Advent IB

27 November 2011

The public sermon, 'preached' on the internet…

The move from the end of one liturgical year to the next is seamless insofar as the lectionary continues to maintain its focus on apocalyptic literature despite the change of gospel. So we move with little distinction from the Gospel according to Matthew to the Gospel according to Mark… from the longest to the shortest gospel. Despite this shift, we remain in a mood of apocalypse.

It is easy even these days to think in terms of apocalypse. Twice this year the world was to come to an end: first in May, then in October. But it did not happen and those who had literally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to spread the word of the demise of the world were left, not raptured up but holding the bag, an empty one of empty promises. These folk have taken words of end times literally, almost too much so.

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The first lesson for today features an extended outburst from Isaiah, in which the prophet decries the absence of God in both public and private spheres, when a sense of violation and the ache of meaninglessness strike deep within. Then we move to Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians in which he tries to persuade the Corinthians that their lack of collective identity is their fundamental problem. They are too busy building up their individualistic interpretations of life in the Spirit while neglecting their common life together. They have focused on the stronger members of their community while neglecting the weaker members of their congregation.

Then we arrive at the gospel. We stand in a funny place, looking ahead to the end, while circling back to our beginning of our story as Christians.

We look forward, we look backward, we live in the present and all time seems to collapse.

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The end of the story is also the beginning of a larger picture, like a huge Mobius strip. The end of the story is about the return of the Son of Mortals, the Christ. Jesus tells us about what will happen on that day and which signs we must notice.

In Mark’s ‘little apocalypse,’ Jesus’ warning about the times to come arrives as the last teaching he will give before he leaves for Jerusalem, the site of the Passion. The warning we hear this morning is not only about cataclysmic change in the world, but also for the lives of Jesus’ followers. Jesus is giving his followers and us a heads-up, watch out, here come times you could not have ever possibly imagined happening. The times that are a-coming bring cosmic change, times when heaven and earth will pass away, but the words of Christ will not pass away. The warning is so important that it appears not only in Mark, but also in Matthew and Luke. The end times are serious business — we cannot escape them so we had better be prepared. Jesus’ words remind us: Keep awake! Pay attention!

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That is what we are supposed to take away from this gospel reading. Not worrying about the end — that will happen in God’s time, whenever God’s time is — but keeping awake and paying attention. How? By watching, waiting and hoping.

Watching, waiting and hoping certainly are major themes of Advent, the all-too-short season that is sandwiched between Thanksgiving and Christmas. (If I had my druthers, we would stretch it out another three weeks, starting the Sunday after All Saints’.) We, who live in two worlds, will hear from the merchants during this Advent: ‘Spend, spend, spend, buy, buy, buy!’ From the gospel we hear: ‘Be alert. Keep awake! Something big and important is about to happen, but it ain’t about Santa Claus.’ If it weren’t for Advent, we would have little incentive, perhaps, to slow down, pay attention, and be mindful of what is about to happen in our world.

There’s something terribly wrong and tragic that the big box stores opened at midnight Thanksgiving night despite protests even from their employeeds and that a woman pepper spray other buyers at a Walmart so she could get her X-Box holiday bargain. There’s something terribly wrong and tragic that a man collapsed in another Walmart and people stepped over and on him in their pursuit for bargains. Yet these two events happened this past Friday — Black Friday, as the commercial world calls it. Waiting was horribly lost in these events.

What if we were to watch with care and attention — reflecting on events in our life and in our world, thinking about the past, present and future? What if we tried to reflect on, rather than react to, events in our daily life? Doing so is extremely difficult in this day and age — only a select few seem to be able to live at a much slower pace. Perhaps one thing to try this Advent is to carve out a bit of quiet space and time, even as small as five-ten minutes a day, to watch and reflect on God’s action in our lives and overall, slow things down.

Waiting is another seemingly impossible task for a society that expects the turn-around of information to happen in nano-seconds. I think about how impatient I can get when my computer freezes or crashes, when my e-mail takes five seconds longer than usual to download. How poor is my memory — I used to have to wait a lot longer for things than five seconds. Hanging out, waiting around, just being is one of the hardest lessons gringos undergo when they go to El Salvador; yet when they finally let go of their calendars and their internal time-clocks and just be, they find God’s presence in the people and situations around them in ways that had they been rushing might not have seen.

What if this Advent we were to let go of our desire for instant gratification in all aspects of our life, including in our prayers, for wanting God to fix it (whatever ‘it’) is right now? What if we accepted willingly, not grudgingly, God’s invitation to wait — not only for answers to our prayers (answers that are not always cast in our terms) but also for the Christ child? God’s time is wondrous and mysterious, and often, the answers we seek are not immediately apparent but manifest themselves in surprising ways down the line.

Finally, living in hope (to me the opposite of living with apocalyptic thinking or even optimism; it is active engagement) is another Advent task. Our culture offers an odd assortment of hope — most of it material. How many of us live a neutral hope — a hope that is not filled with fear or dread per se, but that is not filled with joy?

What if, instead, this Advent we tried living in a joyful hope of Christ’s coming? Living in the assurance of God’s inbreaking into this world, even though the inbreaking is awesome and mysterious? Living and knowing that God is with us all the time?

What if by living this way during Advent, hopefully, reflectively and patiently, we could then carry that way of life into the rest of the year? What a marvellous thought!

If that seems like too much, for starters we can at least try to live this way for four weeks. Watch, wait and hope. And, as Jesus in the gospel of Mark reminds us: Keep awake! Pay attention!

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And the private sermon…

This Advent is a peculiar one because it is the first Advent since 1993 that I have not been involved in preparing, presiding at or preaching about the Advent mystery. All of All Saints’ tide I was caught up in the last days, my own apocalypse, of being priest at Trinity. Now, as Advent begins, I find myself in this liminal place where I revert to life as it was pre-1990, pre-seminary, when I am once again a member of a congregation, but I am not. I am a transient, passing through, worshipping as I am able (that is, as much as my broken heart can bear), before moving to the next congregation. I feel the ache that Isaiah describes.

This Advent is one that will take me far out of the consumerist race because I will need to save every penny I can for an unknown future. As far as consumerist culture is concerned, I will be a poor participant because this year I am totally opting out. I’d be a good candidate for the OWS movement.

Mostly, this Advent is one in which I need to let God do what God will do, yet not wait for or want God to fix my current life situation of being unemployed, without a parish in which to excercise the vocation to which I still feel called. I haven’t figured out how to heal my heart from the past six months so somehow Advent seems the perfect time in which to step back, be still and try to hear God’s voice (which, for right now, seems awfully circumspect).

This Advent is the time for me to live in hope, to believe in the words I have proclaimed so often to others in the past six months (and beyond): All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Yes, this is a very personal hope, though not entirely disconnected from the hope that God will interrupt our daily lives and wake us up. I chose to leave Trinity at the end of the church year so that this crazy period of transition could unfold during Advent, that marvellous period of waiting, possibility and hope.

I may have more than four weeks to practise Advent watching, waiting, listening and hoping but at least I can begin in a time when doing so is totally appropriate. Maybe along the way, God can wake me up in ways I never thought possible. And maybe I can once again be, relearn what it means to be a bearer of hope, that vocation to which I was charged when I was ordained a priest nearly 18 years ago.

Restore me, O God of hosts;
show me the light of your countenance,
and I shall be saved.

In God alone, I cast my hope. And for the Christ, I wait in hope.