Advent waiting and the darkness...

NOTE: These are my notes for the First Sunday in Advent. It will be fascinating to see where the Spirit leads us this season...

Advent, more than any other time in the church year with the possible exception of Good Friday, makes me crazy: the scriptures speak of watching and waiting while the culture is already saturated with worry and busyness. The spirituality of the season invites us to seek out that which is quiet and empty so that God – in the pregnant fullness of time – might bring new life to creation through our ordinary flesh while we obsess, fuss and fret about how to make this Christmas better and different from all the rest.

Indeed, the very message of the Advent season asks us to make room in the inn of our hearts so that the Prince of Peace might come in; and yet most of us are so bogged down in sentimentality – or enslaved to expectation – that if the Christ Child were to take up residence in our Sanctuary, garage or living room as Messiah, we’d be more distressed by the messiness he brings than the shocking promise of this revolutionary birth. What’s more, as Maggi Dawn writes from her ministry to the elite of Cambridge University in England, following the devotional seasons of our tradition “can leave us with the feeling that things never really happen at the right time. The realities of life rarely match up with the mood of the Church year, right? They always come too early or too late.”

If, as we travel through Lent or Advent, life is delivering up abundant joys and happiness, then the somber tone of the season never quiet hits home. But it’s even harder to deal with if you are feeling down and low when Christmas or Easter arrives… (No wonder) all too often we have this dislocated feeling of being out of time and out of step… (And) it’s not only the Church but the whole culture that feeds us an exaggerated image of happiness and celebration at this time of year.

This is why she suggests that the true blessing of Advent – the authentic spiritual wisdom and gift of the season – is that it helps us face the fact that “most of our life is lived in this in-between place where things come early or late, but almost never on time.” What do you think: does that ring true?

I think that’s one of the reasons why our tradition asks us to start with these tough, dark and apocalyptic lessons from the Bible at the beginning of Advent: not only is this the start of the church calendar – the beginning of the Christian year – it is also where we can learn how to discern the way of God in our world. Because, you know, the way of the Lord is really quite different from the way you and I operate when we’re left on our own. Frederick Buechner said it best:

The wisdom of men (and women) is the kind of worldly wisdom that more or less all men have been living by since the cave man. It is best exemplified by such homely utterances as: you've got your own life to lead, business is business, charity begins at home... safety first and so forth... It is in contrast to all this that what St. Paul calls "the foolishness of God" looks so foolish. Inspection stickers used to have printed on the back: "Drive carefully - the life you save may be your own." That is the wisdom of men in a nutshell.

What God says, on the other hand, is "The life you save is the life you lose." In other words, the life you clutch, hoard, guard and play safe with is in the end a life worth little to anybody, including yourself, and only a life given away for love's sake is a life worth living. To bring that point home, God shows us a man who gave his life away to the extent of dying a national disgrace without a penny in the bank or a friend to his name. In terms of men's wisdom, he was a Perfect Fool, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without making something like the same kind of fool of himself is laboring not under a cross but a delusion. There are two kinds of fools in the world: damned fools and what St. Paul calls “fool for Christ's sake."

So we’re asked first to consider what the prophet Isaiah – a servant of God who learned to listen carefully – might have to teach us about the ways of the Lord. And right out of the gate we get this:

O that you would rip open the heavens and descend, make the mountains shudder at your presence—as when a forest catches fire, as when fire makes a pot to boil—to shock your enemies into facing you and make the nations shake in their boots! Since before the beginning of time no ear heard, no eye seen, a God like you who works for those who wait for him. You meet those who happily do what is right, who keep a good memory of the way you work. But how angry you've been with us! We've sinned and kept at it so long! Is there any hope for us? Can we be saved? We're all sin-infected, sin-contaminated. Our best efforts are grease-stained rags. We dry up like autumn leaves- sin-dried, we're blown off by the wind. No one prays to you or makes the effort to reach out to you because you've turned away from us and left us to stew in our sins.

Why do we start here? What sounds and images – feelings or insights about the way of the Lord – do you grasp from these words of Isaiah?

Darkness – sin – God’s absence along with human arrogance and despair: this is where Advent asks us to begin. Not with “comfort, comfort o my people” nor “come to me all ye who are tired and heavy laden and I will give you rest.” Just “our best efforts are grease-stained rags… and we are all like sin-dried leaves blown off by the wind.”

These words come from the time of Israel’s exile in Babylon: a time when the best and the brightest had been led off in chains to sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land, a time when the King of God’s chosen people had been blinded and humiliated by a pagan war lord, a time when the Temple was destroyed so that it felt like the past, present and future had collapsed. Bible scholar and preacher, Lawrence Moore, tells us that:

The people are in exile and mourning and exile is the crisis of the Old Testament. It is as hard to re-imagine ourselves into the mindset of the exiles this side of the return to Judah as it would be to imagine how the disciples felt on Easter Saturday. It is the death of all their dreams, all their hopes, of any future. And therefore it is the death of all the past, too. That’s the problem with a crisis like the exile or the crucifixion of Jesus: it makes a nonsense not only of the future but of the past, too. All the hopes and expectations of the past appear destroyed and the meaning with which life was invested is left hollow and empty.

He goes on to remind those of us in the 21st century who are still paying attention that for the exiles, “this meant that their belief in being a covenant people – their fundamental identity, in other words – was in tatters.” Their faith that God’s promises endure forever was now a cruel joke, their traditions had gone up in smoke and hope itself had been executed. Because, “if they had been wrong about the Lord their God after all these years, then the way in which they interpreted their lives… was now simply a ghastly mistake. Nothing meant what it had appeared to.”

