Blessed be the Lord

Advent 2, yr C

December 6, 2009

I sometimes think Advent is like being in a time warp. If you pay close attention to the readings, and the season, it’s very disorienting. First, there’s the fact that Advent is a season about two different comings—the coming of Christmas, the birth of Jesus Christ, and also about the second coming, Christ coming in majesty. Are we looking backward two thousand years, or looking ahead to who knows how many years? Or are we looking forward just two and a half weeks to Christmas Eve? Which is it?

And then there’s the reality that the world around us is in the midst of Christmas, while we are still in Advent. Advent and Christmas are two quite distinct seasons of the church year. In Advent, we wear purple, a penitential color, while Christmas is festive white, for celebration. We shouldn’t even be saying “Merry Christmas” until Christmas Eve.

If that weren’t enough, Luke adds another layer of time for us in today’s lessons. We are in year C of the three-year lectionary cycle, so we are reading for most of the year from the Gospel of Luke. Luke was written later than the gospel of Mark, which was the focal gospel last year, in year B. Like Matthew, Luke builds on Mark, relies on its overall framework, but adds considerable material. Even more importantly, Luke was not content with only writing a gospel. He wrote what was in essence a two-volume work that includes the book of Acts, and tells the story of Jesus Christ and the early church that is carefully constructed. For example, Luke uses a geographical framework that takes the story from Bethlehem, to Galilee, to Jerusalem, and ultimately to Rome and the world.

Luke is also concerned to connect the story of Jesus Christ and the early church with themes from the Jewish tradition and the Hebrew Bible. Nowhere is that more true than in Luke’s version of the story of Jesus’ birth. There are themes, images, and motifs that return us to the Hebrew Bible again. The song of Mary for example, the magnificat, is by and large a reworking of the song of Hannah from I Samuel, which she sang after giving birth to her longed for son, Samuel.

These themes and resonances come out especially in the story of John the Baptist. Luke depicts him as the last of the Hebrew prophets, dressed as they dressed, delivering a message straight from their works. But perhaps the strongest example of the connection between past and present, between God’s working in the history of Israel and God’s working in the present is the song of Zechariah, which we read together a few minutes ago: “Blessed is the Lord the God of Israel, he has come to his people and set them free.”

These words of Zechariah were the first words he spoke after first hearing that his wife would give birth nine months earlier. It is his response when his son John is circumcised, and one can imagine someone thinking for those nine months of just what to say if he ever got his voice back.

In fact, the words are Luke’s creation and demonstrate Luke’s powers as a writer and poet. Luke ties the birth of John to salvation history, to the story of God’s mighty acts in saving God’s people.

If you are familiar with the Daily Office, especially with the service of Morning Prayer, and I would encourage you to familiarize yourself with it; you would recognize the Song of Zechariah as one of the canticles that are recited or sung on a regular basis. It was in that context that I became familiar with those words, and other wonderful biblical hymns, like the Song of Simeon. As is so often the case, when we repeat things often enough we can memorize them. Sometimes memorization means that we never pay attention to the words, but it can also mean that those words become engraved in our memory, and come back to us often and at random.

Our lessons today, and throughout Advent, are full of such familiar words. “For he is like a refiner’s fire” or “And he shall purify” from the Malachi reading, and of course, Handel’s Messiah. We know them from Messiah but barely notice what they are saying. “Who can endure the day of his coming and who can stand when he appears? The images Malachi presents us with seem full of violence and the promise of the destruction of God’s enemies. Even the words of Zechariah seem directed at the same end. God promised to save God’s people from their enemies. Violence and destruction lurk just beneath the text.

And of course, there is violence to in the imagery used by John the Baptizer. John leaves the settled area of Palestine, leaves Jerusalem for the wilderness, where he takes potshots at the culture he has abandoned and threatens the coming of destruction from God. He demands repentance and promises a world upended by divine intervention: “every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill made low.”

Violence, too, lurks just beyond the world of the text. Luke takes great care to place his narrative in the political context of the Roman Empire. He is writing after Rome has brutally suppressed the Jewish revolt and destroyed the Temple. Luke is writing with those terrible events in mind and one of his goals is to offer an alternative. That may be why he so carefully and completely delineates the powers arrayed against John, and by extension against. He lists seven names, beginning with the emperor Tiberius, and extending downward to Pilate and Herod, and including in the mix the high priest. Seven powers challenged by a voice, crying in the wilderness.

