Sermon for November 29

Sermon Preached in Class (November 10) and at St. Aidan’s Alexandria (November 29)
First Sunday of Advent, Year C: Jeremiah 33:14-16, Psalm 25:1-9, 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, Luke 21:25-36
Rebecca Edwards

In his novel The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen tells the story of a typical Midwestern family that is falling apart at the seams as Christmas approaches. At one point, the story focuses in on the family matriarch – Enid Lambert - as she begins to prepare for the holiday:

“For as long as anyone could remember, the Tuesday ladies’ group at the church had raised money by manufacturing Advent calendars. They were beautifully hand-sewn and reusable. A green felt Christmas tree was stitched to a square of bleached canvas with twelve numbered pockets across the top and another twelve across the bottom. On each morning of Advent your children took an ornament from a pocket – a tiny rocking horse of felt and sequins, or a yellow felt turtledove, or a sequin-encrusted toy soldier – and pinned it to the tree. Even now, with her children all grown, Enid continued to shuffle and distribute the ornaments in their pockets every November 30. Only the ornament in the twenty-fourth pocket was the same every year: a tiny plastic Christ child in a walnut shell spray-painted gold. Although Enid generally fell far short of fervor in her Christian beliefs, she was devout about this ornament. To her it was an icon not merely of the Lord but of her own three babies and of all the sweet baby-smelling babies of the world. She’d filled the twenty-fourth pocket for thirty years, she knew very well what it contained, and still the anticipation of opening it could take her breath away.”

Though we still have a couple more days to prepare our Advent calendars, today is the first Sunday of Advent in the church calendar and the beginning of a new church year. For most of us, Advent represents the go-ahead that we can start getting ready for Christmas. It’s time to dig ornaments out of the attic and get serious about our shopping lists. Like Enid, we are anticipating the birth of the baby Jesus and the joy of the Christmas season as the ultimate reward for this season of frenzied preparation.

BUT today’s gospel lesson doesn’t sound at all like this warm holiday vision. Truthfully, I have my doubts that all of us even listened to the entire reading today, because it is so far from our normal frames of reference that we tend to almost automatically tune it out. So I’ll give you a quick recap of what Jesus predicts: distress, confusion, fainting from fear and foreboding, the powers of heaven being shaken, signs in the heavens, and the roaring of sea and waves. The Son of Man will come and heaven and earth will pass away. The writer of this gospel and almost all early Christians genuinely expected Jesus to return at any time, but as for us – well, this story was written 2,000 years ago and none of this stuff has happened yet, so why should we start to worry now? Very few of us these days walk around with a palpable fear that the world will end tomorrow.

And yet while we may not expect the powers of heaven to be shaken tomorrow, I daresay that we have all experienced moments when it felt like our world was ending: losing a job, ending a relationship, sitting in a hospital waiting room expecting the worst. This gospel lesson was written out of the Jews’ deep pain at seeing their temple in Jerusalem destroyed, their holy of holies razed to the ground, the unimaginable coming true. One commentary I read explained that Apocalyptic literature is about “the end of the world as we now experience it and the beginning of a new world.” First-century Jewish Christians were trying to figure out how to reconstruct their world, and this lesson is an insight into how they were able to do that in the midst of their pain. It encouraged them to remember that every day could be their last day, to remember that the world as they knew it could pass away before their eyes.

This fall I received devastating news from the school where I worked for several years before coming to seminary. One of our recent graduates – a smart, friendly young man - had reached a point in his four-year battle with cancer where nothing more could be done. At the age of 19, he has entered hospice care at home, knowing that he has only a short time left to live. His family’s worst nightmare, coming true. But over these last few weeks of Joe’s life, his mother has offered up a beautiful gift. She has posted regular updates on a web site for friends and family, giving testament to how she and her family are looking into the eyes of this apocalypse in their lives and how they have learned to live in the face of this destruction. Here are a few of the things she has shared:

• On October 10: We have had another day with our family. Off and on, when Joe has the energy we are choosing pictures for his slide show. He rests most of the day. The bedtime routine is now all of us gathering in his room until his medicine takes him off to sleep. Every day is a blessing now and we hold on tight through the night hoping for another day.

