On Tuesday this week, while having lunch at the Chipotle in Woburn, I came across a religious tract called This Was Your Life. It reads like a cartoon, with Bible verses pulled from all different parts of the Bible under each picture. Its about a man who suddenly dies. He is accompanied by an angel and brought before God the throne of God and his life is reviewed. His name is not found in the book of life. He is condemned to eternal damnation, a lake of fire. The tract ends with a call to repent and accept Jesus as his personal savior.

This is how the end of the world is usually characterized: fire and brimstone, judgment and damnation, a violent and angry God.

That is how our Gospel reading is often read and understood. Jesus says that in days of suffering, at a time that only God knows, the sun, moon and stars will go dark, Jesus will return in power and glory. And three times he urges his listeners to “Keep alert! Keep awake!”

This can be easily heard as another This Was Your Life…but not when we understand the larger context for this reading.

This reading is part of what is known as “the little apocalypse” in the Gospel of Mark. These sayings come in the context of Jesus foretelling the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem – an event that would have happened around the time of the writing of the Gospel of Mark in the year 70.

The Temple was the epicenter of religious devotion in Judaism for over 1000 years before Jesus. 1000 years, that’s four times as long as our country has existed. 1000 years. 40 generations. It was simply a given for the early Christians. And even though Jesus cleansed the Temple, he didn’t want to destroy it. But the Romans did destroy it, razed it to the ground, all that remains today is the remnant of one wall.

For the people in Mark’s community, for the early Christians, the world as they knew it – the political world, the religious world, the social world, had ended.

And this is common throughout apocalyptic literature. In the Bible, most talk of the end of the world comes at a time, as in our reading from Ezekiel (and the Book of Revelation), when people are exiled, persecuted, devastated. And so, talk of the end of the world is comforting: the message is that although their lives as they knew it was over, life still goes on, and one day peace and justice will ultimately prevail.

And so what Jesus is saying is this: When all this happens it will not the end of the world. It’s only the end of the world as we know it.

The first Sunday of Advent – the beginning of the liturgical year – always begins with the end of the world. There’s no mention whatsoever of the annunciation, the holy family, the manger.

This is the reason: to alert us to the fact that in the readings we hear the next three weeks, Christmas Eve, and Christmas – that mark the birth and first coming of Jesus -that “its the end of the world as we know it” and we need to “Keep awake! Keep alert!”

Because Christmas is the end of the world as we know it. God is born into the world and takes on our humanity. We call this incarnation, meaning “taking on flesh.” God – all powerful, entirely other, enters into our reality, our existence, collapsing the distance between us. When this happens, things can never be the same.

The incarnation is the end of the world as we knew it.

As we look much further ahead. Easter and Jesus’ resurrection will again be the end of world as we knew it. Everything we thought we knew about life and death will be called into question and flipped upside down. Death and despair no longer have the final word because this God, who entered our reality in Jesus, will submit to death…and then defy death and rise again.

To capture this sense of change, the Gospel writer Mark uses the phrase “torn apart.” When Jesus is baptized, the heavens are torn apart, God speaks and the dove descends. When Jesus dies, the curtain separating the Holy of Holies in the Temple is torn apart.

As one commentator writes, “That which separates us from God, either the heavens or the holy of holies, has been torn asunder and can never go back to the way it was before. …the conviction that there is no keeping God at a distance anymore. God is not and will not be where we expect to find God.”

What this means is when we find moments we think our worlds are ending – and we’ve all been there – its not the end of the world, its only the end of the world as we once knew it.

When our Temples are destroyed.

When our center of gravity is lost and we are displaced and feel scattered.

When things and people we count on let us down, disappoint, or betray us.

When we fail others – and ourselves.

When we receive a diagnosis, or word that a loved one has died.

It can feel like the end of the world.

But its not.

First, because Jesus was born right into it – into human form and into the complexity of human relationship. Jesus knows those places intimately – he himself was hated, betrayed, shunned, celebrated, and misunderstood – and he is there now. Indeed, most present in the hard places.

And second because Jesus died and rose again, new life is possible. What we think is the end really isn’t.

There is something on the other side of whatever it is. On the other side is life.

Advent ushers in the end of the world as we know it. This is what we prepare our hearts and minds to celebrate at Christmas.

This is why we keep awake. To see it happen in the birth of Christ. But also to see it happening in us. Amen.