An Advent Sermon...
From a Sermon Delivered at All Angels’ Church introducing Advent
If you look closely at the Christian year you’ll notice that our liturgical calendar is tightly woven around a story. It’s the story of our humanity discovered, redefined, rescued, and lived in God through Christ by the Spirit. Marking these seasons is meant to form us as faithful witnesses of Jesus Christ.
The Christian year ends (usually Sunday before Thanksgiving) on an incredible high. We do not end our year looking backward at the trends, fashions, and events of the year that’s past. We look instead to the Son of Man who is running the universe in all its beauty and all its complexity.
I’ve often wondered why, for the liberated imagination, this end of the year isn’t significantly more raucous than Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
But then, I think I know why. The assertion that Jesus Christ is in charge of everything is bound to meet with incredulity. The typical New Yorker asks, “What planet are you living on?” Or, “Just how much communion wine have you been drinking? It’s obvious that Jesus isn’t running the world. Or, if he is… he seems to be doing a terrible job. Have you seen the numbers fo people dead because of COVID? Did you know that the number of black men killed by the police the last few years is greater than it was during the civil right’s movement? Terrorism? Job insecurity? Climate change?”
It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by the scope and magnitude of need around us. It’s easy, perhaps even unavoidable, to enter into the tension between a faith that says, “Jesus is Lord of All” and the experience that says “life is a painful struggle.”
The season of Advent anticipates the tension between announcements of God’s goodness and power and the pain of our world. The raucous and faith filled celebration of Jesus as Lord of All is immediately followed by lament. On the Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the church year, we traditionally sing, “Crown him with Many Crowns, the Lamb upon His throne. Hark how the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own. Awake my soul and sing, for him who died for thee and crown him as thy matchless king throughout eternity.” In Advent we sing, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lowly exile here until the Son of God appear… “
Advent invites us to respond to the challenge of our darkening world by waiting, watching, and bearing witness.
Waiting
We read the prophetic books during Advent. Words like Jeremiah’s, “I (the Lord) will fulfill the promise… I will cause a branch to spring up for David… Judah will be saved… It will be called the Lord is our Righteousness”. All of these promises are future tense. Even if you didn’t know that Jeremiah was written during a time of conflict, destruction, and exile the longing and reassurance in the words would suggest these are promises to wait for.
New Yorkers stink at waiting. Anyone who’s ever walked through Times Square during the holiday season knows this. Have you ever done this? You find yourself walking behind a family, or a tour group from out of town, and they’re taking up the whole sidewalk? It’s as if they’re oblivious to the fact that there are 50,000 people who’ll be using this sidewalk to actually get somewhere in the next few minutes. If you’re like me you feel a certain righteous indignation rise up in you. Am I right?
We don’t like to wait in traffic. We don’t like to wait at the grocery store. We don’t like to wait. Period.
Advent invites us to wait. Specifically, Advent invites us to wait for the Lord. We are in a hurry. We are urgent to find a solution, to build our projects, to resolve conflicts, to force change, to move on, move up, and move out.
But wait…. The Christian year begins with waiting. The waiting we’re invited into isn’t like waiting in the doctors office, or waiting for the train where the goal is to distract ourselves. We’re invited to wait attentively. We enter the story of a people waiting for God to act. We read the prophets who point ahead to the coming messiah and we enter into the longing of Israel. We read the prophets who speak of a world finally set right, of the kingdom of God dwelling with people and we enter into the longing for that kingdom.
Without waiting our faith is shallow, escapist, and triumphalistic. Waiting increases our ability to lament, to long for change, to learn all we can, to work in hope. We need these skills and habits to help us become the kind of people who can respond to the challenges in our world with faith, hope, and love.
How are you doing with waiting? Perhaps this Advent you might learn to wait?
The words of Jesus stress the importance of watching. “Be on your guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly like a trap.”
Jesus’ words similarly look ahead to a time of Jerusalem being surrounded by armies. The expectation that ‘every day and every way we’re getting better and better’ is not a Christian view. Jesus’ followers then, and his followers now are to be people whose eyes are open to the world, who see the difficulties, challenges, and tragedies; but also watch expectantly for the saving work of God.
Some interpret Jesus’ teaching as referring to a distant future still unrealized. Some interpret Jesus’ teaching here as fulfilled within a generation of his death and resurrection in the terrible events of the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. I’m not sure it matters, in either case the call to watch and discern is central for those who follow Jesus.
This is a struggle for New Yorkers whose lives are so frenetic and time poor we are easily weighed down by the worries of life. As Jonathan Larson wrote, “I’m a New Yorker, fear’s my life…”
Discernment… the ability to understand what God is doing in my life, the life of my community, or the culture at large is a spiritual discipline we need to recover. This summer we as a vestry worked through a series on spiritual discernment. This fall Jen Knight offered the same material after the morning service.
It’s difficult to overstate how important this practice of discernment is for us. If prayer is akin to spiritual breathing, then discernment is like spiritually seeing. You can live without sight but you’ll bump into things without some means to discern appropriately.
One of the ways that our family has practiced watching with and for Christ during Advent is to practice ‘the Jessie Tree’. Every evening for about 30 minutes before bed we stop, light the advent wreath, sing O Come, O Come Emmanuel, and read part of the grand narrative of scripture (beginning in creation and ending in the incarnation). We talk about what this passage means in the context of the story, but also in the context of our life / world. Then we hang a symbol on our tree that captures a big idea from this passage. This practice of sitting together waiting and watching has become one of the most formative practices of our life together.
Witness.
Our activities during Advent bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. One of the best ways they do this is by the ways they relate to popular culture. (They are not oppositional, but neither are they in the stream of popular culture. Instead our practice of Advent relates at a whole new angle.) As our culture gets really busy and frazzled, Advent invites us to become still and attentive. As our culture rushes to acquire things Advent invites us to lament alongside those who long for home, health, and hope. As our culture becomes louder and louder we are invited to become quieter, contemplative, and discerning.
Jesus Christ is Lord of All! And yet there are many parts of our lives, families, communities, city, and world that are living in profound dissonance. It is time to tell the great story again. To ponder…to contemplate… to wait and to watch.
Ultimately, our waiting and watching will witness not to ourselves, but to the beauty and wonder of Jesus in whose life we have life. The story that shapes our year is the story of a God who did fulfill his promise to Jeremiah. It is the story of a God who did become our Righteousness. It is the story of a God who entered into hunger and want, displacement and disruption, wars and rumors of wars. It is the story of a king who came to his own people, but was rejected by them. It is the story of a God who made himself one of us so that we might participate in his life. It is the story of a coming kingdom where there will be no more war, terror, disease, divorce, displacement, or despair. It is the story of life with God in the face of Jesus Christ.
And so we wait… and we watch… and we bear witness.
Amen.