Online Sermons
1st Sunday in Advent: November 30, The Rev. Dr. Barbara Schlachter
[Ed. Note: The sermon started with the words, “For God So Loved the World that he Sent Jesus” while a picture of the earth from the moon was on the screen throughout the sermon.]
Two years ago my husband and I took a trip to Los Angeles to visit our son who was living there at the time and who gently pointed out that we had never been to see him in nearly five years and we had made numerous trips to visit his sister in Washington, D.C. Whoops! We were smart enough to realize we needed to go and smart enough to go at the end of January, about the time of year you think winter in Iowa is a permanent season.
One of the little excursions we took was a journey to Santa Barbara, which I had always wanted to visit, for obvious reasons, I guess, and to the beautiful monastery called Mount Calvary located on a mountain above Santa Barbara, with gorgeous views of the ocean below and the forests all around. We stayed in the guest house and worshiped with the monks of Holy Cross, some of whom we had known from our years in the Hudson Valley in New York State.
A couple of weeks ago the monastery burned to the ground in a raging forest fire. It was a shocking and sad piece of news, made even more poignant by the newsletter we received two days later. It had obviously already been printed and in the mail and spoke of life as usual at Mount Calvary. Pictures of smiling monks, news of the refurbished guest house and of the calendar of events to come filled the pages. When that newsletter was written and sent, no one knew what would soon happen. No one knew that there would no longer be a Mount Calvary by the end of the next week.
Cedar Rapids and the other flooded communities of Iowa did not know that there would be such severe floods last June. We could go on with all the other disasters that have befallen us, both natural and economic, and we can see pretty much the same thing. We just didn’t know.
[Ed. Note: Barbara extemporaneously included the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai as illustration of one of the disasters we are facing in our world.]
Our Gospel seems particularly timely, then. Mark says, you do not know when the time will come. And what you must do is to beware, keep alert, and later he says, “And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”
That is certainly the first of four great themes of advent: pay attention, stay awake, be aware. Watch for signs. Be prepared for what may come. And of course, what comes, what we are preparing for now, is the yearly reminder of the birth of God among us, and the hope and longing that Christ will come again and complete the work of redemption on the earth. For God so Loved the World.
Our Old Testament lesson from Isaiah speaks of their longing for the first Advent of God in their midst. The people of Israel have returned from exile in Babylon after 70 years away from their beloved Jerusalem. Nothing has happened. They have come home and nothing has happened. The temple still lies in ruins. Will the hope and the promise they kept alive all those years in a foreign land come to nothing but vainglory on a rubble of rocks?
This reading is a lament—so much is wrong. This reading is an entreaty, the entreaty we most associate with Advent: Come down, O God. Come down and dwell among us. The cry for divine intervention is the second theme of Advent. This is a season to cry our prayers—to shout, to weep. We cannot do the tasks ahead without God’s strength and guidance. They are too big.( The author, whom we call 2nd Isaiah, acknowledges the people’s part in the calamity. We have sinned—but he also reminds God that God hid himself from them, so of course they would sin. But be that as it may, remember he tells God, you are our Creator, we are the work of your hand. He is calling God back to basics. You started this enterprise; we are your people.)
The first line of the passage is the most poignant one for me: O That you would tear open the heavens and come down! That tear open the heavens imagery appears again in our tradition. Guess where? In the baptism of Jesus. Mark reports that the heavens were torn open and the Holy Spirit descended like a dove upon Jesus. God had come down as the people had prayed for, cried for, waited for.
And every time we gather around the table to break bread together, the heavens are rent and Christ comes down in the sacrament of the Eucharist to feed us, to strengthen us, to remind us that we are not alone. God is still with us.
Paul reminds the Corinthians that we do not lack any spiritual gift as we wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will strengthen us to the end. God is faithful. And here we have a third theme of Advent: waiting. A lot of life is about waiting, about learning to be patient, about discerning when it is time for action, when it is time just to wait.
This knowing when to pray and hope and when to act requires discernment, and in order to be good discerners, we need to take time for preparation. Preparation is the fourth theme of Advent. Prepare the way of the Lord. Prayer is preparation. It provides the container for discernment, for the action of the Holy Spirit.
When I think of the monks of Holy Cross, I am imagining them spending time in prayer as to what God would have them do next. Rebuild? Relocate? Be a different kind of community? It makes me think of the Celtic monasteries in Ireland and Scotland and England that were the victims of Viking raids in the 8th and 9th centuries. Sometimes the monks were killed, and sometimes they escaped. Sometimes they came back to rebuild and sometimes they wandered for a long time. The monks of Lindisfarne, on an island off the coast of Northumberland, when they saw the Viking ships approaching knew what they had to do. They knew what they needed to take with them, what they needed to preserve: The Gospel book they had illuminated that remains along with the Book of Kells one of the artistic masterpieces of the world, and the bones of Cuthbert, their beloved abbot. They wandered a number of years before they discerned that God wanted Cuthbert’s bones to rest at Durham Cathedral, where they remain to this day. The Lindisfarne Gospel is in the British Museum. Those monks were prepared. They knew the book and the bones needed to be saved.
It is telling to hear the stories of what people were able to get out of their houses before the floods threatened and it became too dangerous. One man in Iowa City told me how his son evacuated his new large screen television in a canoe. Others grabbed pictures of family off their walls. The pictures of our ancestors and our descendants are our bones. We know they are the most important things to take, next to the very people they represent.
We are going through a period of discernment right now as a nation. The economic situation has forced us or given us an opportunity, depending upon how you look at it, to think about what is most important to us. What really matters. Who really matters.
Advent is a good time to ask these questions. Hopefully you have had time with family this Thanksgiving and that the people you are connected to can be a starting place for your discernment.
Here at Christ Church we have some other things to help you: Mid-week Eucharists on Wednesday mornings., Centering Prayer late Wednesday afternoons. There are Advent wreaths and readings that go with them, and beautiful daily readings in Forward Day by Day. There is the Alternative Gift Market to gift someone who needs nothing with the knowledge that because of your love for them, someone who needs everything has something.
Finally, one last thing to think about as preparation: the dark itself. The days keep getting shorter. Darkness is with us for longer periods each day. That sounds like a contradiction. Dark? Day? Darkness is part of the day. We may need to cast away the works of darkness, but darkness itself is important to embrace. We need the dark, we must embrace the dark to be able to realize the great joy of the light.
Advent is a good time to remember that everything and everyone can and will be taken from us. It is only our spiritual life that will continue. It is time to do our spiritual preparation, therefore, and it is time to be grateful for today, for who and what we have and how precious it all is. Advent is a time to prepare for the wonder and light of Christmas.
This has been an unusual year for those of us in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. May we have an Advent that is not business as usual. May you stay awake, cry your prayers, learn to wait, and act to prepare. And may your Advent be followed by a Christmas that is truly wonder-full and illuminating.
Amen.
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