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Sermon at The Church of the
Holy Apostles, New York City,
December 10, 2006, The Second Sunday of Advent, Year C
The Reverend Elizabeth G. Maxwell
Baruch 5: 1 - 9
Psalm 126
Philippians 1: 1 - 11
Luke 3: 1 - 6
May the
words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable
in your sight, oh God, our rock and our redeemer, Amen.
I’ve recently discovered a new poet whose name is Drew
Dellinger, and these words from his poem hieroglyphic stairway
seem to me particularly Advent-ish. He writes:
it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?
surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once
you
knew?
And then he writes, referring to the public transit in the Bay
Area where he lives:
I’m riding home on the Colma train
I’ve got the voice of the milky way in my dreams.
Advent, this wondrous season in which we are now
embarked, is the darkest time of the year. It’s a time for
wakefulness in the middle of the night, at 3:23 in the morning.
Advent is the time to listen to the unexpected and surprising
voices that disturb our sleep, the voices that disturb the status
quo- the voice of the poet, the voice of the prophet, the voice of
the mammals and reptiles and birds, the cries of the trees and the
rivers and the slow voices of the rocks, the groans of creation
and the song of the Milky Way- all of them speaking of ecological,
even cosmological tribulation; all of them calling us to
ecological, even cosmological hope.
Advent calls us also to listen to the ancients and the
very young, to the poor, the suffering, the silent ones, and those
who have disappeared. And it points us to the whispers of our own
dreams and imaginations, the songs of our deepest hearts, our
fears and our longings. Advent is about listening to the
neglected, unheard, half-forgotten voices, there perhaps to find
the voice of the holy.
Advent anchors us in the past. In its liturgical
cycling, it helps us to stay grounded in the ongoing mystery of
Christ’s birth and incarnation. That is part of what we wait
for. But Advent also points us toward the future with both
judgment and longing. It challenges us, as it were, through the
voices of our great great grandchildren, and that is true even for
those of us who will never literally have great great
grandchildren.
For in Advent, in our imaginations (and Advent is
surely above all the season of imagination), in our night visions
we see that we are in fact kin to all flesh, and we are
responsible to all those who will come after us; they are all our
great great grandchildren. Advent has a dimension of revelation
in it- last week we particularly heard the apocalyptic dimension
of Advent. But “apocalypse” means uncovering, literally, and what
is uncovered is the future that we are moving towards, a future
both of destruction and of salvation, in which our connections and
the breaking of our connections are revealed.
Now, similar to this theme of the darkness in Advent,
the season also directs us towards wilderness. And, of course, in
today’s gospel we hear that the word of God came to John, son of
Zechariah, in the wilderness. Literally, Luke says the word of
God happened to John in the wilderness; it was an
experience, not an idea. John is the baptizer, the forerunner,
the disturber, the quintessential Advent figure; he is the voice
that cries out in the wilderness, and it’s as if he is the voice
of the wilderness, in a way. And what he says is “Repent,
repent, prepare the way of the Lord.”
This wild man with his wild words, this poet, this
prophet, this visionary…he comes bursting on the scene on the
second Sunday of Advent as if out of this wilderness space. But
Luke, paradoxically, goes to some trouble to situate John and his
wildness in very concrete historical, political events. He says,
“The word came in the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor
Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea and Herod was
ruler of Galilee and his brother Philip was the ruler of the
region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was the ruler of
Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas.”
It’s just as if Luke had said, “The word came in the
wilderness when George was president and George was governor, and
Elliot was about to be governor, and Michael was mayor and Mark
was bishop.” Or, if had spoken about the particular moments of
joy and struggle in your individual life or mine: the word came
when I had lost my job, or just met someone new, or gotten sick,
or begun to struggle with addiction. It’s as if, also, he had
marked the particular moments of the larger time on the planet:
“It was during the war in Iraq when we had been there longer than
we had been in World War II, it was in the midst of the greatest
extinction crises in thousands of years, it was when the poor in
the cities where ignored yet again.”
Far from the places of power, the word comes to John in
the wilderness, comes imaginally, in vision, in power. The
wilderness where the word comes is, in a sense, a liminal space,
the space in between. It’s dangerous, it’s beautiful. Perhaps,
most of all, it’s not really defined by humans. It’s the land of
cactus, tumbleweed, rattlesnakes, wild beasts. Although, if you
look carefully in the wilderness, you’ll find that there is much
going on there, it nevertheless has a feeling that is spare and
empty and open. It’s a place of new possibilities, a place of
surprises, a place that is not in our control. It’s the place of
God’s self-revelation, not only to John, but to Jesus and Moses,
to many seekers and prophets and poets from that time to this one.
The wilderness word that comes to John and that John
then proclaims is “Repent.” Literally, “turn around.” See what’s
wrong with your life, with your world; take responsibility, begin
to participate in making it right. There’s the dimension of
lament, of grieving, and there is the dimension of change and
choice. Next week, the gospel will go on, continuing this story
of John and his words, to very specific and practical exhortations
that he gives in his preaching. “If you have two coats, share
with anyone who has none and if you have food, do likewise. “
Treat each other with kindness and justice and generosity in your
particular specific lives.
In a sense, it’s what we are practicing today,
parenthetically, as we dedicate and bless the scarves that so many
of you have knit for our soup kitchen guests. One part of this
repentance that John preaches out of the wilderness has that very
clear, concrete kind of content. We know what to do; hopefully we
can choose to do it.
But there is another dimension that is harder to know.
