Good Morning: a Holy and Blessed Advent to each and every one of you. Keep awake, make ourselves ready, hang-on, these have been consistent themes we have heard the last few weeks, and we hear them again today as we enter into Advent.

Yes, we are in Advent! This means we have started a new Church Year. We do things a mite early in church-land. This means we are wearing different color vestments. We have our Advent Wreathe displayed with our first candle lit. Starting a new church year means we switch Gospels, from Matthew to Mark. And what a Gospel selection we are given as an entry point into the Gospel of Mark this first Sunday of Advent!

Advent always seems to be a season in conflict with the rest of the world. Well...church-land is always in conflict with the rest of the world, but during Advent that tension is much more marked. The world is telling us to start celebrating Christmas....right now! While in church-land we are supposed to enter into this period of waiting, of watching, of expectancy, of exploration. There is quite a juxtaposition between what we see and hear in the world around us and what we see and hear about in church-land. How do we reconcile the two?

This reflective waiting period that is Advent can be a gift. This Advent time can be a period in which we give our spiritual selves a present: a place to incubate, kind of like what happens in a Petri dish we used in high school chemistry class. Or perhaps a pregnancy, where we are waiting with great expectation, waiting in the unknown, waiting in excitement. This spiritual incubation period is really a transition time. That is what we are doing in Advent: we are waiting on a transition moment to happen: the Incarnation, God taking human form, the transcendent God becoming the imminent God. We are waiting on a mystery to unfold, a mystery that is about to happen: God taking human form, becoming tangible and real and yet, still a mystery. Waiting can be a good thing, an appropriate time to dwell into the mystery of that Christmas morning to come four weeks hence and what that in-breaking of God means to us. We need this time of reflection to try and understand this in-breaking of God.

Initially this reading we are given in Mark today may not seem to fit this period of reflection. In this chapter Mark uses imagery and language steeped in Jewish tradition and the Hebrew Scripture. Images from Barach and Micah, Zechariah and Daniel, Joel, Isaiah and Deuteronomy pervade this chapter, part of which we are dwelling on today. The imagery presented makes this chapter hard to decipher at times and a bit scary. Yet our passage for today ends with a clear statement from Jesus telling us to "Keep awake." These last words of Jesus before he enters the Passion narrative are telling us to examine our actions, ourselves and our conscience. Jesus is asking us to make ourselves vulnerable to truth, to a vulnerable authenticity.

Given what is happening to the world economic climate, being unaware of our financial vulnerability is nearly impossible. So many people's lives have radically changed in the last few months because of the transgressions of our economic system. So many people are struggling to just hang on. Many of these folks are: evaluating what is important, what is vital to, and in, their lives, and what is not; as well as what they hang-on to and what they do not hang-on to.