NOTE: Here are my worship notes for Sunday, December 8, 2013, the celebration of Advent II. I am grateful for the art work shared here from Jan Richardson. I invite your prayers for her upon the recent death of her beloved husband, Garrison Doles.
Introduction
Every year my participation
in Advent is filled with tension – it is a quiet tension, to be sure – lovely
and tender but still a tension nonetheless.
Maybe you have experienced this tension, too so let me try to give my
apprehension shape and form: for me the
aesthetics of this liturgical season are quiet – almost serene – a call to
saturate ourselves in chant, contemplation and candle light. One of my favorite songs of this season, “Of
the Father’s Love Begotten,” puts it like this:
Christ
to Thee with God the Father – and O Holy Ghost to Thee
Hymn
and chant and high thanksgiving
and unending praises be
Honor,
glory and dominion and eternal victory:
evermore and evermore.
This poem is one of the
oldest in the Christian tradition – a 4th century Latin prayer –
that has become a mystical love song to the Lord: hymn and
chant and high thanksgiving and unending praises be. Another of Advent favorite, “Let All Mortal
Flesh Keep Silence,” also hails from the 4th century as part of the
Eucharistic songs of Syria. It begins
with the proclamation:
Let
all mortal flesh keep silence
and with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder
nothing earthly minded for with blessing in His hand:
Christ
our God to earth descendeth our full homage to demand.
Do you get what I’m trying to
say about the aesthetics of the season?
They are lofty, peaceful and hushed.
Gertrud Mueller-Nelson speaks of the spirituality of this season as our
training in the feminine virtues of waiting, gestating and simmering. “There isn’t anything of value that we don’t have a
certain period of waiting for: a good wine, for bread to rise, for our compost
to work. This kind of waiting is about transformation.”
It’s about
going from this state of heart and mind to that state of heart and mind. If
your children smell a cake in the oven and say, “I want a piece right now,”
would you pull it out and give them each a soup spoon? It wouldn’t be the same
thing. All those things are about a period of waiting where something turns
from one thing, which is kind of raw and not useful, into something quite
marvelous and worth the wait.
The
season of Advent is wrapped in serenity and darkness but the readings we’re asked to wrestle
with are anything BUT
tranquil, right? First we have to deal
with the apocalyptic words of Jesus about judgment and the end of time and then
for two full weeks we have to put up with John the Baptist. And this
is where the tension begins to arise for me because the challenge of the
Scriptures feels like a glass of cold water has just been thrown in my face. Just when I’m getting all cozy and “spiritual”
with my chants and candles that maniac John the Baptist shows up shouting
repent, repent. “The time has come,” he tells all who are listening “to start
living like a voice crying out in the wilderness that we must prepare the way
of the Lord.”
+ Do you grasp what I’m trying to say?
One message in Advent is about waiting and listening in a very quiet and
nurturing way while the other is a public challenge to turn everything upside
down and inside out in preparation for the kingdom of God.
+ And every year I find myself resenting this spiritual schizophrenia because
I know that the way of integrity and God’s kingdom is NEVER either/or – it is
always both/and – waiting AND acting – being still AND knowing God – and this
paradox makes me wiggy!
I want it to be one way or the other but Advent tells me that it isn’t
about me – or my preferences or comfort level – it is about getting ready for
the Lord. And
while I’ll grant you that part of my wigginess comes from spending so
much time with both the Scriptures and our tradition, I bet that even if you
aren’t paying any real attention to the Bible readings for Advent you still
feel some of this tension, right? How
many times have I heard you say – or said myself – I want this Christmas
to be different? I want it to be special
– loving – spiritual and nurturing. Are
you with me? Have you ever said those
words: I want this Christmas to be
different?
Insights
This
is where the poetry of Isaiah and the Baptizer can be useful to us if we’re
willing to be both playful and attentive with their words. And this is also where the contemplative
spirituality of Advent can help us give shape and form to our deepest desires,
too. It takes some work, of course, and
can’t be purchased or ordered and flown in immediately like some drone from
Amazon.com. Rather like Mueller-Nelson
suggests, it would be best for us to treat the four weeks of Advent as
hunkering down times:
Time out of
time… God’s time… (living) in these four weeks, as you would be in the last day
of your own pregnancies. The process of making things and counting diapers and
painting the room and hanging the mobile — all of those odd little gestures we
do — prepare us on the deepest level for what’s coming.
And here’s where the upside-down
challenge of the prophets comes into focus:
they, too, are asking us to hunker down and discover whether or not what
we’re doing with our ordinary, walking around, everyday lives contributes to
our deepest desires or wastes our time. Take
John the Baptist who at first always makes me uncomfortable: His call to repentance – metanoia in Greek – is not really a scolding as if we’ve been bad
children although it can sound that way at first. Rather it is an invitation to change our
direction – to get off those roads that are dead-ends – and back onto paths
that will lead us in the way of faith, hope and love.
