sermon preached
at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
by the
Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector
The
First Sunday of Advent (Year C), December 2, 2018
It was early December many years ago, and my planned business trip had failed. I was supposed to be attending a conference in North Carolina on radio research, but a huge winter storm was blanketing the country. I had made it as far as Detroit, but then my connecting flight was cancelled, as were all others for the foreseeable future. By the time I managed to get there, the conference would be over. So I flew back home to Seattle. I had been up all night, and now it was the middle of the next day. Exhausted, I tumbled into bed for a nap. And then I heard the singing ... from somewhere inside my house.
“Have a holly jolly Christmas! It’s the best time of the year!”
What was going on? Oh yeah—groan—the broken plumbing in our bathtub had been fixed, but that meant that all the tile had to be replaced. Christy had arranged for the tile guy to show up today and left him a key. Now he was in our house. And he didn’t know I was in the bedroom.
“Oh, ho, the mistletoe!”
STOP! Just stop! I wrapped my pillow around my ears.
“Kiss her once for me!”
I was too tired and cranky to deal with this guy. I was too tired not to be sleeping. I was torn. Should I get up and ask him to shut up?
“Gee, oh golly, have a holly jolly—”
I decided to lie there and put up with it. And eventually, he left, and the tile in our bathtub was restored.
You know, sometimes the whole month of December feels like this to me. It’s an assault, a disruption of the way I’m actually feeling. Have you ever had that experience? I lay there in bed refusing to confront the jollity that was attacking me.
And we hadn’t even gotten to the event later that very December, when our house was robbed. That was a clearer violation, to be sure. Or later that same month—yes, the very same December!—when I came down with kidney stones that I had to deal with through Christmas Day and into the new year.
Our culture is screaming at us that it’s the holidays, but we’re not always in the mood to hear it.
Right now the congregation of Good Shepherd is mourning the loss of several beloved people: Barry, Ann, Ken, Ihuoma. I imagine that the closer you were to any of these folks, the less you may feel like celebrating.
Fear not. During Advent, the Church can be an escape from blithe cheeriness—a refuge in the realer-than-real. The month of December may happen to be the time when we’re rushing around fulfilling other people’s expectations for what the secular version of Christmas means to them. But for us in the Church, the season of Advent means a different kind of preparation. In the Church, we’re preparing for the arrival of the Kingdom of God.
The first Sunday of Advent doesn’t really look forward to a baby. It’s more like, “OK, before we begin, let’s all get clear that the world is a mess, and we’re all in crisis mode.” And in response, Jesus says, “Stand up and raise your heads … be on guard. Be alert!” Something is happening in the midst of crisis—something so important and so disruptive that it would be ridiculous to try to ignore it. For the second week in a row, straddling the dividing line between the end of one Christian year and the beginning of another, we hear of “the Son of Man” coming “in a cloud” or “with the clouds” with “power and great glory.” While such a thing may look like chaos or terror, Jesus tells his disciples it is actually a call to stand up and welcome your salvation from God. There is a promise here that someday, in some way, everybody will experience this—“it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth.”
A lot of Christians take this and similar Bible passages very literally. They believe that on some idle Tuesday or something, all the elements will suddenly start dissolving away and Jesus will show up to whisk certain people away to heaven and leave others behind. That’s possible, I suppose, since all things are possible for God. But is it characteristic of God as we know God through Jesus? Is it a trustworthy vision?
Bear in mind that for the gospel writers, the Kingdom of God was not some far-off future event. It was at hand. When Jesus sends 70 disciples into the neighboring villages to share good news, the news, whether they accept it or not, is that the Kingdom of God has come near. At another point Jesus says the Kingdom of God is not something you can see coming, because it’s already here, “among you.”
This is why I don’t care for metaphors about Christians building the Kingdom of God. We don’t get to construct something that God has already sent here in some way. I think a better metaphor than construction is that of gardening. Jesus uses that metaphor himself: “A sower went out to sow seeds …”[1] When you garden, you make your plans, but you still never know quite what’s going to happen. Maybe this is why Jesus can talk about the temple crumbling to the ground, and then point to the fig tree’s leaves as a sign of hope. Maybe the Kingdom of God is not something built, but something grown—and we ourselves are growing in God’s garden. Maybe even God doesn’t quite know what’s going to happen—only that it will be beautiful. Or maybe God knows exactly what’s going to happen, but we can’t yet see it from our perspective.
Either belief is fine and gets to the point: God does indeed have plans. But that’s different from saying, “God has a plan for your life,” as if it’s your responsibility not to stray from that one precise blueprint or face the consequences. To me it makes more sense to say, “God has planted, and the harvest is coming.” All of our carefully constructed creations will fall, but this is only the beginning. Something new is about to sprout from God’s earth, and who knows what it will look like? All we know for sure is that it won’t look anything like the seed it sprouted from. And you—you are sprouting and growing, and who knows what you will look like? “We are God’s children now … what we will be has not been revealed.”[2]
We begin the season of Advent talking about Christ’s second coming, so that we can prepare ourselves to accept his first coming and place ourselves relative to it. If, just once, God came into the world on the creatures’ own terms, then everything is transformed. And that effect works both forward and backward in time, demonstrating God’s investment in us and raising the whole thing up to a higher level. What if this is really what has happened? What does that mean for “your one wild and precious life”?[3] What if it changes everything?
In the church, our concern is indeed with a “what-if” world. We look around and recognize that a world steeped in God’s Kingdom does not seem to exist. There’s too much grief, too much injustice and suffering for that to be the case. But we hope that one day it might exist, so we work toward it, and we leave the timeline to God. Even more, we dare to believe that God’s Kingdom might actually exist right now, sitting right on top of the world we thought we were seeing so clearly. It just takes us opening our eyes to see it.
It’s an incredible idea, and the word incredible means “not believable.” But is it a trustworthy idea? Oh, yes. It’s worth building our lives around—or, rather, growing our lives around! It’s such Good News that you might as well stand on a street corner like one of the prophets of old, with a big cardboard sign that says, “The beginning is near.”
When we open our eyes, it feels like the beginning of something new. When we stay awake and alert, all times feel like a beginning, even when everything seems to be ending. A twig sprouts from a rotting log. Can we trust the twig to grow? What if it grows wrong? Who will help set it straight? Who will strengthen it to stand upright? So we pray to escape pain and suffering, and we pray for the forgiveness of our sins, and we work to change sinful situations in the world around us, because this kind of purification is what grows us into the Kingdom. But it’s all a long, slow process of allowing God to help us grow. Faith means living in the real world in all its ugliness, yet always bearing in mind a promise. That promise has been fulfilled, but it is still coming into its full realization.
And that’s why I don’t feel jolly quite yet. I don’t feel despairing either. Advent is a season of hope, of seeds still in the ground, of food still in the oven, of gifts sitting wrapped under a tree, of pregnancy—of pregnant waiting with muscles tensed and quivering with a joy whose time hasn’t yet come.
So whatever project our secular culture is about right now, we’re doing something different here. For the next few weeks, you can wish me a “holly jolly Christmas” if you like. And I won’t take it as an assault. I’ll smile and thank you and store your greeting away. On Christmas Eve, we will indeed sing, “Let every heart prepare him room.” But I’m not ready yet. I have my own work to do first—the patient, careful, slow-growing, preparatory work of getting myself out of the way and inviting Christ to be born in me. That beginning is indeed very near. Amen.
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