“The cheese is gone, someone came in and stole the cheese.”

I looked at Sheralee unsure what this sentence might actually mean as it was not the one I anticipated coming out of this woman’s mouth.  Sheralee had found our church recently and was becoming a lovely and regular fixture after having been a bit gun-shy after the hurtful collapse of a church plant she was committed to years ago.

I wasn’t expecting her to say “someone stole the cheese” for at least two reasons: 1) Everyone else was saying “congratulations,” as this was, after years of study and examination and hoop after ecclesial hoop, my ordination into the office of Word and Sacrament ministry in the ELCA, my Lutheran denomination.  2) After a long, beautiful and very HIGH CHURCH ordination service, I was starving and really looking forward to some sliced Swiss that I just knew was waiting for me and my guests downstairs at St. Paul Lutheran church in downtown Denver.

Instead, both platters of sliced cheese that my community had painstakenly arranged in precious little spirals had been stolen during my ordination, along with one of the vegetable trays.  The thing is –- you can’t exactly sell sliced cheese for drugs.  There isn’t a black market for baby carrots and ranch dressing.  But that night of my ordination, the hungry were fed, both those upstairs and those outside.  I imagine a feast being shared around the altar and around the corner.

Later that night when I told my friend Sara Miles, she said, “Well that’s about that most gospel-y parable I’ve ever heard.  You have to preach it.”   She, of course, was right.  So the next week, last Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent when the gospel reading is from Mark 13, known as Mark’s Little Apocalypse, a portion of my sermon read:

At first this apocalyptic text might seem weird and shocking and unexpected, like having The Poor steal all the sliced cheese during one’s ordination.  But, like stolen cheese and an unmarried young peasant girl, God wraps God’s self up in that which we can so easily misjudge or even just miss altogether.

Mark the gospel writer tells us to keep awake for the coming of Christ into our world because it might just be as beautiful and apocalyptic and raw as the gospel of Mark itself.  We, like hypnotized cartoon characters, might be spiral-eyed by the surrounding culture, but the first step of getting ready for God or being aware that the Holy One of Israel is here with us is to snap out of it. We might be spiral-eyed, but God still slips into skin and walks beside us as the neighbor, as the cheese thief, as that which we would never choose, as suffering and beauty and forgiveness and bread and wine.

Happy Advent.

Nadia Bolz-Weber is a Lutheran pastor living in Denver, Colorado, where she is developing a new emerging church, House for all Sinners and Saints. She blogs at www.sarcasticlutheran.com and is the author of Salvation on the Small Screen? 24 Hours of Christian Television.