Somehow it doesn’t seem like Advent to me. We haven’t even finished our turkey sandwiches. I cannot deal with the bell ringers at the stores, the Christmas music on the radio, and the relentless march of Christmas lights on every house in town (including ours). I’m not ready for Advent. let alone Christmas. I just want to shout, “Enough already”, but then nobody wants a Grinch to steal Advent.

I had prepared a sermon focusing on our Gospel, Mark 13:24-37. But the words of the earlier verses kept running through my head all weekend: the words about the “desolating sacrilege.” One of the problems with our lectionary and sermons based on the lectionary is that it is way too timid. For example we pick up today’s reading in the middle of the action. Jesus says. “… but in those days, after that suffering …” Doesn’t that make you want to know what days, what suffering?

If you base your sermon on today’s text alone, you will either get a nice Advent sermon about God’s love and waiting expectantly OR you will get a sermon that sounds a lot like those awful “Left Behind” books. In either case we completely miss what Jesus is trying to tell us. If you were hearing this entire chapter from verse 1 to 37, you would note the parenthetical command “let the reader understand” right after Jesus talks about the desolating sacrilege.

Mark is telling us in giant red letters, “This is significant. It is in code. Have you figured it out?” The exact phrase “desolating sacrilege” that Jesus uses is also found in the book of Daniel and in 1 Maccabees. referring to a time when the Roman Emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes set up an altar to Zeus in the Jerusalem Temple and sacrificed pigs on that altar. Not only were Jews at that time outraged by the action of the occupying Romans, two hundred years later in Jesus’ day they were still outraged by it. And the hated Romans were still there two centuries later. Now do you understand? These words of Jesus are radical, subversive words.

If the explicit connection between the words of Jesus and the events described in Daniel were not enough, you also have to understand that Mark’s gospel was written about thirty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection during a time of Jewish revolt and Roman destruction of the temple. This passage in Mark occurs right before the crucifixion and resurrection, so we could look at another layer of meaning where Jesus effectively says, “Don’t look for God in the Temple anymore. Don’t look for God in the big cities or centers of power. Look to the cross.”

The cross, an instrument of Roman execution, becomes a subversive statement about the power of God over the powerful government. For another three centuries, you could be executed for making a sign of the cross. Early Christians disguised it using an anchor as a kind of cross.

As with so many symbols, over time they become used and worn and lose the power of their original meaning. They say there is no Easter without Good Friday, but I say there is no Advent without the cross. Have we bit by bit undermined the real power of the cross? Have we diluted it so much that we print it on Tee shirts, tattoo it on our bodies, make it into jewelry, and use it to ward off vampires? Talk about a desolating sacrilege!

Many of us go to church but we hedge our bets. We pin our hopes on a variety of things that we think or we believe will save us. I’ve got news for you. The power of the government will not save you. Doctors and hospitals will not save you. Changes in tax policy and paying down the debt will not save us. The military will not save us either. The only thing that will save us is the real power of the real cross in your life.

God who set the planets in motion and fashioned you in your mother’s womb chose to become human like any of us. That same God willingly submitted to a painful, brutal execution on trumped up charges because there was a greater plan. That same God would defeat the powers of death itself and live among us again. That same God has plans for you. Plans to give you hope and a future. A future that goes beyond death itself.

Where are you going to look for god this Advent?

What kind of salvation do you really hope to find?