• On October 16: We never know what the next day will bring, but our first wish is that Joe will wake up. It is ironic we all speak of living each day to the fullest, and in reflection we always think we do, but in reality we don't. Our family has had the best and fullest days this past week. I can't think of another time, trip or gathering that has been better. Each of us will remember these past few days forever and I am pretty sure it will not be with sadness.

• Or just last week: There are so many times I watch Joe sleep wondering what could have been without this horrible cancer. I ask why he was not one of the survivors, giving him the chance to live his life, fulfill his dreams, fall in love and have a family of his own. Since the onset of his cancer I have searched for an answer but have never discovered why it is Joe, why our days have been filled with this heartbreak. So after almost four years I have given up searching for the answer since it will elude me. Instead I strive to focus my energy toward enjoying every day, not what the future will bring nor dwell on time that has past. Ironically, I have found over these past weeks that living in the present is comforting, and I think this is a peaceful way to live.

Joe’s parents and younger brothers have spent nearly two months together in that room doing everything in their power to savor their time together: sleeping on the floor at Joe’s bedside to catch every waking moment, recounting favorite memories, re-reading beloved books, planning Joe’s memorial service with him, saying their goodbyes over and over.

The truth is that for each of us, every day is a gift from God, but we so easily forget this. Unlike those early Christians, we go through our days expecting many more. But Advent is not about complacent expectation of more days to come that will be even better than these ones: Advent seeks to jolt us back into remembrance that all time is holy time. If we can live our lives in expectation that everything we know and love could pass away, we can start to live free from what Jesus called “dissipation, drunkenness, and all the worries of this life.” When we can look at the world with this Advent perspective, we can put on the armor of light; we can see and do what matters most. We can stand up and raise our heads, for our redemption comes near in that awareness of how precious our time is.

So yes, in Advent we anticipate Christ, but not just the little baby in a walnut shell. We anticipate Christ in his second coming, the Christ who can shake the powers of the heavens, and we learn to face this possibility and guard our hearts from the things that distract us from living our lives fully until then. What if your anticipation of Christ’s coming was as palpable as that of Enid Lambert, who knew full well what was in that tiny pocket but still found the wind knocked out of her every Christmas Eve? What if you made New Year’s resolutions now, at the beginning of this church year, instead of waiting for January 1st? What if you filled the pockets of your Advent calendar with ways to embrace this season as holy time, things that look something like what Joe’s family is doing to make sacred their last days together, things like being more patient with your kids or your spouse, honking less in the parking lot at the mall, trying to see the best in your crazy relatives, spending less but giving more? Living our lives this way is our prayer for strength to stand before the Son of Man, to stand in the face of knowledge that the world can and will end.

Today’s gospel challenges us to live with clarity, to live with alertness, to live with kindness, to live like it really means something. Do you accept the challenge?

Sermon for October 18

my first sermon at St. Aidan's, Alexandria as a seminarian:

Readings: Job 38:1-7, 24-41; Psalm 104: 1-9, 25, 37b; Mark 10:35-45

O LORD, how manifold are your works!
in wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
Hallelujah!

Over the past couple of weeks, I have spent quite a few hours immersed in Ken Burns’ epic documentary series about our national parks. From the couch in my living room, I have been carried away to our nation’s most pristinely beautiful places, and I have continued to be amazed by the majesty of our country’s landscape. I’ve also been interested to discover the personalities behind the creation of many of these parks, in particular that of President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt harbored a passionate love of nature, one that he indulged at every opportunity and one that held deep religious significance for him. After sneaking away from a state dinner once to camp out in the wilds of Yosemite with the conservationist John Muir, Roosevelt later described that experience. “Lying out at night under those sequoias was lying under a temple built by no hand of man, a temple grander than any human architect could by any possibility build,” he said. Roosevelt was once described as having a “distance in his eyes,” a habit of looking at the world around him with wonder and reverence.

Our scripture readings today speak to the importance of reverence. Job and the disciples James and John are all trying to comprehend the actions of God in the world around them. Poor Job has recently lost all of his possessions and everyone he loves, and he has no explanation for why this has happened. In a previous chapter, he has made a petition to God, politely pointing out his untarnished record of faithfulness and uprightness. In the case of James and John, these two have witnessed a lot of confusing things leading up to today’s gospel passage – the transfiguration, Jesus’ command to a rich young man to give up all his possessions, and most recently Jesus’ third dire prediction of what will happen when they reach Jerusalem. The disciples are confused and scared and so, like Job, they have laid out their case, pointing out, just for the record, that they are pretty nice guys and asking for just one little bitty favor to reassure them.