Rome promises violence and oppression, Zechariah hopes for a God who will deliver God’s people, will save them from their enemies. The nature of that salvation isn’t completely clear. Perhaps it will be violent, but the end will be radically different. Zechariah’s hymn ends with the hope that God’s tender compassion will come down from and how and that God will “to guide our feet into the way of peace.” In fact, peace is one of Luke’s central themes. He uses the word more often than all of the other gospels combined.

I couldn’t help thinking of that promise of peace this week. It is a sentiment we hear repeatedly this time of year, the words of the angels in Luke’s gospel easily roll off our tongues “Peace on earth, good will toward all.” Yet we live in a world in which there is no peace; our nation continues to be at war, increasing its military presence in Afghanistan with no end in sight and apparently no real plan nor real hope for bringing stability and order to that part of the world. Apparently, we fight because we fight.

It’s hard for us to take peace seriously in such a world, it’s hard to believe that God’s in-breaking into the world might bring peace. It’s hard to even imagine what it might be like for us to have a faith like Zechariah’s. In some ways, we might understand John a little better. We might imagine ourselves, or a different version of ourselves, getting so tired of everything—the religious establishment, the political establishment, a culture that focuses on White House party crashers and adulterous golfers rather than the intractable problems that face us as a society and a world community—we can imagine getting so sick and tired of everything that we go off into the woods, or go crazy, and start preaching on a street corner or screaming from that wilderness that it’s all going to come to an end.

We might even think that John is somehow more faithful and more responsible than Zechariah, his father. Last week, I talked about the irrelevance and futility of lighting advent candles in the growing December darkness. I spoke of the difficulty of paying attention to that light, of how hard it was to discern the signs of the times.

Zechariah saw, and knew. In the baby that was born to him and Elizabeth in their old age, he recognized the dawn from on high breaking in and he expressed his hope and faith that God would deliver God’s people. His hope was not a hope limited to himself, to his family, or even to his religious and ethnic group. His hope of peace and salvation ultimately extended to the whole world, even to the universe. Such a hope is the hope of Advent. Such hope should be our hope now and always.

The Signs of the Times

Advent 1, Yr C

November 29, 2009

There were many things that I never got used to in fifteen years of living in the South. Grits, for example. I first tasted grits when I visited Corrie’s parents just after our engagement. There was this mess of off-white something on my breakfast plate the first morning I was there. Politely, I had a spoonful. Tasteless, with the texture of wallpaper paste, I swallowed. It was the last taste of grits I had for many years. I avoided them assiduously, even refusing them vocally in a buffet line in Charleston, leading to a delightful interchange with Natalie Dupree, the doyenne of Southern cooking.

In fact, the list of things about the south I never grew accustomed to is quite long. If pressed, I might be able to come up with a similar list of things I liked. But one of the oddest things was the way Southerners approached, or didn’t approach, winter. As a native Midwesterner, with a dozen years in Massachusetts under my belt; I knew what to do when October came around: You got out the storm windows, you made sure you knew where the snow shovel was, and all of your winter clothes, and coats, and the like. You should have gotten the car winterized. In the south, none of that is necessary.

In the south, in South Carolina, where we lived for the last decade, when November came around, life continued pretty much like it had in the previous months. In fact, often by late October or November, it was actually cool enough that you could enjoy the outdoors after a summer of 90+ degree weather.

The only times people actually gave a thought to what winter might bring were when weather forecasters promised snow or ice. Then, everyone got into high gear, making sure that all of the grocery stores were sold out of bread and milk, long before the first snowflake or ice pellet appeared in the sky.

As a somewhat snobbish northerner, I came to think that the climate had shaped Southern culture and character in negative ways. Not needing the annual discipline of careful preparation for a bitter winter, many Southerners tend to approach all of life with a somewhat lackadaisical, carefree attitude. What are the consequences down the road of some decision we make now? Who cares, we’ll deal with that when the time comes. Don’t worry, be happy.

They may be hardnosed businessmen and women, but if it’s a really nice day, many would be inclined to take it off for a round of golf or a day at the beach. One could call it “flip-flop” culture; the tendency to wear overly casual clothes, summer clothes deep into the winter. Of course, one need only drive down University Avenue once to see flip-flop culture’s advance north—as students everywhere seem to have adopted that mode of footwear.

It’s hard work to get ready for winter. I’m beginning to remember that, even though we are renting. We don’t own a house and have all of those preparations. I did, finally put on the storm doors over the weekend. Hey, don’t criticize me, these were the first two solid, consecutive days off I’ve had since moving here. We’ve got a cord of wood laid in; we’ve been out shopping for new winter coats, winter clothes, boots, and the like. I think we’re ready, but not psychologically.