Moore suggests that the disciples, too, faced this experience at the crucifixion: “It didn’t just take away their anticipated future with Jesus: it robbed them of the past. What price all Jesus’ stuff about the coming kingdom? What had all the sacrifices been for? Why had we wasted these last three years?” And this experience – this horrible encounter with something that turns our lives upside down and destroys our past, present and future – this is what exile is all about and… it is part of the human experience.

It is not an exception – it is the rule. There is a cruelty to real life that no sentimental Christmas can erase. There is war and rape, there is sexual abuse, economic and political exploitation, race hatred, homophobia, the pollution of God’s sacred land, water and air and I am just getting wound up. There is psychological anxiety and depression, there is unemployment, there is cancer and there is violence against the most vulnerable.

+ In a word, there is sin in this world: darkness, separation from God and one another, fear, shame, abuse and wounds that I cannot even name – and the wisdom of Advent asks us to take this sin seriously.

+ So, we have to be clear what sin really means in a full and honest way because too often religious and even political authorities have used our impoverished and deformed notions of sin to control or degrade us – and that is not what God desires.

Rather, our tradition begins by telling us that in the beginning we were created in the image and form of the Lord – beautiful, sacred, filled with truth and grace – so what is the point of all the sin talk? What truth has been obscured?

Two very different thinkers, Kathleen Norris and Irwin Kula, have helped me get ready for Isaiah and sin this Advent – and maybe they can be helpful for you, too. Norris is a Presbyterian who has found solace and insight in the Benedictine monastic tradition while Kula is an eighth-generation rabbi living and working in New York City. They both take the reality of sin seriously but in a way that is liberating.

Norris, in her most recent book about marriage, monks and the life of a writer, offers a host of small blessings about what it means to become an adult of faith – not a child – but an adult with a mature and nuanced understanding of God. “Many people,” she begins, “who would not dream of relying on the under-standing of literature or the sciences they acquired as children are content to leave their juvenile theological convictions about sin largely unexamined.” Then she goes for the jugular:

Many of us are right to distrust the idea of sin as it is often presented, but are foolish indeed if we throw out the living baby with the old church bathwater. The concept of sin, you see, does not exist so that people who may need therapy more than theology can be convinced that they are evil and beyond hope. It is meant to encourage people to believe that they are made in the image of God and to act accordingly. Hope is the heart of it – as well as the ever-present possibility of transformation…. Were I to deny this, and discount the wisdom of my ancestors, I would grow not wise but over-confident in my estimation of myself and in what passes for progress.

Did you get that? The whole point in naming sin is NOT to grow weary over stupid or dirty, little thoughts that are simply part of the human experience. Rather, the point of naming sin is to help us see where we’ve missed the mark – wandered off the path – and ask God’s grace to help us get back into the light. Rabbi Kula says that the first time the word sin appears in the Bible occurs in the story of Cain and Abel, do you recall it?

What a wildass story this is: Adam and Eve’s children, far from the garden, set out to build a new life with the younger, Abel, tending the sheep and the older, Cain, going into farming. Cain brings an offering of the earth to the Lord and before he can put it down, his baby brother is bringing up an offering, too. “Damned copycat,” Cain thinks, “he’s too uppity and doesn’t know his place.” And just to make matters worse, God paid attention to Abel’s offering but not to Cain’s. The good rabbi tells us: hence the beginning of sibling rivalry.

In his anger, Cain communicates with God who tells him that if he does the right thing – “if he keeps his envy and anger in check and acts as his brother’s keeper, there will be blessing and integrity to life” – and all will be well. “But if you do not do the right thing, then understand that sin crouches at the door.” This is the first time in the Bible that the word sin appears… so what did Cain get wrong? Kula is clear: “Cain had imagined, as so many of us do, that reality was designed to meet his needs. So now he has a choice: how to react to the inevitable unfairness and perceived inequalities of life?”

If you know the story, Cain goes to talk to his brother… but ends up killing him – and we really don’t know why. All we know is that instead of examining his rage, Cain acts on it. Rabbi Kula continues:

Cain avoids the messiness, the intensity and pain of investigating his own feelings; he chooses to see his anger as an end rather than as a beginning and in the process kills his only brother… (which brings us to a key insight about sin) There are really only two questions we need to answer in our lives: “Where are you?” – the question God asked both Adam and Eve as they were trying to hide in the garden after turning their backs on the Lord – and “Am I my brother or sister’s keeper?”

As the wise ones like to say, “everything else is commentary” – and that brings me back to the craziness of entering Advent: there are signs of sin all around us. Sometimes we encounter it as exile – being torn away from hope and safety – brutalized by the cruelty of real life that we neither deserve nor know how to cope with. Sometimes we create it by running away from God’s love rather than dealing with the truth of our lives. And sometimes sin is born when we refuse to acknowledge that we are, indeed, our brother and sister’s keeper.

That old master preacher, Fred Craddock, likes to tell us that the reason God gave us the word sin is so that it might slap us in the face when we get too full of ourselves to notice our own laziness or greed. “When we can look at a starving child,” he says, “with a swollen stomach and say, ‘Well, that’s not my kid’… or see an old man sitting alone among the pigeons in the park and say, “Well… that’s not my dad’… Then we’ve fallen into the ways of sin. For sin, you see, is that capacity of the human spirit to look out upon the world and everything God has made and say: I don’t care!”

Some of us are in exile this year and we’re tired of waiting – some of us are in sin and we don’t want to stop – and all of us are aching for a deeper connection to the one who brings hope and healing. But it doesn’t come quickly, does it? And it doesn’t happen all at once either. No wonder we are told to start with the darkness… and so we will. There is a promise of light, beloved, and I trust it is true. But first we must acknowledge the darkness – for this is how the journey begins…