For me, indeed, and maybe for many of us, the hardest thing in
this Advent season is to find empty time and space, to be able to
listen to the poet, the prophet, the visionary, those wild
voices. We live in a culture that is crazed with busyness and
even more crazed, especially right before Christmas, with
consuming, with buying, with acquiring. There isn’t any emptiness
because we fill it all not only with what we need, but with what
we think we want, voraciously grabbing because we fear we may not
have enough.
My cousin was in town this week, and so she and I
ventured to a place that I rarely go this time of year, that is to
say, Fifth Avenue, where all the big shops are. We went shopping
for some of the younger members of our family to the American Girl
store. You can imagine what that was like on a Friday afternoon
in December! I like the American Girl dolls; I think I would have
liked to have one when I was that age, nine or ten. I like the
stories about them. I think they give interesting and encouraging
messages to young girls. I like the idea of giving pleasure to
the two kids who are the right age to get them in my family. But
the store…the store was filled with so many people and so many
girls wanting one more thing, and so many parents struggling with
whether to buy it. And always there was more and more and more.
One girl who was helping me find the doll we were
looking for said, “My friend has almost all the accessories for
this doll – she’s gonna have the complete set and then she can
start on another doll.” I think it was disturbing to me partly
because it connects with my own appetites and wanting. Of course,
the things I want are very tasteful! But there’s always more,
there’s always more to consume. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out
how much is enough.
It’s not just that I don’t always give my one other
coat to someone else as John the Baptist urges. I counted them –
I have eleven coats, and I think I need all of them for different
situations. Recently, I took one of those online tests about my
ecological footprint, and I learned that if everyone on the planet
consumed at the same rate that I do, we would need 3.7 earths.
This way of living is not sustainable. It’s not really
what I want to leave to the great great grandchildren.
So, in Advent, on this planet, in this time, the
question is how I and we move through to a different way of
living. And I don’t have answers – I really have questions. I
have questions about the choices that are mine to make, sometimes
so clear, sometimes as simple as sharing food or making a scarf,
sometimes very murky indeed. But it seems to me that we need to
begin, I need to begin, with finding space and allowing the
images, the dreams, the voices of the prophets, the voices of the
poets, the voices of those in need, the humans and the earth, and
my own need for grace. I need to begin to allow something
different to emerge about how we can live together with the
others, with God, with the planet – a way that is sustainable and
graceful and grateful and aware of connection – that is, in a
sense, embodying what Scripture means when it talks about
salvation and wholeness.
The purpose of the repentance that John calls for is
preparation, and we both know and do not know for whom and for
what we wait and hope. We are grounded in and living the story of
the incarnation of the Christ who has come among us. We look back
with wonder and joy to the Christmas story of that wondrous
birth. And John points beyond himself to one he says “is more
powerful than I, who baptizes with spirit and fire.” He also
points back to an earlier tradition from the prophets of Israel’s
exile- Isaiah and Baruch, who we heard today- of an anointed one
who makes a way through the wilderness. It turns out that they
were actually talking about a pagan ruler who didn’t even know he
was being used by God to bring the people home.
And yet, somehow, the spirit is at work in all of this,
and salvation becomes visible to all flesh and involves all flesh.
In Advent, we look towards the coming of the unknown
beloved one, we look towards welcoming the divine stranger, and in
that welcoming, we also come home – like those exiles that Baruch
preached to. “Arise O Jerusalem, stand upon the height; look
toward the east and see your children gathered from west and east
at the word of the Holy One – rejoicing that God has remembered
them. Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, and put
on forever the beauty of the glory from God.”
And in this homecoming, the landscape itself is changed
and leveled and smoothed, and the trees offer their shade and
fragrance.
Baruch, like Isaiah, has a vision of creation that is
healed and vibrantly at peace, in which human beings live
sustainable, responsibly. I love this imagery of the people
standing and looking with their heads lifted, seeing the
homecoming that is for them, that is calling them. And not only
beholding God’s glory, but putting it on – as if to participate,
to enter in, to begin to embody what is imagined. And I love that
there is a kind of blessing and a help from nature as they are
welcomed home.
What we have in this Advent season are glimmers and
hints, dreams and visions – and I have one more story about that.
It actually happened yesterday in Central Park, which is not
exactly the wilderness. It is, however, spacious and quiet,
especially when you are there early in the morning, walking a
dog. Scout and I were walking along, and over there somewhere
there was a sort of a dog conflagration – lots of barking and
squealing. Scout went charging over to see what was happening,
delivered one bark and then came back to me. And all of a sudden-
I’m not sure where she came from- there was a small, elderly woman
with a very decided German accent addressing not me, but Scout.
She said, “You wanted to help, didn’t you?” Then she looked at me
and said, “You know, we don’t give the dogs enough credit. We
need to learn from the animals; we need to learn from
everything.” She added, “I think I was a dog in a former life,
and that’s how I know.” And then she said, “Everything is trying
to live; everything is finding its way, and you have to find
yours. Whatever your stage of life is, you have to stand up and
do what you can.”
And she stood up, like someone stretching to put on the
beauty of the glory of God. She said to me, “People may say
unkind things to you, but you have to let them go. You have too
much to do.”
I was astonished. I went away smiling. It may have
been partly her words, it may have been partly the body language –
there was just something communicated about what it is to be
connected and awake and ready.
This Advent, my prayer is that we may all find those
open wilderness spaces where the new, the imaginal, the visionary,
the prophetic, the poet can come to us. Where the Word of God can
happen to us, that we may be moved to repent, to prepare, to put
on God’s glory. This Advent, may we shake loose our imaginations
and allow the Coming One to confront us, that we may fall in
love. May we hear the voice of our great great grandchildren and
of the Milky Way in our dreams.
Amen.
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