Sermon, 11/28/21. Advent: A Time of Consternation and a Time of Great Joy!

1 Advent

Psalm 25:1–9; Jeremiah 33:14–16; 1 Thessalonians 3:9–13; Luke 21:25–36

There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars…Be alert at all times.
Lk 21:25f.

Spoiler alert.  Should you remember nothing else of what I share with you this morning, remember this: Advent is not about counting down until Christmas Eve and midnight mass and Christmas Day and exchanging gifts.  Rather, Advent is, if we take seriously what we hear today in St. Luke’s gospel, about the here and now.  Right Now!  Advent is a challenge to us to consider how we use the time that is at our disposal.

On Thanksgiving Day, gathered around the dinner table, such as many of us did on Thursday last, we enjoyed each other’s presence, food being only the pretense to spend time with one another.  In our family and in a time when we were able to get together, hindered now in our international travel because of COVID, we played the food game: “If you were deserted on an island, not knowing when you would be rescued, what food would you want most to have?”  Pronouncements were made.  And then the challenges would begin, because someone would invariably say, “But that is not what you said last year.”   More challenges, more denials, more laughter.  All done in great fun!

A modification of this game is played, when we ask the question: ‘If you knew that your time was limited on earth—and my intention this morning is not to be negative, but to look at the positive message of today’s gospel cloaked in a strange garment—how would you use it?  What do you wish you could have/would have/should have done?’  In my own instance, my list would be long, but I assure you that spending more time in my office, whether in person or via Zoom, does not come close to being included in list of the “thousand and one” things that I would conjure up.  Because we cannot recapture that which is past, and as the future has yet to be, my first thought would be to live in the moment with those around me who have abided with me for decades.  And, relying on the saying ‘six degrees of separation,’ I would be surrounded also by those peoples and cultures that are geographically removed from me, but with whom and to which I am bound by humanity.    

That is the game, as it were, that Advent presents to us.  I suggest, for us liturgical Christians, Advent is not about preparing for the Feast of the Holy Nativity in the midst of commercialism, with its Black Friday and jingles.  Rather, for us liturgical Christians and for any Christian who hears Christ’s call to consider whose we are, Advent presents us with a dilemma. Advent, in a real sense, calls us to reflect on our human condition, a condition that far too often we tend to describe primarily in a negative light.  A virtual Doomsday: wars and rumor of wars, irresolvable racial and social injustices, abuse of the creation, over which we are but stewards.  We claim and proclaim a helplessness and wait for some final judgment day.  Such an image is, so I suggest, the easy way out of being human.  We absolve ourselves of responsibility for the here and now.

However, the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth—even today’s account in Luke’s record—claims otherwise.  For us liturgical Christians, as well as for non-liturgical Christians and nonbelievers, Advent calls us to positive possibilities.  For me, you see, Advent’s basic premise is about peace, an ever sought-after elusive peace, a peace that is more than the mere absence of war.  In this light, Advent is a reminder: There is great joy in knowing that our Creator God has placed this opportunity to achieve that seemingly elusive peace within our grasp, within our own time, were we only to listen to the Divine commandment. 

Whenever God interacts with us human—let me rephrase—whenever we acknowledge the presence of God among us in our daily interactions, we perceive that things often do not follow the usual order, nor fall into the categories to which we are accustomed, and in which we take our ease.  Change, if God is involved, will happen, and that change can and often will be unsettling.  We of the 21^st century are given signs, prompts on life’s stage, and sometimes we are receptive and sometimes we are blinded by our own self-induced limitations or by those imposed by others. 

The contributors to the Bible, our Book of Records, understood this, and used images and concepts that were familiar to them: sun, moon, earthquakes, tsunamis as indicators of God’s involvement in their lives.  Whatever our sophistication may allow, it is clear that if God is to get our attention, something out of our routine, something as simple as assisting an anxious child who has lost eye contact with a parent in a shopping mall, or negotiating the automobile to safety after a blown tire.

No matter what images may be placed before us in the four Sundays in Advent, as we consider the lesson of the four Sundays in Advent, no matter how far-fetched they may appear according to the natural order, as we now understand it, I suggest another improbable image: a Times Square ticker tape that scrolls across our liturgical screen:  “Peace Alert.  Advent.  Peace Alert predicted for your area.  Beware.  God at work among humans!  Peace Alert!”

There is nothing wrong with Advent that a dose of a quiet reflection of what God is asking of us would not cure.  Advent is a time for consternation and a time for great joy.  Our Creator God made us stewards of that which the Divine Will created, and as stewards we should expect a reckoning.  And that exercise of faithful stewardship causes discomfort.  However, as stewards, we have chance to prune the fig tree so that it bears more and better fruit.  That is cause for much joy.  This is the true Advent, a time of contemplative action.  Advent’s message is a simple one: peace through active witness and faithfulness.    

We 21^st century Christians stand at the door of Advent 2021.  We open that door with greater scientific understanding of the earth that seems to some to make the first century’s worldview obsolete and irrelevant, and which, thus, tempts us to ignore the “Son of Man’s” presence in our lives.  However, there are still those among us who stand with us and other people of faith in the recognition that our Creator God continues to create and allows us to participate in that wonderful, awe-inspiring work.

Such an individual among us is Catherine Cameron, who has captured so beautifully poetically the dilemma of Advent and the Christian life in our own time, that her poetry has been included in our Hymnal (#580), but not as an Advent carol, but as a prayer for the entirety of the Christian year and life:
God, who stretched the spangled heavens infinite in time and place, flung the suns in burning radiance through the silent fields of space: we, your children in your likeness, share inventive powers with you:
Great Creator, still creating, show us what we yet may do.

Proudly rise our modern cities, stately buildings, row on row;
Yet their windows, blank, unfeeling, stare on canyoned streets below;
Where the lonely drift unnoticed in the city’s ebb and flow,
Lost to purpose and to meaning, scarcely caring where they go.

We have ventured worlds undreamed of since the childhood of our race;
Known the ecstasy of winging through untraveled realms of space;
Probed the secrets of the atom, yielding unimagined power,
Facing us with life’s destruction or our most triumphant hour.

As each far horizon beckons, may it challenge us anew,
Children of creative purpose, serving others, honoring you.
May our dreams prove rich with promise, each endeavor well begun:
Great Creator, give us guidance till our goals and yours are one.

Amen