It’s a cliché to say that Christmas comes
sooner and sooner every year, but it sure as all get-out seems that way to me . . . I was hearing Christmas music the day
after Halloween this year, and I guess that it’s been that way for a
while. At least it’s not coming before Halloween yet . . . can you
imagine hearing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” as you’re opening the doors
on some little ghoul—all incisors and fake blood—begging candy off of you? I can see it now: Zombie Santa and Rudolph
the Dead-nosed Reindeer . . . I remember very clearly when I realized it was
all over, when I realized that I was unprepared by the early onslaught of
Christmas, when Pam and I walked into a mall in Eureka, California the weekend
after All Saint’s Day, and there were big old gaudy Christmas packages and bored-looking
store clerks dressed like oversized elves.
Ok, maybe the elves weren’t there, but I swear the Christmas packages were.
Of course, it’s all being driven by the
bottom line, and I guess I can’t really blame
merchants for trying to bring a little extra cheer into the ol’
pocketbooks. They do make the
bulk of their money at this time of year . . . Black Friday—the day they
supposedly break even—was only day before yesterday, so I guess it’s understandable that vendors would try to stretch
it all out . . . and I wonder when it all tipped the scales, when a critical
mass was reached. Probably before most
of us were born, even though a lot of
us can remember a time when it didn’t seem to be this way . . . maybe it goes
back to the very first store-bought gift and the first store-owner who realized
that “Hmmm . . . there may be a profit to be made here.” It was the first Norelco, and the Angels did
say.
And it’s even harder on us mainline Christians, who practice Advent . . . although
I daresay some of us have succumbed to the secularity—is that even a word?—of the culture. I know none of you all have, of course, but I, for one, have felt the siren song of
Christmas glitter . . . Oh, yes, brothers and sisters, it’s true . . . On my way up Winton last
night I was admiring the lights on Shroyer’s nursery . . . And then I caught myself
humming—I’m so ashamed—I caught
myself humming “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer . . . The extended cut . . . OK, so you can go overboard on the waiting, but
I think it’s important to remember that it is Advent, not
Christmas, and that the season has it’s own pleasures and
joys and lessons to teach.
It seems to have been celebrated in some
form or another since about four or five-hundred years after Jesus’ birth . . .
for its earliest celebrants, it was a season of baptismal preparation. In various places at various times it has
lasted anywhere from two to six weeks, and even today in the Eastern Orthodox
tradition it lasts 40 days, from November 15 until Christmas. If that sounds suspicious, it is—one of
Advent’s earliest meanings was a time of fasting and self-examination—a kind of
lesser Lent—prior to the coming of the Messiah, and the Eastern Orthodox
tradition, it’s still that way.
The four-Sunday version we have in the
Western Church seems to date to Pope Gregory VII in the waning years of the
ninth century; Gregory’s the one who made the first Sunday in Advent the start
of the Church year. And it’s meaning has
gradually shifted from fasting and penitence to a time of anticipation of and hope
for the coming of Christ. At Advent we long for Christ, we pine for
him, we are ready after the long, hot
summer, and the long, hot stretch of Ordinary Time, with its emphasis on
discipleship and the Christian life, we are ready for a little magic, a little wonder, even a little mystery
. . . and my favorite Advent hymns convey that mystery, they’re set in a
minor key, O Come, O Come Emmanuel . . . they evoke a long, dark night, and
we’re right at its end, in that cold, still time just before dawn, when the
midnight spirits have silenced their rattling steps, before the roosters have
shaken themselves awake, that’s where we are now, Advent, anticipation, hope
and wonder . . .
Even the word Advent evokes hope . . . it means coming, as in something’s coming, or someone’s coming . . . and Someone
certainly is, and the mystery of Advent lies in part in its ambiguity, because the coming it
celebrates is multi-valent, multi-faceted . . . Christ has come in the past, and we look back upon that time . . . The
second week is traditionally about John the Baptist, the forerunner, the one
who was not the Messiah but foretold the coming of Christ. And we re-member that time, even though none
of us were there, we remember it all the same, because to re-member something
is to put the members back on it,
members as in arms and legs and heads and hearts,
to re-member something is to bring it back to life, if only in our minds . . .
And so the second sense in which Advent
means coming is in the present . . . we are expectant, just as our ancestors in
the faith were, for the Christ who is coming as if for the first time, in 23
short days . . . Christ who is inaugurating the kingdom of God, who will come
among us in a ratty old manger, a mangy little stall, who will come among us as
the most fragile thing we can think of, a little, helpless baby . . .
And it’s tempting to coo over that baby, to
want to protect that child, to wrap him against the cold desert nights, to sing
him to sleep at night and walk him around when he has the colic . . . Do we have to nurture the Christ child that
has come among us, who will come upon
us on December 25? Of course not . . .
that’s God’s responsibility, God’s thing, not ours . . . and yet we constantly,
idolatrously think that it’s all up to us, that God’s will won’t be done unless
we do everything just right, but
Christ is coming whether we do anything or not, whether we prepare or not, even
whether we want him or not, Christ is
coming in 28 days whether or no.
