Advent Dawning

It's a cliché even to bring it up, but I'm struck once again with how out-of-kilter the season of Advent has become with the rest of our world. On Friday night, the Thanksgiving dishes barely put away, my family and I went to the official kick-off of the "holiday season" down in Littleton. There, the night sparkled with thousands of yellow lights on every tree branch; bright light from open storefronts poured into the crowded streets; restaurants hummed, and cash registers buzzed; people cheered for Santa on his brightly glowing sled; children frantically waved overpriced blinking neon swords and unicorns. There was even a brass band to lend cheer to the night!

And then on Saturday morning, I sat down at my desk and opened my bible to Matthew's Gospel. In today's reading, there seems to be no "holiday cheer." Jesus calls out the horrors of the Noah story, the tale of God sweeping away an alienated humanity like a hose suddenly blasts away an ant hill. Jesus warns us of God sneaking into our lives like the bad guy in a scary movie, jumping out from behind the couch when we least expect it. As I read on, my ears began to buzz with those crazy evangelical cries about the Rapture: half of humanity left in judgment while others are swept up to heaven. The sharp contrast from Friday night to Saturday morning gave me inner whiplash. While the world is promoting cheer, here we Christians are, seemingly wallowing in darkness. While the world waves neon swords, we light one scrawny candle. While the world jumps into the bustle of "the holidays," we insist on waiting and watching in the dark. While the world manufactures smiles, we cling to a God who offers hope in paradox. What are we doing?!

Perhaps a story and an image will help articulate the meaning within this counter-cultural Advent season. When I was first ordained, I spent eight months serving as a longtime supply priest in a small town more than two hours away from my home in Louisville, Kentucky. Every Sunday morning, I'd get in my car at 6:30 in the morning and head west along the Ohio River. I'd spend time with this congregation, and then I'd head back home in the afternoon. It was a long day, but over the summer, it was a quiet, easy drive, and I usually didn't mind it too much. By November, I was starting out in darkness, though. As soon as I left the city lights behind, the sky would be wrapped in thick black cloth that hugged my car like a blanket. With all my concentration, I had to keep my eyes carefully fixed on the small segment of road right in front of me. I could only see the narrow path illumined by my car's headlights. It was a limited path that ended in the darkness of the unknown road ahead.

In lives filled with unknowns, we often wish that God's light could be like those headlights. We think that the Light of the World is a focused beam that we can point into the future and swivel across the landscape to ease our fears. Engrossed in the path ahead, we think that we are in control, that we can use even God's light to herald our own causes and chase away uncertainty. In today's Gospel, Jesus is trying to make us understand. Deep down, we know that Jesus speaks the truth when he insists on our own powerlessness over the night, on our lack of understanding of the ways of God. He's simply trying to remind us to watch and wait for the arrival of God's true light, rather than anxiously peering into the little stretch that we can grasp for ourselves.

Indeed, on those trips to Western Kentucky, as I strained to control the road ahead, God's true light was silently sneaking up behind. As I headed West, the dawn began in the East, coming in like a thief in the night. On nice days, a routine glance in my rear-view mirror showed slivers of pink and coral light slowly, silently peeking through the hills and trees. Soon, daylight would wrap all around me. I would smile at the subtle beauty of a new day and turn off the car's headlights, relieved. "Ah yes, this!" I would sigh. "Thank you, God, for this new day. I get it." On nice fall days, it was easy to appreciate God's ways.

But I still didn't understand. The weather didn't always cooperate on Sundays, you see, especially in the winter. Sometimes, it would rain, or even snow or sleet. When things got rough, God's ways were no longer enough for me. Instead, I would obsess over the weather channel all day and night on Saturdays. I would try in vain to predict the next day's forecast, as if knowing could change the weather. Getting in the car, I would be more anxious than ever, more focused on controlling the car, following the beams, scanning the road ahead, so as not to slip. One Sunday, it seemed so, so dark. When I got to the place where I usually noticed the dawn, everything was still dark. Even in the rear-view mirror. Frozen fog had obscured everything. I couldn't see any delicate hints of the light to come. But I had to keep moving. I forged onward, tense as a strung bow, blind to everything but the road ahead. Unnoticed by me, though, the blackness of the night finally gave way imperceptibly to gray: a gray that grew brighter and brighter until I suddenly realized that I could see, and that my car's precious headlights had become superfluous once again.

