The First Sunday of Advent, November 29th, 2009
The Rev. Dr. Katharine C. Black, preaching
Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25: 1-9
1 Thessalonians 3: 9-13
Luke 21: 25-36
Remember, O Lord, your compassion and love, for they are from everlasting. AMEN.
Happy New Year! Today as we begin a new church year, Year C, Luke's year, it is an occasion to consider time of various kinds. Stores, anxious economists would have this series of days be a simple and urgent time to spend for Christmas. (While for true life, stores have tried to bully us into considering Christmas shopping since Labor Day, the ads for Black Friday, the decorations, the too-early constant musack of Christmas music, and the daily bombardment from stores, radios, TV's, and more, hammer us with these days as shopping days to count down until Christmas.)
There is another church tradition about Advent, which I find nearly as unhelpful: the tradition, which tells us to focus on our sins so that, we're ready to greet the Savior when he comes. That tradition wants to make Advent a mini-Lent and wants us to match the purple of Lent as we prepare for the birth of the Savior. As I've said before, that is a tedious holdover from the Church's history, even one which continues, of a deep uneasiness or even dislike and distrust of, or even loathing, of the human body. This understanding sees the whole event around the birth of the Savior as tainted, because of the bodily reality of birth, and worse, there's a woman involved. Not only is this an unhealthy understanding of the coming birth, but also it is a wrong one. When God finished up the Creation, creating people, as with all the rest of Creation, God saw that it was good. The only way to begin to apprehend God's second foray into creating is that it, too, is good, only good, and always good.
Advent therefore is neither a run-up to Christmas, nor a time to focus on ourselves and on our sins.
What then does today begin? I'll name easiest answers first. Today is the first day of the new church year. We begin using Luke's Gospel, the third Gospel in a standard Bible, not the first written, but hard to date. It presumably could be close to Mark's Gospel and be predicting the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD before that event, or it could have been written shortly after that with these portents of signs being either predictions or warnings to explain what had by then already happened. Also, Luke is thought to have been writing to Gentiles, and writing in Greek. His theme concentrated on the work Jesus did persistently in behalf of the poor, often doubling stories Jesus was telling, with a second version in which women participate. In these ways, then, Advent begins a new church year, a new lectionary Gospel writer, and a new look at, take on, understanding of Jesus.
However, Advent brings other understandings of time as well. There is the time of predictions, warnings, and signs of what's to come. There is the human time Luke is to describe in considerable detail, with the gentle and shimmering glory and touching humanity of the nativity. Most important there is the time between here and there, human time and God's time, in the time Newman describes: "This then is to watch: to be detached from what is present, and to live in what is unseen." Advent gives us the best edge into each of these kinds of time. Jeremiah predicts a time when Jerusalem will live in safety, when the time of "The Lord is our righteousness" comes." Luke describes signs and warnings, and illustrates it with an example of the last tree to bloom, late, late in the growing season, the fig tree, heralding that the next time is almost come. As with Jeremiah's prediction, when Luke's events arrive, redemption and safety are coming, with the coming of the Son of Man. When Luke was written, if that date were known, we could better understand how the fall of Jerusalem fits into his warnings of signs in the heavens, and on the earth distress among nations. Whenever this was written, there was uneasiness in the air that something was up. There have been other times like, The Great Fear, in France, in mid-summer, 1789, just before the French Revolution and some other occasions. In families, when the generations shift, when we're the caretakers, not the kids, when we're taken care of, not the parents, beginning or retiring from careers, all those big uneasy-making transitions-none of which are bad, but all of which make us consider where our ground is, who we are in the world, and when and where we're going. The uneasiness is less one of fear, and more one of expectation and curiosity, because in both Jeremiah and Luke whatever is coming is in God's good hands and will be safe, new, and good.
Then there is the reality of human time being made something new and good as well. In a simple way to say it, we wouldn't long for and say "come thou long-expected Jesus," if he weren't already known to us, hadn't already come. The not-yet and already merge in a mystical wheel of time which renews at Advent and renews the promise of a Second Advent. We wouldn't care about the Incarnation, the birth of Jesus, if we didn't hope for and believe in his death and resurrection into God's eternity. His resurrection wouldn't matter, if he weren't fully human like us, and born as a human in a human life, in an all, human way. The lectionary in each year is like a great hoop of time, and we push the hoop along as we head into each season, pushing it into the narrative and making time roll on.
The narrative is made real in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of the fully human person of Jesus.
The Gospel fragment of today, doesn't start at the beginning, but rather Jesus starts by describing what the meteorological and natural signs will be and what they will indicate. The lectionary starts with the eschatological point, which only matters, if Jesus is born. Jesus describes what the conclusion will be, knowing he'd been born, lived, but not that he would die. We know that, and so we hear, in his letting people know about the Son of Man coming in a cloud, that all will be well whatever the forces of evil do against him
F. D. Maurice said "We look forward to a redemption which shall be not for our selves only, but for the world, when Christ shall appear without sin, unto salvation." It's a back and forth of human time and God's time." We think of God's time for redeeming a human life and humanity's time. Micah called us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before our God. Talmudic commentary tells us to do each now, but then adds, "You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it." Again it's the banging of ordinary human time and work with the scope of God's justice and salvation. We intersect that time when we get hooked into Micah's job description for each of us as humans.
Thomas Merton wrote, "Christ has given a special meaning and power to the cycle of the seasons, which of themselves are good and by their very nature have a capacity to signify our life in God. Jesus has made this ebb and flow of light and darkness, activity and rest, birth and death, the sign of a higher life, a life we live in Him." We are asked how will we take advantage of this opportunity of a new beginning, that is also a continuation of an unbroken personal lifeline, and a chance to merge our own history and actions with 'God's time'?" How will each of us do that? Pausing and listening is a start. The quiet time of Wednesday's "Blessing the Darkness" presentation is something we can do. Picturing where we are on that lectionary wheel and how to move the cycle on, is part of what we can do, to walk with the already and the not yet. Phyllis Tickle observed: "Religion has always kept earth time. Liturgy only gives sanction to what the heart already knows." Let's listen to the words of so many of the Advent hymns, which reach for that meeting of earth's and God's time.
Paul observed what a blessing and delight communities of faith are. They were to him; they are to each of us together. We are just like those people in Thessalonica being urged back into the Advent time of beginning and promise, the renewed time to work again at our response to Micah's, to Jesus', to God's call to us to join in that on-going work of transforming each of ourselves and the world into the world of God's and God's promises. Robert Crashaw, in the 17th century, wrote:
Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span
Summer in winter, day in night
Heaven in earth and God in man...
So, "Be alert at all times, praying that we may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man." Know that he comes again to lead us with him to Paradise, into the everlasting light, and however well we do in that reaching out for light, he'll always welcome us to him, and that's Good News.
copyright Katharine C. Black 29 November 2009