And we know this if we spend
a little time with the Baptist and pay
+ Mostly it had to
do with mikvah – the ritual bath performed in fresh running water for the
purification of men and women who were converting from one faith into Judaism –
so some biblical scholars now believe that what John was really saying was that
everybody who sensed that their life was out of rhythm with God’s love could be
purified right on the spot. They didn’t
need to go to the Temple in Jerusalem and offer costly sacrifices on the altar;
they could simply humble themselves to God and rededicate themselves to the way
of compassion and justice anywhere.
+ This is probably
the reason why those in charge in Jerusalem were so uncomfortable with John as
a prophet – and it might explain why the Baptist called the religious leaders
of his day a brood of vipers – like the prophet Isaiah before him, John was
inviting God’s people to be humbled and let God’s love change their priorities.
Isaiah put it like this: all the sin and distractions of the people
will be chopped down like clear-cutting a virgin forest. For a time, life will look like a devastation
– but then, in God’s time and God’s love – out of the stump of Jesse (the
father of Israel’s King David) shall come a tender shoot – a tiny branch filled
with new life and integrity – and from this unlikely and miraculous source will
come the power to live into God’s compassion and justice.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of
wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of
knowledge and the fear of the Lord. His
delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or
decide by what his ears hear; but
with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek
of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the
breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
Righteousness (that is compassion) shall be the belt around his
waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins. The wolf shall live with the lamb, the
leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling
together, and a little child shall lead them. The
cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion
shall eat straw like the ox. The
nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall
put its hand on the adder’s den. They
will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of
the knowledge of the Lord as
the waters cover the sea.
What I hear both
prophets telling us is that God’s love will reverse and heal human sin and
alienation – God’s grace will restore creation to the holiness of the beginning
– that’s what all that snake talk is about, ok?
Children playing before the adder’s den is what life looked like before
Adam and Eve were banished from garden and all the snakes were cursed,
right? In humility God’s grace restores
everything that was wounded and corrupted – it creates healing between enemies –
and makes clear the way of peace and compassion.
So, if you will allow
this playful leap of faith: whenever WE say, “I want THIS Christmas to be
different,” we are joining John the Baptist and the prophet Isaiah whether we
know it or not. We are saying: I need
something to be different. I ache for
something deeper than anything I might buy on Black Friday or Cyber
Monday. I yearn for the baptism of
repentance in my everyday life. If you
will, this is OUR acculturated way of asking:
“in what way are we preparing the way of the
Lord and making straight a path for our God in our own and other's lives?”
(Ben Witherington, Working Preacher, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.
aspx?commentary _id=777)
Conclusion
And now let’s get really
playful with both the Scriptures and tradition because in truth this call to
repentance is NOT a call to have LESS Christmas, but an invitation to have
MORE: more joy, more peace, more faith,
hope and love. Like preacher David Lohse
says: Isn’t that what the season of
Christmas is all about? MORE love, more
grace, more faith, hope and love? It’s
just that we’re like the people of Isaiah’s time – or John the Baptist’s era –
we need some help and direction to get back onto the road of humble repentance.
So let me ask you right
now to try something with me: I’m going
to play the role of scribe and record your wisdom to three questions because I
think they can help us all find a way to have MORE Christmas this season.
+ First, with NO judgment at all, can you say out loud some of
the things that are still on your TO DO LIST for Christmas? I’m going to need a helper who can make sure
I don’t miss things with my faulty hearing ok?
Can I get a volunteer to help me hear right? Ok, now what are the things you still have on
your TO DO LIST for this Christmas: let’s
shout them out…?
+ Second, let’s say out loud what your hopes and dreams are for
the celebration of this Christmas: what
kind of day do you want to have on Christmas – what kind of interaction are you
hoping for – what would make the world look more like Christmas for you? Let’s hear what is in your hearts and minds…
+ Now there is one more thing I need your help with – a third
list – and this one has to do working backwards to review what we put on our TO
DO LISTS and how they “contribute directly to our own deep hopes
and longings... There may be many things on the list that are important in the
short run but don’t contribute to our larger vision and hope. So perhaps Advent can be a time to put things
in perspective, to channel our energy and resources to those things that matter
most to us, to our families and communities, and to God.” (David Lohse,
Working Preacher)
+ Can you help me with that – what things on our list deepen
and strengthen what we truly desire for this Christmas…?
In
her book, Night Visions, pastor and artist Jan Richardson writes: Advent is a season where I journey with more
questions than answers. “What and whom
do I desire?”
Do my
desires spring from a longing for wholeness or from a sense of inadequacy? Do
they come from within me or from what others say I should want? Will the things I long for bring healing to
others as well as myself? Will my
desires draw me closer to God? Do I really believe the Holy One desires me –
loves me unconditionally – longs for me?
All
of our Advent traditions and customs – all of the contemplative
Come, come, whoever you are: wanderer, worshipper,
lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a
hundred times:
Come, yet again, and again and again, come.
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