First Sunday of Advent Sermon
“Keep awake,” says Jesus.
Well, that’s good advice this time of year – this time of year when I yawn and stand up and announce I’m going to bed, then look at the clock and discover it’s not even six o’clock yet. But it’s been dark so long already, surely it must be time for bed. Keep awake. It’s not time for bed yet.
Keep awake.
And so begins another Advent season. Keep awake: through the shadowed darkness of the night, with so much we cannot see. Keep awake: in the long stretches of waiting – for peace in the middle east, for stability in our politics, for a grandchild whose eating disorder keeps bringing her to the brink of destruction. Keep awake.
For this is the wisdom of Advent.
We begin each new year of the church, not with the beginning of our faith story, but with the end. We begin by looking forward, scribing hope within us, of where this story is taking us: that God in Christ will come again to complete this story of creation, this story of humanity, this redeeming story of “God with us” in all things.
The call of Christ and his church at Advent is to keep awake. Hold fast to what we have seen and learned to be dependable and true, even when the darkness of this world presses upon us.
My stepfather died a few weeks ago. He’d been widowed several years before. And so last week, my siblings and I gathered in his apartment – to be together in our shared bereavement, but also to do that necessary work of going through his things: what to keep, what to throw away. And, as is always the case when doing such work, there are discoveries – discoveries of “Oh, look! Remember this?” (I kept the little cutting board Bill always used on picnics.) But there are also the discoveries of things you didn’t know – the hidden things that fill in the cracks of who this person was – this person you’d known your whole life, but you never knew this. And this.
I was tasked with sorting through the pictures. And you’ve got to be ruthless! Landscapes from summer vacations? Chuck ‘em! That time there was a heavy snow or there were three deer in the back yard? Chuck ‘em! You can’t keep them all. But there are some you’ve got to keep – the ones that capture those iconic moments that can be so defining in the story of your family.
And as I was going through the pictures, I thought, “I’m not even going to touch the slides; they’re too hard to deal with.” But then I vacillated. “Ahh, wait a minute. There might be something important.” And right at the end, right when I was about to give up and throw them all away, I found this one box: “Spring 1974.” It was a gold mine. This one little box of slides spanned that stretch of time before and after our parents’ divorce, when the whole structure of our world was being reordered. I was only three at the time. My memories are vague, at best. But suddenly, in my hand, were these archives in vivid Kodachrome: of my youthful parents, of me, my siblings. I could see where we were, what we were wearing, what we were doing, the expressions on our faces. I’d never seen these pictures before. And I cannot tell you how significant it was for this murky season of our past to come suddenly to light with such bright, clear particularity. We passed the slides around to each other, angling them to the light, squinting to see these tiny portals of our past.
And so we finished our work. We kept those tokens we wanted to preserve, and threw the rest away into a dumpster. I got home Wednesday night and the first thing I wanted to do was show Cynthia those slides. I opened my bag, sifted through the pictures I’d kept… and … that box wasn’t there. Somehow, in the chaos, it’d ended up in the throw-away pile.
I felt something being ripped out of me.
But with that gaping loss came also this clear sensation: God was not separate from this situation, and that those images had been ours for a moment. They showed us something we hadn’t known, but now we did. And that revealing was what remained.
The following day, I was talking to my brother Kent about this loss. He was very gracious and very wise. “Maybe it’s the way it needs to be, Eric. They weren’t ours to possess, but ours to learn from.” Then he added, “But I know I’ll forget. So will you write down what we saw, and what we learned from them?”
Yes. Yes, I will.
For this is how it is in life. No moment or thing is ours to keep forever. They pass through our hands, just as our own lives pass through the hands of time. But within those fleeting moments of seeing or possessing, there lies a seed, which – if nurtured and tended – can grow into wisdom, a wisdom not only for our formation, but for the edification of those communities and people to whom we belong.
That’s how it was for Julian of Norwich. She was 30 years old in 1373 and so sick all were certain that she would die. A curate came to pray last rites. She began to lose her sight and feel physically numb. But gazing at the crucifix held over her bed, she began to see the Christ figure bleeding. And for the next several hours, and into the next day, she had a series of 15 visions (or “shewings” as she called them).
Miraculously, she recovered and spent the remainder of her life – 43 more years – secluded in a cell as anchoress, praying and reflecting on these visions. She wrote about them in two texts. There’s a short version, written soon after the event. But then, many decades later, she wrote the long version. And that’s the good one. Years of meditating on these visions, plumbing their depth, produced layer upon layer of the most profound theological insights into the nature of Christ. It’s pure wisdom.
Her writings were lost for many years, but then rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century. Her voice has now become one of the guiding lights for this generation of the church. In fact, it is her words we’ll pray in our Advent Prayers of the People, that whatever woes or sorrows or mysteries beset us, our anchored hope is certain: “All will be well, and all will be well; all manner of things will be well.”
And so it is with Kent’s charge to me. Recording and meditating on that Kodachrome glimpse we shared of our past will be my Advent task, not only because I’ll be doing it in the season of Advent, but because of how deeply it resonates with the substance of what Advent can be for us.
In Advent, we remember what we learned of God through Christ in his first coming, to form us and give us hope of what will be when Christ shall come again.
This world had Jesus within it for its season. In the broad span of human history, we had our thirty-three years of “Emmanuel, God with us.” God in Christ showed us the purity of the Kingdom of God: who God is and what God values and what it means to be human. He showed us how to live rightly in this world: in our communities, in our own bodies, in union with God and one another. He showed us how to give our lives away, even unto death. And he showed us the promise of life redeemed beyond the grave – a tangible life, both familiar and changed. He was with us for his season. He completed what was required of him and – for the time being – is now beyond our grasping.
But we have inherited the wisdom of the ages. That first generation of the church recorded their memories of Christ in the gospels. And every generation since has continued to meditate and discover afresh the good news that remains alive within us and among us – layer upon layer of wisdom and hope that all shall be well, for the Kingdom of God cannot be quenched, but grows among us still.
And it is with this spirit of hope and calling that we welcome new members into the fellowship of St. John’s today. The mystical body of Christ is now ubiquitous through time and space, but we incarnate ones live in this time and this space. It is with one another that we will share our lives – the mundane and the extraordinary, the sorrows and the joys. It is our generation’s call to continue this work – discerning the wisdom of faith by living the gospel of grace, together.
St. John’s will now include Samuel; it will include Nancy and Byron, Jeanie and Ron, Warren and August. They are the incarnate ones among us who will serve and be served, who will love and be loved. And the testimony of Christ will be strengthened among us as we are called into this living, dynamic fellowship of God’s son.
So let us keep awake – alive and alert – that we may perceive what was, and what is, and what ever shall be: God with us. Amen.