In both of these stories our friends receive answers, but not the ones they were expecting. In answer to Job, God appears in a whirlwind and says, in essence, “What do you know about being God? Have you ever tried to create and run a world?” And in answer to his faithful disciples, Jesus speaks out of his own whirlwind. Instead of promising them eternal glory or even explaining what is going on, he tells them that uprightness and faithfulness are not enough to cash in on a throne in heaven. His answer sounds a good bit like God’s answer to Job: “What do you know about being God? You have a lot to learn.”

Job, James, and John all know firsthand that sometimes the actions of God are beyond our understanding, but they are learning in these passages that the first step toward comprehension is being put in our place. This isn’t something that is meant to diminish our experience or ignore our questions. After all, both God and Jesus take time to deliberately address these petitions. God’s answer to Job points him to a litany of the wonders of the created world, one that is echoed in our psalm today, and it reminds Job of his place in the grand design of creation. It reminds him of what is bigger than him. It reminds him that a God who can create the magnificence of this world and who created him must have other designs that are beyond his comprehension. Job learns to live his life without all of the answers, and, strangely enough, this brings him a sense of resolution and peace, though I don’t want to spoil the ending for next week. So too James and John start to see that what is about to take place in Jerusalem might be part of a larger plan that they cannot yet understand, part of a world where leaders suffer and sacrifice, part of the kingdom of God.

That sense of feeling dwarfed by something bigger than ourselves, of recognizing that we are pieces of a much larger and more magnificent puzzle, the feeling of reverence, is an important first step in figuring out that we can’t figure everything out, and we’re not expected to. It has been said that reverence is the virtue that keeps people from trying to act like gods. Barbara Brown Taylor speaks of reverence as an exercise, something that can be cultivated, by practicing what she calls “knowing your rank in the overall scheme of things.” For her, this mostly involves taking God’s advice to Job, making time to observe the world, both in its grandeur and in its particularities. But being able to see these things requires slowing down, being willing to detour from the map of our daily plans that so often blind us from the things that would make us tremble with awe.

I learned the practice of reverence from my dad. He grew up out West, hiking in many of the beautiful landscapes Ken Burns has documented, and my dad is always prepared to marvel. A common refrain in our car growing up was, “Let’s take the scenic route!” even if we were just driving across town. Dad is visiting me this weekend, and it took him two and a half days to get here – a drive that normally takes about ten hours. His spontaneous detours inevitably add time to a trip, but they have always introduced me to things I otherwise wouldn’t have seen, and I have grown up to be a big fan of the scenic route. This is often frustrating for my husband, who is a pretty big fan of getting from point A to point B on a straight line via the interstate. But reverence doesn’t necessarily involve a physical detour. It can be as simple as pausing for a few moments to ponder what is right before you, whether that is the Grand Canyon or the spider spinning an intricate web on your front porch. It mostly involves acknowledging what you never could have orchestrated yourself. When we gaze on something that reminds us of the magnificence of this creation and our places in it, we remember that we are not gods, and we remember that we rest in the hands of a skilled creator who listens and answers. The answers may not be the type we expect – after all, St. Augustine said: “We are talking about God. What wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, we are not talking about God.” And God may not physically appear to speak to us out of a whirlwind, but we can learn, like Job, to look all around us for the answers. And we can give thanks to God that we are part of this marvelous world.

The conservationist John Muir became a good friend and ally of President Roosevelt, and these two men can be seen today as pioneers who inspired a whole generation of Americans to begin the work of preserving our nation’s most beautiful natural treasures. But Muir’s work was a constant battle for the landscapes he loved, and he lost his last and greatest battle to save the Yosemite Valley from being dammed to provide drinking water for the city of San Francisco. Like Job and the disciples, he found himself in his life’s darkest moment of doubt and confusion, but as always Muir turned to the wilderness around him to remember that he was not God or expected to be God and to note with reverence the enduring wisdom of God’s world. Because the God who made those mountains also made him and made you and knows exactly where each of us fits. “THIS is the morning of creation,” Muir would cry. “The whole thing is beginning now. The mountains are singing together.” He saw God’s whirlwind all around him and we can too. So slow down. Look around. Give thanks.

O LORD, how manifold are your works!
in wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.

Hallelujah!