentence when a pastor helped her face what she had done and accept God’s forgiveness. The letter said, “If the life even of a convicted murderer can be turned around and so radically redirected, then none of us is without hope. Please allow Kelly the opportunity to live out her redemption, which in reality is the more difficult burden we all have to bear.” In other words, to live as a person forgiven and free takes courage. It is at once the most basic posture of a Christian and a mark of a mature faith.

This moment in our nation’s history demands Christian maturity. We are only mature if we can grapple with the whole of who God is and the whole of who we are. A mature Christian faith trusts that God loves me to the core. Immersed in that love, when a mirror is held up to me, I can face myself — what I’ve done and left undone, attitudes I’ve held, disordered desires I’ve pursued, patterns of behavior I’ve failed to confront, loyalties I’ve refused to give up that counter God’s reign. The good news is that Jesus has come, will come again, and continues to come in between, bringing the judgment and grace that makes all things new.

Jesus will come again and take the side of the vulnerable and oppressed. Jesus will come again to liberate each of us from inner and outer forces holding us captive. He is coming to save. So, come, Lord Jesus, come. AMEN.

[^1]: Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol 1, Judy Yates Siker, p. 23

[^2]: Feasting on the Word, find citation.