Library
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Advent: The Great Reminder
First Sunday in Advent
By Rev. Cindy Bates
Scripture: Isaiah 40:3-5;
3 A voice cries out: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 4 Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. 5 Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken."
I Corinthians 1:3-9
3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 4 I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, 5 for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind— 6 just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you— 7 so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. 8 He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! And this morning, may I be the first to wish you a, “Happy New Year!” Now, before you think the holiday stress has already gotten to me and I have lost all sense of time and space, please know today really does begin a new year, at least for those of us who are followers of Jesus Christ. Today is the first Sunday in Advent which begins the Church’s calendar year. Traditionally it is a time for preparing our hearts and minds for the birth of the Christ-child, Emmanuel, God with us. Webster’s dictionary describes “advent” as a “coming into being.” The word “advent” comes from the Latin word “adventus” which means “coming” or “arrival”. Advent is a time when we prepare to celebrate God’s coming to us in the newness, in the fragileness, in the awesomeness of a birth of a baby. All of Advent is a great reminder to us that God shows up in our humanness to say, “I love you and I want to be with you.”
I always look forward to this time of year for many reasons. It is a time for remembering traditions and rituals that have become meaningful over the years. We light our advent wreath and bring out the decorations. Tonight we will have our annual Advent Festival, haul out those beloved well-worn costumes and retell the Christmas story through the yearly Christmas pageant. Our musicians have been practicing diligently over the past several weeks to bring us many opportunities throughout Advent to hear so many familiar carols and songs that will bring back memories of previous Christmases. Many of us will use grandmother’s recipe to create the perfect Christmas cookie or homemade pie. Decisions will be made about creating or buying the perfect gift, although this year our Christmas budgets will probably be a little smaller. Some of us will contribute to the same charities for a special Christmas offering because we know it is a season of giving and many will be without this year. I am sure you have some tradition that you will remember or repeat this holiday season. And unlike, when we were children and the wait between Thanksgiving and Christmas seemed like an eternity, before you know it Advent will be over, the decorations will be back in the boxes and we will be getting on with making New Year’s resolutions, for that other new year we celebrate in just a few short weeks. Already I feel out of breath! I want to slow down and pay attention. I don’t want to rush through this season and then struggle to remember what was meaningful and relevant related to my faith, my relationships, my life.
The other night I was with a friend who does not attend church or participate in many of the same Christmas traditions that I do. We talked about Thanksgiving and he said that was his favorite holiday, because it was simple, without a lot of fuss, just getting together with friends and food and being thankful. I think I understood his point but his response made me a little sad. His implication was the upcoming Christmas season was not simple but somehow filled with complications and obligations he could not meet. Somehow the spirit of Christmas had disappeared amidst the expectations, materialism and artificiality of the season. Has that ever happened to anyone that you know? How do we really prepare ourselves to celebrate this season to receive God in our midst?
Maybe we have put too much emphasis on the word prepare, translating it into complications and obligations. In order to keep focused on the meaning of Advent this year, what if we thought of this season not so much of a time of preparation but as a time of practicing, to really practice what it would mean to open our hearts and minds to expect God to show up in our midst all the rest of the year? It’s not a time when we have to find the perfect tree or throw the greatest party or get just the right present, although that’s what many of us put our energy into this season.
I admit to often being guilty when it comes to the perfectionism thing. This Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, I went with my niece and her family on a mission to Pike National Forest to find the perfect Christmas tree. I spent considerable time preparing for this adventure, making several different varieties of turkey sandwiches and fixing enough hot chocolate to keep us warm for weeks. As it turned out, we ended up traipsing through the woods for what felt like weeks, all because we were sure that just over the next hill or around the next curve we would find that perfect tree. Finally, we were so tired, and cold and grumpy we ended up cutting down a couple of Charlie Brown trees that were about 30 yards from where we started out in the first place. The best part of the day was being able to laugh at ourselves and our waning expectations of perfection as the sun was going down and our bodies said, “enough”! Even the dogs were ready to head for home. And you know what, I will look at that funny, misshapen tree in my living room this Christmas and it will be beautiful because it will remind me of the time I spent with those I love getting it there.
