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Advent Imagining
Sermon by Catherine W. FitzGerald November 27, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 64:1-9 Mark 13:24-37
A wonderful seminary professor of mine was kind enough to help us learn from his ministry mistakes, sharing with us an Advent tale of his own. He was a new associate minister and had been assigned an Advent children’s sermon. The children gathered dutifully before him on Sunday morning, no doubt expecting a traditional Advent/Christmas moment concerning giving and receiving or something along those lines. Instead, he gave them a most intimidating glare and spoke a reworded version of a treasured Christmas tune: “You’d better watch out, you’d better not cry, you’d better not pout I’m telling you why: Jesus Christ is coming to town.” The children were terrified and I believe he spent a bit of his Advent season atoning to parents, children, and congregants. He had good intentions, but perhaps the wrong audience. It is my hope for the day and the season, that we can explore the true meaning of Advent, and that we can be honest with ourselves and one another concerning both the hopes and fears that prevail in this special season. Without scaring the children. Advent begins not with a song of joy and a message of unadulterated hope for it is a season filled with ambiguity. On one hand, we are hopeful—remembering God’s fulfilled promise, and anxiously awaiting and preparing for the celebration of Jesus’ birth on Christmas day. On the other hand, we still await God’s return in the risen Lord. In this way, we find our situation is not entirely different from the Israelites in our Isaiah reading. The lamentation of Isaiah represents life lived between promise and fulfillment. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence,” cries the author of Isaiah. The prophet serves as mediator between the God of the promise and a greatly disillusioned people. The initial return from Babylonian exile to Judah has already taken place, but this exodus has not been as magnificent as had been originally predicted, and life for those who’ve returned to Judah remains very harsh. Amidst these difficult circumstances there exists both economic oppression and, in an attempt to cope with life’s problems, a resurgence in the pagan rituals long indigenous in Israel. In response to this situation, Isaiah announces God’s impending judgment upon the oppressors and those who have strayed from God’s will. “The prophet promises the righteous that God’s glorious deliverance of Israel, promised long ago, is soon to be realized. Soon the wealth of the nations will pour into Jerusalem along with the rest of Israel’s exiles, and the shame and sorrow of the recent past will be replaced with eternal joy and prosperity,” writes Biblical scholar Bernhard Anderson. Soon, but not now. The reality remains that life for God’s people is still difficult. Despite their return from exile, they exist as an exiled people—wondering when the promises of God will come to pass. This is where Advent begins. A prophet in the midst of a suffering people looks to the heavens and cries out for God to come. On this day, we too pray for our Emmanuel. In an age of anxiety, in a time of unending disease and war, like Isaiah, we should be crying out for God’s reign once again. Instead, we tend to reach for safe places and comfortable thoughts. We grasp at anything that would remind us of “happier” times—nostalgia reigns at Christmas. If Advent is a season of waiting, we might as well make it a joyous one—after all, we can save all that gloom and doom for Lent. For many of us, it is too difficult to acknowledge our pain and sinfulness—too easy to cover up our need with the joy of the holiday season. But if we “experience” only the joy of the season, then perhaps our joy has been falsely won. As poet and author Ann Weems asks, “When are we going to learn that Christmas Peace comes only when we turn and face the darkness? Only then will we be able to see the Light of the World.” Or as Deitrich Bonhoeffer so aptly preached one Advent Sunday, “We have been shielded from the awful nature of Christmas and no longer feel afraid at the coming near of God Almighty. We have selected from the Christmas story only the pleasant bits, forgetting the awesome nature of an event in which the God of the universe, its Creator and Sustainer, draws near to this little planet, and now speaks to us. The coming of God is not only a message of joy, but also fearful news for anyone who has a conscience.” Early Christians thought they would soon see the Lord’s second coming. Advent for them (though it was not an “official” season) meant preparation for the joyous and fear-filled event of God’s coming. They were the ones who lived with the words of Jesus: “keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.” We are far removed from the apocalyptic urgency felt by our Christian ancestors. Advent has become one-sided: a mere joyful prelude to Christmas. The thought of Jesus’ return does not move us in the same way it affected our ancestors. Real apocalyptic discussion is generally left to our more conservative brothers and sisters. Now, I am not a fire-and-brimstone theologian, nor am I about to don a sandwich