I’m going to let you in on a little professional secret, which is that most preachers, sooner or later, despair of the task. Sooner or later, hopefully for just a little while, we feel like, "What’s the point? I preach and preach and preach and no one hears, no one changes, the world is just the same as when I got here." It’s like the old joke about a new priest who preached a very good, challenging sermon on his first Sunday. And then he preached the same sermon on the second Sunday. And the third. And the sixth. And finally the senior warden, pressured by the vestry, came to him and said, "When are you going to preach a new sermon?" And he said, "When you’ve heard the old one."

Well, with that in mind, you can’t imagine how much pleasure it gives me to inform you that, "There will be a test." I’m not kidding — there’s going to be a test, so you’d better listen up.

We’re going to talk a little today about Advent, the four weeks before Christmas. This is the first Sunday of Advent, so today we begin a new liturgical year. Happy New Year! You’ll be able to tell that we’re in a new year (Year "B") because our Gospel readings will be mostly from Mark, with a little John sprinkled in. But most everything else will remain the same. Every year through the cycle of liturgical seasons, we tell anew the story of how God has acted and still acts in the world.

And our great story begins with Advent, with this season of anticipation, of preparation for that wonderful event in the manger. It’s a time to get ready for the baby, to anticipate the birth. It is a time when, as a community, we are all pregnant, waiting for God to come among us as a little baby.

And all that waiting for a baby to be born is fun and sweet. But there’s another side to Advent. A side that is not so warm and fuzzy. Because Advent is not just about the first coming of Christ, it is also a season of judgment and uncertainty as we contemplate the second coming of Christ. Judgment. There’s a cold, prickly theme if ever there was one. And so to begin Advent, we read from the "Little Apocalypse" in Mark’s Gospel.

We’ve talked about apocalyptic literature before. (You should be taking notes for the quiz, by the way). It was all the rage for a couple of centuries on either side of Jesus’ time. It’s characterized by exotic, often bizarre imagery depicting cataclysmic events. And we have a dose of it here. There will be great suffering, Jesus says, and afterwards "the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky and the powers in the heavens will be shaken and heaven and earth will pass away, and no one knows when."

As apocalyptic literature goes, this is actually pretty tame stuff, but it gets my attention. This imagery seems pretty scary to me. But the truth is I need to be scared. I need to be shaken up. Because the Little Apocalypse emphasizes what Jesus tells us: "Be alert!" "Keep awake." And I need to have those things emphasized.

I think I’m a lot like most of us — I’m not very good at staying alert. I tend to slip into a complacent routine. I tend to slip into living my life as if it were going to last forever, so I don’t think of it as my one, wonderful, precious opportunity that I have to make the most of right now because I don’t know when it will end.

It is so easy to just keep on keeping on as you watch yourself put one foot in front of the other without ever lifting your head to see where you are going, without ever asking, "Is this where I should be in my life? Is this how God wants me to use this one precious opportunity? Am I constantly looking for the coming of Christ in my life?"

When I was in school, it was easy to be complacent. Just sort of listen to what the teacher was saying, think, "That’s interesting," or "That’s boring," but not really buckling down to learn it, not really letting the material affect me. But there were five words that always shattered my complacency: "There will be a test."

"There will be a test." My demeanor changed immediately. Suddenly I understood that whether I got this or not was going to mean something, that someone cared, that there would be consequences, that I would be called upon to give an accounting for myself.

Now when lots of people read passages like the Little Apocalypse in Mark, passages where Jesus talks about judgment, they imagine a condemning God, a harsh God, and some versions of Christianity use passages like this to instill fear of a God who seems to be looking for excuses to condemn. I don’t see it that way. I see it the way C.S. Lewis portrays God’s judgment in a wonderful little book called The Great Divorce. It is about heaven and hell, although they are not separate places. They are the same place, and whether it is heaven or hell depends on whether you embrace the values of heaven — sacrificial love, forgiveness, compassion, mercy, relatedness, valuing all others — or the values of hell — isolation, anger, power, resentfulness, grudges, superiority, "looking out for number one." In C.S. Lewis’ vision, God no more judges us than my teacher judged me by giving me an exam. The exam only revealed what I knew, what kind of student I was. God’s judgment, so fearfully depicted in Mark’s Little Apocalypse, only reveals who we are, people of heaven, or people of hell.

So, you see, alas, there is not really going to be a quiz about what I’ve said in this sermon. But I hope you also see that there really will be a test.