Advent 1 Year A 2025: Matthew 24:36-44

In 2019, the musical Hadestown opened on Broadway. Hadestown is a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the story of Eurydice, who goes to work in a hellish industrial version of the Greek underworld to escape poverty and the cold, and her poor singer-songwriter lover Orpheus, who comes to rescue her. Orpheus fails - Hades gives them a chance to walk out but they must do so single-file, and Orpheus is not allowed to look back at Eurydice. Just as they are about to complete the test, doubt causes Orpheus to turn around, condemning Eurydice to return to the underworld. The audience knows it ends badly from the beginning - even if you don’t know the original story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the opening song lets the audience know it's a sad song. But the story is told so well that it still breaks your heart when Orpheus fails - there is oftentimes an audible gasp from the audience when he turns around. But the story ends with Hermes, who functions in the story as a narrator, says, "It's a sad song / But we sing it anyway / ‘Cause here’s the thing / To know how it ends / And still begin to sing it again / As if it might turn out this time” and then the story begins again as if the whole show might run again.

Hadestown reminds us that the telling of the story is just as important as the ending. It’s one of the reasons I love 19th century literature like Jane Austen. You can figure out who is going to have a happy ending before the story is over, but it’s written well enough that you care how they get there. I remember a few years ago I was reading Anna Karenina by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy and I was about halfway through the book. I could tell things were not going to work out well for Anna - I knew enough about the era of literature and about Tolstoy to guess that - but there were hundreds of pages left. So I called my mom and asked her if anybody ends up happy at the end of this. Is there any hope or is it just going to be a depressing 300 pages until everyone is miserable? The ending would’ve been fair either way - the book begins with the hopefulness of, “happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way.” But I wasn’t in the mood to sign up for hundreds of pages of sadness with no happy payoff.

Our Gospel text comes from a surprising location within the Gospel of Matthew. The way the church calendar works, today is the first day of the year. So why are we in chapter 24? Even without knowing how many chapters there are in Matthew - there are 28 - you can figure out that chapter 24 is way too late to begin on the church equivalent of New Year’s Day. In the Gospel of Matthew, Holy Week lasts seven chapters. The triumphal entry into Jerusalem that we celebrate as Palm Sunday begins chapter 21. The Last Supper is in chapter 26. So here we’re at, like, the Tuesday in Holy Week. And Jesus is talking about the coming of the Son of Man. This is oftentimes referred to as an apocalyptic discourse. Why are we reading this on Advent 1?

To be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church, most dioceses require seminarians to take General Ordination Exams, or GOEs. This is a series of six two-hour exams that you usually sit during January of your senior year. There are a plethora of legends surrounding GOEs of days past. Of what the requirements used to be. Of what the format used to look like. Of various professors who failed various sections of the exam. One of the rumors surrounding the Bible exam is that you used to be given a section of text and had to identify which Gospel it came from and give a justification for your answer that can’t be “I just know this is in Matthew”. And one of the ways you can recognize that something comes from the Gospel of Matthew is its reliance on the prophets and recognizing Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophets. He sees Jesus as a transfiguration of Torah. So if you read a text that says something like, “this was done to fulfill what was written by the prophets” and then quoting something from Isaiah, you should put your money on Matthew.

Episcopal publisher Forward Movement offers a ministry every year called Advent Word. Advent Word is an online global advent calendar where participants are given a single word upon which to reflect every day from today through Christmas Day. You’ll find the list posted in our Parish Hall. Today’s word is "again". Our text reminds us, as we read it again this year, to be constantly aware of Jesus. To be paying attention to what we are being called to do.

There’s something that happens with active repetition. With reading our stories again and again. And by knowing how the story ends. Today we read about the re-making of the world that happens through Jesus, ready or not. Most of us are here because we have experienced or are seeking the movement of our crucified and risen Lord. We know how each of the Gospel accounts end. How the church grew and evolved into what it is today. But knowing the end of the story isn’t all there is to it. We have so much left to read between chapters one and 24. About the incarnation into the person of Jesus. About his earthly ministry and how he transformed the lives of so many in his own physical time. And I have found that every time I read those chapters, I experience them differently. A different story speaks to me. A different word shines in my mind and allows the text to take up residence in my heart. With each repetition, each time reading the story again, it becomes more a part of who I am. That is what we want our Scriptures to be: a part of our own stories.

But doing something over and over again for repetition’s sake isn’t good pedagogy. Doing something mindlessly or incorrectly will not have the desired effect. It could even have the opposite effect - it’s much harder to re-learn how to do something right once bad habits have been established. Memory and cognition experts will explain that once something is learned, a neurological track is laid in the brain that can’t be undone, but must be relearned in such a way as to lay a new “bypassing” track. So it’s important to read our sacred texts mindfully. To take them seriously. And to be patient and gentle with ourselves if we are in a process of laying that bypassing track around damaging theology or toxic family systems.

And like the narrator in Hadestown, that is why we sing it again. Even though we know the end of the story is always the same. We begin the story in the same way every Advent, remembering the years of preparing for the Messiah and we know the story will end with Christ coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead. But what we do in the in-between time is constantly being re-written. And as God’s beloved creations, as creatures who have the gift of co-creation with God, we can do some of that writing with the guidance of our God. So sing your song. Even if it’s off-key. Even if your voice shakes. Because we know that in the End, whenever it may be, what we sing in the meantime matters to God. Amen.