That's the way it is in Advent. There's no blinding divine light that we must accommodate ourselves to. There's no flash of Glory. Neither is there the need for blinking neon swords or raucously blinding cheer. The arrival of God is an imperceptible dawning: yesterday, a lowly birth; someday, a return of the dawn; today, a quiet glimmer of love, a streak of hope, and a twinkle of joy in the smallest everyday gestures. Jesus is asking us today to acknowledge that, while our eyes are set on controlling the darkness, God is ushering in the light of day.

You might be surprised, but I'm not advocating that we boycott or scorn the holiday cheer. I'm no longer a card-carrying member of the dreaded priestly "Advent Police." But I am advocating that we also set aside enough time in Advent to wait and watch, as Jesus asks us. We need Advent as a season to look at the world as it is, bare and uncovered by glitz and daily busyness. Hope, after all, is born out of reality, not dreams. Let God's light slowly reveal the world around us: the houses and the trees; the people we love and those we hate and those to whom we are indifferent; the poverty and the richness of life; the beauties and the horrors of our world. And as we await the Light, reality awaits our loving attention.

 

 

Enduring When Nothing Endures

This will be easier for young people than for us adults, but I’d like for you remember a time when you had just finished building something. Maybe it was a fantastic Lego creation or a super-high tower of blocks. (I bet some of us even remember building with Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs?) Picture in your minds how fine your creation looked. Remember how proud you felt putting on the final piece… How you wanted to keep your amazing construction there in the middle of the living room floor for everyone to admire for at least, say, ten years? And then a younger sibling or a neighbor’s baby came toddling in from the kitchen, a determined gleam in his eye. He zoomed straight over to your construction, and before you could stop him, just as you were hollering “no …..!!!!” at the top of your lungs, his little hands lunged at the blocks, and the whole beautiful thing broke into tiny pieces.

Remember for a minute how angry you felt at the little menace who had just destroyed your finest work. Remember the despair that you felt as you saw your work reduced to cosmic dust in an instant. Maybe you jumped up and chased after the little menace, hoping to give her a good whack for what she did. Or maybe you just collapsed on the floor in a pile of sobs. Or maybe you ran with the speed of righteous indignation over to your mom or dad so that they would make everything right again.

You might have yelled, “Why didn’t you at least TELL me that the baby was up from his nap, so that I could be ready for him?”

          We all know what it feels like to have our hard work, or our security, or our dreams, smashed before our eyes, seemingly without warning:

        Jesus’ disciples know, as they look with pride and love at the magnificent Temple, at the solid stones of the place where they know that God can always be found. They must cringe to hear their Lord tell them that their comfortable lives and comfortable certainties can be ripped apart, just as suddenly as if a two-year-old smashed them to smithereens, without warning. 

         Luke’s first readers know, too, as they struggle to survive in a land occupied by the very Empire that had indeed reduced both Jerusalem and the Temple to rubble in 70 CE.           Even Isaiah’s readers know, as they return home and try to rebuild a life together in a country that had been totally wiped out by foreign powers. They know the sinking feeling of devastation, the numbness of displacement.

Now, as parents and grandparents, we can’t promise our children that unpredictable toddlers won’t destroy their Lego creations. But think about it: What do we do when our precious children come running to us, wailing and in despair? We take them in our arms. We wipe their tears. We kiss them gently on their damp foreheads. We encourage them to get back out there and build again. Maybe we even help them rebuild. We comfort and console them.

          To comfort, in Hebrew, carries the image of removing a burden so that a person can breathe freely again.[1] That’s what we need, isn’t it, in order to keep on going, to endure? We need the loving kindness that will lift the crushing burden, so that we can breathe again. Like a parent, God yearns to give us that love, to lift the yoke and lighten our deadening load. 

       I invite you today to curl up in God’s lap. Close your eyes, and with Isaiah, imagine God wiping the sweat of suffering from your brow, removing all sound of weeping from your ears. Imagine that there’s no need to feel the world on your shoulders anymore. Everyone has enough food to eat and a good place to live. No one is taken advantage of by another. All races and peoples can create, and thrive, and build without fear of loss. No one can hurt and no one can destroy. As our Presiding Bishop likes to say-- such a world is God’s dream for us.

