Advent I

Advent 1: November 27:

Mark 13:24-37: On Suddenness

This reading is perhaps not the most troubling reading in all the lectionary, but it’s pretty rough. Moreover, it’s pretty far from the images that “preparation for Christmas” conjures up in a lot of our minds. One of the joys of Advent, I think, is the opportunity to preach on themes that are perhaps unexpected, and are certainly not present in the commercial “preparations for Christmas” of the media and the marketplace.

There’s one theme here that I want to lift up as being particularly relevant to our work at The Night Ministry. However you interpret or read this vision from the author of Mark, it’s pretty clear that we’re talking about some pretty radical change here, and change that comes pretty suddenly. At The Night Ministry, we encounter sudden and radical change pretty regularly, and this scripture might be an opportunity to consider some of the theological implications of change that is both startlingly fast and disorienting in its scope.

The first thing that comes to mind is a certain category of questions that comes up now and then, when I talk about The Night Ministry at congregations, community groups, and other settings. Sometimes, it comes out like this: “Do you see a lot of drug abuse among these young people?” Or: “Most of these people are mentally ill, right?” Now, often, questions like these are genuine attempts to understand the folks we serve, and the contexts in which we work, but I wonder if there’s something else going on. When I hear about people who are homeless, about young people who turn to dangerous ways of securing shelter and food, about people who are lonely and on the margins, I have a very human impulse to try to call out some ways in which “these people” are different from me. It’s not safe if they’re like me- if they’re like me, then that could be me one of these days.

We know that many of the people we work with, in our shelters and in our street outreach program, came to their current situations fairly suddenly. Their parents kicked them out, or the bank foreclosed on the family home. Or an illness, or a lost job, or any of a dozen other things that could quite literally happen to any of us. Sometimes we talk about our work as centering on people who are “homeless or precariously housed.” Many of us don’t want to admit how precarious our housing is.
If Mark envisions a future full of radical change, maybe we should prepare for radical change ourselves. Or, at least to allow for the possibility that our seemingly-stable lives are not as stable as we might like. And exploring this might lend us some more courage and compassion in reaching out to those who are experiencing homelessness. Maybe it’s powerful to consider our congregations and towns as made up exclusively of people who are experiencing homelessness, and people who are not yet experiencing homelessness.

This is perhaps a rough preaching of this text, (which may be authentic!) but I want to explore also the other side of this. Just as we know plenty of people who find themselves in dangerous situations with some suddenness, so do we know people who find housing or safety or health with an often-shocking suddenness. One of the goals of our outreach and shelter staff is to connect with people who are in crisis, and try to help them imagine what there next step will be. Often, a stimulus as simple as a conversation about goals, about next steps, or about whether someone’s happy about how their life is going can lead to some pretty radical changes. We’ve seen folks who have been out on the street for many years find housing; we’ve seen estranged families get together again; we’ve seen those struggling with addiction step away from their demons and find pathways to health. We don’t rule anybody out, and we don’t rule any changes out.

Finally, a question: what would it mean to bring this expectation, this affinity for suddenness to a systemic conversation? Surely, it will take a long time to end homelessness in our city, and our world, right? And maybe we never will, right? I don’t know. But it seems like we should keep watch. We should be aware. We should keep alert.

Let me know what you think.