We think about the hard work of getting ready for Christmas—the shopping, the party planning, the decorating, and we may think that when we come to church, we can leave all of that hard work behind us and enjoy another year’s worth of Advent music and upbeat sermons. But Advent is hard work too. Advent is all about preparation, about getting ready. But it’s about more than that. More than that, it’s also about paying attention.

In today’s gospel, Jesus warns his disciples to be on the lookout. Be on guard, be alert, Jesus cautions his listeners. Today’s reading comes from what scholars call the little apocalypse; a sermon that is common to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in which Jesus tells his disciples about coming events. It’s called an apocalypse, because it, like the book of revelation and parts of Daniel, including the section we read last Sunday, focus on events that are promised to take place in the near future.

Now there’s a lot I could say about apocalyptic, I once taught a course on the topic, but what’s important for us to understand is that apocalyptic presupposes a cataclysmic end to the world as we know it. It posits an eternal battle between the forces of good and evil, and in the end, a final victory of good over evil. Most scholars argue that in spite of all of the predictions that seem to linger in apocalyptic literature, it’s actually more focused on what has already happening, or what is happening right as the author is writing.

In fact, most of us are probably uncomfortable with apocalyptic language and unless we’ve attended church services regularly over the years, and paid attention to the readings, chances are we’re wondering what this gospel lesson has to do with the coming of Christmas. Where’s the joy? Where’s the party?

In fact, Advent is about two comings. Yes, we look forward to the incarnation, the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem; but of course, when we do that, we are really looking back to events that took place more than two millennia ago. Advent is not just about preparing us for Christmas. It is also about the second coming, the coming of Jesus Christ at the end of the age, an event we all proclaim our faith in every time we recite the Nicene creed.

The symbol we use to mark the first Sunday of Advent, a single candle, is a reminder to us of all that Advent means. We may miss its significance in a well-lighted church, but by itself, one advent candle shines brightly in the darkness. It reminds us of the darkening world in which we live, as the days grow shorter and we near the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. But it takes effort to notice it; we are easily distracted away from that single candle toward other things.

Jesus warns his disciples about being distracted, and about missing the meaning of the signs they are seeing: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” On first blush, the language and the imagery may startle us. We may be inclined to dismiss it as nothing more than another example of apocalyptic language that has no place in our lives. Yet the resonances are real, and it may be that by dismissing it as apocalyptic, we lose sight of the real power behind the words.

“Signs in the sun, moon, and stars, nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves?” This sounds a great deal like the very world we live in, a world in which we are reminded again and again of the destructive forces of nature, and the extent to which we humans have brought destruction to our world. Our climate is changing; the scarce natural resources from which we live are vanishing at an alarming rate; our food supply is endangered by all manner of threat. But for the most part, we go about our daily lives, oblivious to the future, oblivious to the myriad ways in which our decisions every day contribute to ultimate global catastrophe.

Those problems seem quite distant from us. Instead, we focus on our own concerns, our own lives, and however much we might pay lip service to the world around us, we do everything in our power to keep all those fears, all that uncertainty, all that change as far away from us and our families as possible.

But my brothers and sisters, think about it for a second. Such attitudes fly in the face of the evidence around us. At some point, our personal hopes and expectations are going to meet up against the cold, hard, reality of the world. Try as we might, be it by willful ignorance, by blinding ourselves through entertainment, or relentless consumption, we might try to keep the world at bay. But it has its way of breaking in upon us, reminding us that all our efforts at avoiding pain and suffering will come to nought.

But it still breaks in upon us. The world surprises us at every turn. We have lit one faint candle, a sign of hope in a darkening world. There may be no clearer symbol of the meaning of this season of Advent than to light the advent wreath. In this time of the year, as we move toward the winter solstice and the shortest day of the year, we defy the inevitability of our darkening world by lighting candles each week. We light candles, proclaiming our faith that in spite of the darkening world around us, we look for the coming of the Light of the World.

Our every tendency may be to ignore the suffering in the world around us. There’s nothing we can do about it; the problems seem so great and intractable. Our impulse is to circle the wagons, retreat inside our homes, perhaps even inside of our gated communities and there to live life to the fullest, perhaps assuaging our guilt with an extra donation of money in this season of giving. But our faith does not let us do that.

Think about that candle again. Think about the irrelevance, the meaninglessness of lighting a single candle in the growing darkness of December. How can that dispel the gloom of a winter’s day? Yet we do it, each year. Each year we proclaim our faith in the Light of the World. We proclaim our faith that our redemption is near as we light the candles of the Advent Wreath. A simple, insignificant act like that should give us hope that all of our actions, no matter how small and insignificant may also contribute to the redemption of the world.