And the past and the present collide at
Advent, they come together for us every year at this precise point in time . .
. and it’s even more poignant for us now, even more pressing that Christ comes,
for he is our redemption, our new hope, in our personal lives but no less for
our beloved Church. Christ is our hope,
our salvation, our transformation,
and if we take our eyes off that fact for even a second, we risk losing our
way. Turn your eyes upon Jesus, the hymn
says, fasten them upon him, glue them to his face, for he is coming.
At Advent, Christ has come and is coming .
. . and the third facet in our multivalent view, the third lens in our trifocled
vision is that he will come again.
The past and present are fused together, and then joined by the
future. It’s Kai-ros time, God time, where chronological was, is, and will-be
are collapsed into simply the now. And
it’s this future, second coming that’s reflected in the scriptures we read this
morning . . . Jesus himself speaks of a time when two women will be grinding
meal, and one will be taken and one left . . . when two men will be in the
field, and one will be taken and one remain . . . keep awake, therefore, wait therefore, for you don’t know when
it’s going to be.
And the Apostle Paul, in his letter to the
Romans, speaks of that metaphorical moment of Advent, the time we are at right now . . . the night is far gone,
the day is near . . . and though he
expected Christ to return before he died, his words resound to us prophetically
at this time of year . . . salvation is
nearer to us than anytime before, and so we should live like it, live as if we
are anticipating Christ’s return, as
if we are anticipating the fulfilling of God’s Kingdom, not just one more
shopping day until Christmas . . .
And that brings us back around to the
missing ingredient in it all, the thing that our secular friends don’t understand,
that even a lot of Christians don’t get,
is that if you anticipate, you by definition wait. And if you celebrate
his arrival before the event itself, if you rejoice before it happens, then
there is no anticipation . . . you
can’t anticipate what’s already happened in your minds. And I think we’ve all been there, we’ve all
sung Christmas carols till we’re blue in the face, stuffed that same face with
Christmas candy, driven around in a frenzy looking for the best light shows,
and then when Christmas actually arrives, it’s a let-down. There’s nothing left to do, because in fact
for us, Christ arrived weeks ago, and when he did, it was all over but the
shouting. In another passage from
Romans, Paul put it this way: “Hope that
is seen is not hope. For who hopes for
what is seen? But if we hope for what
is not seen, we wait for it with patience.”
And before Paul, the Psalmist said “Be still before the LORD, and wait
patiently . . . indeed, those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the
land.”
Why is waiting on God so important? Is it just a character-building exercise,
like we say that suffering builds
strength, or humiliation builds character?
Or is it something more fundamental, more basic to our relationship with
God? Well . . . when we wait, we’re not doing anything, or at least anything
pertaining to what we’re waiting for . . . waiting involves nothing but our
minds. When we wait on the Lord, we aren’t trying to do it ourselves. It forces us to depend on God’s great
providence, rather than ourselves, to let things happen in God’s good time, not
our own. It’s an attitude of
expectancy, of hope, of prayer . . . waiting is surrender, it’s capitulation,
it’s subsuming our will to the will of the one who created us, the one who
wants only the best for us, who desires us to be at the top of our game as proclaimers
of God’s coming kingdom.
But what’s the difference, you might ask,
between waiting and simply doing what we’ve always done, continuing life in the
church? We’re certainly not going to stop
all the things that make us the church, we’re not going to quit worshiping on
Sunday mornings the way we’ve always done, praying the way we’ve always prayed
. . . we’re not going to quit S.O.U.L. Ministries or Christian Ed . . . We're not
going to stop going to Matthew 25, are we?
Of course not, but waiting involves doing something fundamentally
different from business as usual, it involves expectancy, it involves trust in
God instead of ourselves, it involves an active openness, a vigorous
receptivity, an energetic seeking of God’s will.
And do you get the impression I’m not just
talking Advent here? That I’m talking
about something in addition to the
coming of Christ in a few short weeks?
Of course I am . . . Advent is a perfect metaphor for our transformation
process . . . in a sense Advent is that process, that renewal that comes
once a year, it’s revitalization in a nutshell . . . and here we are, at the
end of the night, waiting for the dawning of a new day . . . and that new
day is coming, we can sense it’s excitement, we can feel it, we can see it
in the new outreaches we're going to try, we can hear it as the buzz starts to
happen, but the renewal will only happen in God’s good time, we can't hurry it,
even though the tendency is to quit all this waiting and jump right in, it
feels urgent, after all, it feels like we’re on a precipice, after all, but we
have to wait, we have to not sing of its arrival until it has come . . . but
as we wait, we prepare, we anticipate, we create a space for God to work, we
open ourselves up to the whisperings of God, to the moving of the Spirit. As Isaiah says, those who wait upon the LORD
shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. Amen.
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