          This comforting image, this wonderful new creation that God offers us, isn’t just some “pie in the sky by and by” thing, either. No, we can see glimpses of the joy that streams from God’s dream every day, if only we are looking in the right places. In 2015, I was a deputy at our Episcopal Church General Convention in Salt Lake City. For me, church business meetings are not the place where I expect to find abundant joy! But find joy, I did, just like in our reading from Isaiah.

On the evening before the historic Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex marriage, Convention deputies had been engaged in discussions on the topic. There was a lot of dark fear lurking in the corners of that meeting room. The fear was expressed in hand-wringing “what-ifs”: what if we made the wrong choice; what if we were jumping the gun; what if the Church didn’t survive the crisis. We sounded a lot like the disciples trying to pry out of Jesus knowledge of when the Temple was coming down. Faces were drawn, and voices were tense, and it was indeed hard to breathe.

The next day, however, after news of the Supreme Court decision filtered through the crowd, the fear seemed to have vanished into thin air. As people heard the news, there were extra smiles in the hallways. There was more clever repartee in the House of Deputies, and more voices singing during worship than I noticed earlier that week. Those who had stood in drooping solemnity during the past days’ Eucharist started clapping along to an impromptu, “We are Marching in the Light of God.” Young adults, grey-haired bishops, and collared clergy started dancing down the aisles, all waving their arms like a bunch of Pentecostals on fire. The funny thing was, the show of emotion didn’t seem forced or staged. There was none of that, “Oh-look-at-us-we-are-Episcopalians-but-we-know-how-to-be-cool-too” air that often accompanies mandatory innovation in worship. It was all authentic. In the hallways, I didn’t notice any of the self-congratulatory back-slapping that can accompany a political victory, either. It was just pure joy, an exhaling of breath held in too long. A burden removed. All of a sudden, we caught a glimpse of the freedom that God dreams for us, the freedom to soar, the freedom to love.

It was a beautiful moment, a glimpse of what could be. But of course, our carefully constructed towers have continued to tremble and fall since that day. We still experience anger and despair. Jesus can’t promise us that our beloved institutions, our churches, our government, our securities won’t ever face change or plunge us into adversity. He can’t promise us that there won’t be upheaval. But he shows us—in his own life and suffering—how to flourish in the midst of that upheaval, how to find life in the midst of death. He shows us--as he forgives the leaders who have sent him to die on the cross. He shows us--as he reaches out to the criminal outcast hanging beside him and offers him immediate grace and healing. He shows us--as he hands his spirit over to God even as he takes his last breath.[2] He shows us—as he rises from the dead, guaranteeing that God’s way of self-giving love will always defeat worldly power and violent oppression.

In our turbulent world right now, people are looking for what we experience in this Jesus. They are looking for love, looking for forgiveness, looking for meaning and abundant life. And as they search, do you know what they are going to find? They are going to find us.[3] You and me. That’s how Jesus set it up. We are his witnesses here on earth. Empowered by God, it’s up to us to build lives that testify to his love, with the blocks of both word and deed.  Today, Jesus is asking us if we are willing to risk building a tower of love out of the very blocks of our lives, even though it will get knocked down. And then to rebuild it, over and over, for as long as it takes. To work to inch closer and closer to Isaiah’s vision of a just world for all of God's people. To remove the burdens from our neighbors' shoulders so that all might truly breathe again.

Are you willing? I'd like us to try something this morning. There was once a little boy who kept reaching up to give a high five to his parents in church after every prayer. They thought that it was a cute gesture, if a bit strange. It was only later that his parents found out that he thought that they were all ending their prayers with the words, “I’m in,” instead of with “Amen!" So he gave them a high five, like you would respond to your little league teammate or something. [4] Can we follow the little boy's example this morning? If you are willing to join in building a tower of love, no matter what, turn to the person in the pew next to you on both sides, give them your best high five, and say, “Amen/ I’m in.”

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[1] Ruthanna Hooke, found in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 4, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010,) 298.

[2] John Shea, The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels for Christian Preachers and Teachers: Year C (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2006), 215.

[3] From the November 11, 2016 diocesan convention homily by the Rt. Rev. Terry White, Christ Church Cathedral in Louisville, Kentucky, who borrowed the image from a sermon by the Rt. Rev. Jake Owensby.

[4] From a lecture by Martin Smith, summer 2018, the School of Theology at the University of the South.