board proclaiming the imminent end of the world, but I do believe that in consideration of God’s return we should be moved—and I’m just not sure we are. If we really believe that Jesus will return to us—that God’s promises will ultimately be fulfilled—our response would not be limited to hope. Isaiah’s isn’t. Isaiah anxiously awaits God’s promises to be fulfilled. He prays that God would come down once again to care for his people. And his cry leads to confession. “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth…. There is no one who calls on you name, or attempts to take hold of you.” The awesomeness of God’s impending arrival must first be met with humble confession. Bonhoeffer has a similar Advent response: “Lord Jesus, come yourself, and dwell with us, be human as we are, and overcome what overwhelms us. Come into the midst of my evil, come close to my unfaithfulness. Share my sin, which I hate and which I cannot leave. Be my brother, Thou Holy God. Be my brother in the kingdom of evil and suffering and death. Come with me in my death, come with me in my suffering, come with me as I struggle with evil. And make me holy and pure, despite my sin and death.” This was his Advent wish. It was not a wish for material goods, family gatherings, or even peace on earth—it was the cry of a self-professed sinner to the God of redemption. It is the cry of one who has not yet found his way out of exile. It is the cry of one who waits for God in the season of waiting. Unfortunately, as songwriter Tom Petty puts it: “the waiting is the hardest part.” We live in a time when waiting is at best an inconvenience. In the event that we do have to wait, there is no need to worry because we’ve got plenty of things to do to pass the time. This is the type of waiting in which we are most likely to engage—the kind of waiting Bonhoeffer calls “foolish.” It is not, however, the waiting expected of us during Advent. Concerning Advent waiting Bonhoeffer explains: “A longing emerges within us, which will not be silenced, a longing that all should be fulfilled amidst all the failures and against all the evidence, yet we protest its fulfillment all the stronger. This is a waiting within us for nothing less than that this world will be redeemed through and through—not by this or that political means, but by God. When God himself comes to us, then Advent truly begins to become real. When we see all our hopes and dreams shattered by questioning, by fruitless efforts and failures; when the narrowness of our existence wounds us; when suddenly we are tormented by the thought that all is lost and fallen into oblivion; and when the cry is wrenched from us: ‘Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down’ (Isaiah 64:1), then perhaps we can understand what the Bible means by ‘waiting.’” We wait in darkness for the light of the world…and the darkness is not a comfortable place in which to wait. It is then likely that only those who have known and remembered suffering during this season, truly know the nature of need-for- redemption-Advent-waiting. Those of us who have encountered the darkest nights of the soul know best what it is to yearn for the light. Why do the rest of us have such a difficult time engaging in this all-but-lost season? Our problem, proclaims Walter Brueggemann, is that “in our achieved satiation we have neither the wits nor the energy nor the courage to think freely about imagined alternative futures.” If we cannot admit to ourselves our own need for redemption, how can we ever acknowledge our need for God? How can we pray, “Come, Lord Jesus” without acknowledging the urgency of our need? How can we imagine an alternative future when we fail to see our present time with clarity? In a world dominated by need, we have become numb…numb, Brueggemann says, to our own mortality. The more need we encounter, the more we shutdown. He notes that we ministers are particularly susceptible to this numbness—this staving off of our very humanity. “In a hospital room we want it to be cheery, and in a broken marriage we want to imagine it will be all right. We bring the lewd promise of immortality everywhere, which is not a promise but only a denial of what history brings and what we are indeed experiencing.” Isaiah did not mince words. He did not have fluffy expectations of God peacefully coming to do a little tweaking of the earth. He knew the necessity of the mountain-shaking, reality-altering coming of God. He had, what Brueggemann calls “prophetic imagination.” “The task of prophetic imagination,” Brueggemann writes, “is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord.” I believe this is not just the task of the prophets—it a task for every one of us. During the Advent season, we must be careful not to deceive ourselves with empty hope. Hope can only come once we have acknowledged our need—and we are in need. We cannot “hope” to avoid our life struggles—we hope because of them. This is the true hope—it is the hope we have in Jesus Christ, our Savior. It is the hope that carries us through the darkest days, all the way to the babe in the manger—in whom “the hopes and fears of all our years are met.” And so, acknowledging our brokenness, we cry out: come, Lord Jesus, come! And so, we are moved. Thanks be to God! |