That same night as I was listening to the evening news and hearing how people participated in the biggest shopping day of the year, I again questioned some of our holiday practices. I was aghast at all the stories of people pushing and shoving and literally doing bodily harm to one another as they stampeded into stores to be the first in line to take advantage of the sales and find the perfect gift. How far have we strayed from the meaning of this Advent season? How far off course are we in our preparations? Writer William Temple says, “The world, as we live in it, is like a shop window into which some mischievous person has gotten into overnight and shifted all the price labels so that the cheap things have the high price labels on them and the really precious things are priced low. We let ourselves be taken in.” What do we need to do to get the price labels back in the right place? Someone in the congregation emailed me this week, even before Advent had begun and said, “I am already sick of our materialistic society. This Christmas I need to find some peace.”
Advent really needs to be a time when we look at what we practice the rest of the year. In spite of some of our questionable actions, I really think there are certain things that we do at Christmas time that we don’t practice enough. During the Christmas season we do seem to become more proficient at being generous, thinking of others, reaching out to friends and neighbors, performing random acts of kindness. Is it somehow easier for some of us to practice being “Christian” during this time of year? What if waiting for the arrival of the Christ-child is just a way to practice living in ways God asks us to live all the other times throughout the year.
Something came across the internet the other day warning about yet another virus, only this time I decided I would like to catch it! It was called “the Advent virus” and if you were infected these were some of the symptoms you could expect:
Thinking and acting spontaneously rather than out of fear
Loss of interest in judging others
An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment
Frequent attacks of smiling
An increased susceptibility to the love extended by others as well as an uncontrollable urge to extend it
What would you like to practice this Advent so you could be really good at it every season, everyday?
When I asked myself that question, my mind took me immediately to something I experienced last Christmas. I know many of you heard bits and pieces of a story that Jerry Herships and I experienced when we did something we had never done before. It was such a powerful and meaningful part of Christmas, I believe it will now become a yearly practice. It all started with a conversation with someone who owns a “tavern” in downtown Denver. This young man comes out of a Catholic tradition and asked if we had “midnight mass” serving communion Christmas Eve. One of our clergy friends who serves a church near downtown told him they didn’t have a midnight service but she would bring communion to him later if he desired that. His response was, “Oh, no, you wouldn’t want to come to my place on Christmas Eve. We don’t close until 1:30 am. It would be way too late and besides, everyone there will probably have been there all evening having something to drink because they don’t have anywhere else to be on Christmas Eve.” Our clergy friend said, “I think that’s exactly where we need to be on Christmas Eve.”
The three of us started talking about our Christmas Eve schedules and decided after finishing our regularly scheduled services we would meet downtown at 1:00 am to have a Christmas Eve service quite unlike any of us had experienced before. We didn’t prepare a long time for this service we just decided we would take the communion elements, a few candles and leave plenty of space for God to show up. What actually happened could not have been planned or scripted or prepared. At 1:30 am there was a pronouncement that the bar was closed and a “church service thing” was about to happen. Everyone was invited to stay and participate or leave. Most everyone stayed. We gathered around the pool table and lit a candle in the middle of it. A “regular” at the bar reached up and turned off the old florescent light hanging above. People got vey quiet. We said a few brief words about why we were there and why on Christmas Eve we light candles symbolizing God bringing light into our darkness. We talked about how Christ shared food and drink with his friends and talked about God’s love as we walked around the table giving them pieces of bread and offering them a taste of the "house" wine. I hope I will never forget their faces, many with tears, receiving those simple gifts, with such profound gratitude. We ended the service lighting our candles from that Christ candle in the middle of the pool table, singing “Silent Night, Holy Night” and knowing it truly was. After the service was over, people didn’t want to leave. They stayed to say “thank you” and tell their stories…stories of why they didn’t go to church, stories of why they weren’t “good” enough, stories of why they were alone at Christmas. We cried with them and laughed with them and thanked God for the opportunity to witness how God shows up whenever we open our hearts and minds to that Holy Presence, Emmanuel, God with us.
I would encourage you to perhaps begin a new Advent “practice” this year. Find a way to get outside your comfort zone and do something you have never done before. Start a new tradition that will give you an opportunity to create room for God. Do something that will be a reminder to you for how you want to act for all the rest of the year. And maybe we can share those experiences together as we make our New Year’s resolutions.
There is a Hasidic story told about a preacher who repeatedly admonished the congregation to “Put God in your life.” The village rabbi proposed a different practice, suggesting, “Our task is not to put God in our lives, because God is already there. Our task is simply to realize that God is present.”
I truly believe Advent is a reminder to us…a reminder of how we can practice receiving God in our midst, not just for a holiday season, but for each day, each moment we celebrate life.