The
season of Advent opens a new church year as we cycle back around to
again revisit the ancient story of God’s great creating and
redeeming and sustaining love for us and for the whole creation. Here
at church we signal the new season with a change of color—we’re
now decked in the midnight blue of the season, a blue that is the
color of the night sky just before dawn. A darkness just ready to
brim over with light, the light of a new day, new beginnings, new
promise, new hope. It’s the light we perceive before we see
it, because we have longed for it and yearned for it to come into
our darkness.
Advent
begins in darkness, the wonderful preacher Fleming Rutledge has said.
It begins in the darkness of the real world as we know it. It begins
in the darkness of the night as we experience it.
Have
you not wakened in the middle of the night, troubled by all the cares
and worries of the day which only seem to grow bigger and more fearsome
in the dense darkness? And have you not felt the relief of peeking
your eyes open some hours later, so very grateful to sense the coming
of the dawn?
It’s
like that, Advent. It’s a season of four weeks that the church
has set aside for generations and generations, a sacred and precious
gift of time. A time to name our darkness as well as our deep longing
for the light.
We
love this season, but my gosh, are we here already? Where has the
time gone? Another year past? Wasn’t it just summer? Back to
school? Halloween. Thanksgiving. Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Bam!
The December days are rushing up on us like on-coming freeway headlights
and we are dazed and disoriented.
I’ve
come to think that these feelings of surprise and disorientation are
in fact central to the very meaning of Advent itself. The point is:
we’re never ready! We never expect it. We’re hunkered
down just trying to manage our every day lives, to get along, to cope.
Advent is designed to shake us out of our routines, out of our self-made
calendars and rhythms and routines and snap us to attention. Look
up from your lists, your planners, your palm pilots! Hold everything!
Hit the pause button, people! And the mute!
Listen.
See. Hear. God is working even now to turn the world upside down and
inside out and make all things new. And so the church, in all its
ancient wisdom, sets aside four Sundays of Advent and demands that
we pay attention and try and take it all in and get ourselves ready.
Not just our homes and our gifts and our decorations and all that--but
ourselves, our hearts, our souls. That’s what worship is for
during these crazy weeks...it’s our time to stop, to go quiet,
to pay attention to what God is doing in our lives and in our world,
and like Mary herself, to ponder all these things in our hearts, in
the darkness of the night, in the darkness of this world.
Pay
attention to God, to what’s really going on, this season commands.
Consider again what God is doing even now in this world, in our lives,
to bring forth hope and peace. Oh, it might seem hopeless and lost,
dreary and dismal. BUT…people, don’t give in to despair.
Never lose hope. For unto us, a savior will be born. Salvation is
at hand. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has never
overcome it.
The
Scriptures of this first Advent Sunday readings actually present for
our consideration two very different pictures of how God is acting
in our world—on the one hand, the apocalyptic vision in Luke’s
gospel and on the other, the prophetic proclamation in Jeremiah. Two
different visions that hold in exquisite tension the terror of end-times
and the promise of ages, these two pictures—a vision of terror
and a vision of salvation--still fight for the allegiance of the human
heart. And the picture we choose as our window on the world makes
all the difference in how we live and in how we cope with the fearsome
things of the night.
Luke
says: “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
for what is coming upon the world….” This vivid, dramatic,
ominous apocalyptic imagery of Luke’s Gospel graphically names
the fears of our time and of our hearts: distress among nations confused
by the roaring waters of sea and waves and signs in the heavens.
Need
I rehearse headlines from the papers just this past week? Iraq, Lebanon,
Darfur, the Philippines?
Living
as we do, post-Katrina, foundering in war, devastated by famine and
AIDS, how dare we look for the Lord in the wind and the waves or in
the night sky? Many in this generation have passed away. Many have
perished. Many live in fear and foreboding, for the only thing they
can see “coming upon the world” seems to bear the violent
face of war and poverty, destruction and disease.
The
problem comes when people of faith take this picture which graphically
describes the world as it is and make it into some kind of prediction
of the future. There are people who call themselves Christian millennialists,
all those “Left Behind” books and movies and others—you
can hear them on the radio and on TV—who actually want to ramp
up the wars and bring on the destruction because, they say, all this
must happen before Christ can come.
They
acquiesce to the violence and the suffering because they say that
this is part of God’s plan. They justify –even promulgate--wars
as pieces of some sort of diabolical jig saw puzzle through which
God is working all things out.
They
are SO wrong. God does not wish this destruction upon us. God does
not need this violence and terror in order to act. Luke is merely
describing how very horrible this world can sometimes be. And we know
that. We see and hear it daily. Wars. Rumors of wars. Floods and famine
and AIDS. We know. We know. It’s part of what keeps us awake
in the dark. It’s why our own fears and worries get so big.
What
we need to hear and ponder this morning is that God has another word
for us and it comes from his prophet, Jeremiah, for it is precisely
to this same nightmare that Jeremiah speaks. In his own time, Jeremiah
looked around and saw only destruction, only a wasteland where Jerusalem
once stood. The “facts of life” as he observed them, were
just like those in Luke’s vision. And yet, and yet…the
prophet Jeremiah reaches deep and is sustained by his conviction that
“the outcome of human history is in the hands of God. God —
who could be trusted to make the city a place of safety and the land
a center of salvation.”
Listen.
He said: “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I
will fulfill the promise I made…in those days I will cause a
righteous branch to spring up and he will bring justice and righteousness
to the land. In those days, Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will
live in safety.”
Yes,
the days are coming, but we are to know that they are days of promise
and hope. The people will be saved and restored and in the holy city,
all will live in safety. This is what God intends, for us and for
the world.
God’s
word to us through his prophet is a promise, his God’s covenant
with us. So that even in the midst of days of destruction and violence
and fear, we cling to hope. We stand on the unshakeable ground of
God’s everlasting love for us. We know that even in the darkness,
precisely in the darkness, God’s light shines, right where it
is needed most.
The
whole Christian story, it seems to me, is about how God’s love
for us, over and over again, overcomes the darkness of our lives and
of this world. The birth of the Christ Child happens in the darkest
dark of the night. The big darkness is overcome by the birth of one
tiny baby. In that night, God’s love triumphs over the power
of hopelessness and fear and a special star shines so bright that
the whole of the night sky is brilliant with light. And years later,
again in the dark darkness of the night, the stone is rolled away
from the face of the tomb. In that night, God’s love triumphs
over the powers of death. And the sun rises on that morn to pierce
the darkness with rays of healing and hope.
The
light shines in the darkness and the darkness has never overcome it.
And so, should you wake in the night, and all the fears loom up, pray
with the Psalmist and God’s people through the ages: “You,
O Lord, are my lamp; my God, you make my darkness bright.”
May
this light shine in your hearts, in your homes this Advent Season,
and in all the seasons of your days. AMEN.
Notes:
Quote from Joanna M. Adam’s “Light the Candles,”
Living by the Word, The Christian Century, December 3, 2006.
Fleming Rutledge. The Bible and the New York Times. Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans Publishing, 1998
©Patricia
Farris , 2006. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution.
All other rights reserved.
First
United Methodist Church
1008 Eleventh Street
Santa Monica, CA 90403
www.santamonicaumc.org
(310) 393-8258
What
Will the Future Bring?