Texts: Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12
Chilly December, last month of the calendar year, first month of our Christian year, invites us to engage in a bit of retrospecting, introspecting, and prospecting, to play with words that all have to do with seeing.
About this time every year, we sit down to write our Christmas cards and letters to those friends who come to mind more often than we probably take the time to let them know, or who emerge from memory’s shadows only in this bleak mid-winter time, binding us to a past that has shaped us by the interaction of their lives with ours, and moving us to share a bit about our personal current state of affairs.
Every year, I get Christmas letters from seminary classmates, and I note how we all are prone to making editorial comments about the state of affairs in the world, as we join in a mutual “tut-tutting” by correspondence. And, in the pauses between our sentences, we may also allow ourselves a brief thought or two about the future, about what will be happening for us, no accidents befalling us, of course, God willing and the crick don’t rise, as our Appalachian brothers and sisters are wont to say, in the year ahead.
We perform other rituals: we pull out the Christmas decorations, get a tree, or use the artificial tree that makes things so much easier, especially the ones now that are pre-strung with lights. We find the crèche, and remove it gently from its wrappings, fingering each little statue, thinking perhaps of those people long ago who had just about exhausted all their hope, Mary and Joseph looking for a place to stay, shepherds and other loners, wandering magi. Or maybe we think of parents and grandparents to whom the crèche figures originally belonged, or who gave them to us for this small annual ritual.
We put electric candles in our windows, having forgotten, if we ever knew, that the practice emerged from 17th century anti-Catholic England.. Three candles in a single window represented Joseph, Mary, and Jesus, and signaled secretly to a priest, traveling incognito, that the doors were unlocked and he was welcome to come in, and could celebrate Christ-mass with them.
We light other candles during this season, appreciating their aroma and warm glow. Perhaps we will think of the one who comes as the light of the world that shines in the darkness, a light that can never be extinguished. Just thinking of the candles reminds me of a story that Archbishop Desmond Tutu tells about a light bulb that shined so brightly and proudly that it eventually became convinced that its impressive achievement was due to its own merit and skill. One day, the light bulb was taken out of the socket and placed on a table. Try as hard as it could, when it was disconnected from its source of power, it could do nothing. Advent is a good time to remember that little lesson. That’s why, in my Friday reminders, I suggested that paying attention to the dark places in our lives, our thinking and our emotions, may offer us a means to find God speaking to us. Rather than repressing the bleak thoughts that come in bleak mid-winter, opening ourselves to explore them more deeply may bring suprising revelations.
Advent is a challenge….always keeping us on a spring board of memory and hope, both intimately twined together. There is a tension in this spring-board, making the season a challenge to us. We’d like to forget all this preparation stuff, get right to the holiday, give and receive the presents, share a feast with family or friends, and then pack it up again, get the tree out on the kerb on the day after Christmas, or by New Year’s at the latest. We know the tightrope, for we have all worked on a balancing act. We have known the thirsty wandering in deserts, and the glory on mountaintops. We know the real world might best be described by Woody Allen’s famous quote: “While it may be that the lion and the lamb (overlooking the fact that Isaiah actually says it is a wolf and a lamb) will lie down together, the truth is the lamb won’t get much sleep.”
Much as Christmas takes its richness from our personal lives but also signifies something far greater, the tension of Advent speaks to us every year to ground us not in the belief that some kind of personal moral purity code enacted into law will save the social fabric of our nation, but to point us to the ultimate source of hope that winnows away all that is chaff to find the real kernel of sacred life, and offer us the kingdom of God, that peaceable kingdom of hospitality, wisdom, and gentleness.
Advent comes, like the Baptizer in the wilderness, to invade our dark places with a searing combination of extravagant welcome—no matter who we are—and admonition. My classmate, David Bartlett, says in a commentary on the Gospel this week, that John provides not only the most astonishing news that “…we are cherished for who we are, but also that we are responsible for what we do.” [Pastoral Perspective, Matthew 3:1-12; Feasting on the Word, Year 1, Vol. 1, 2010, p. 46]
In a time when many people, perhaps like the people who came to hear John out in the wilderness, are refugees from religious judgmentalism, John’s message about chaff being thrown into unquenchable fire may be misunderstood. John’s point is more that if God loves us enough to prepare a way for us, then God actually cares enough about us to expect something from us as well. [Ibid., paraphrased].
John the Baptizer, the wild man with his camel skin garb and diet of locusts and honey, whom we might try to ignore as crazy, speaks also to people who know the tension between memory and hope, and who have misplaced their hope on to something personal and prejudicial, rather than on the “fruits of justice”: “We have Abraham as our father,” they say, thus trusting the ancient promise that Abraham would father a multitude. Yet Isaiah’s stump, and John the Baptizer’s axe, both suggest that in a heart-beat, in an instant, all the realities of the past may be changed, may be wiped out. What gets the axe it seems is presumption, arrogance, prejudice, inhospitality.
Paul, too, in writing to the Romans, speaks of things written in the past…like the dietary and sexual taboos of the book of Leviticus, and notes that it was written for our instruction, but he goes on to exhort the Romans to live in accordance with Christ Jesus, who never turned away anyone. So Paul tells them to welcome one another, despite all the differences between us that people label with such awful terms as “abnormal”; “illegitimate”; “alien”.
The world is looking for signs: signs of values of wisdom and understanding, not disdain and rejection. The world is looking for places where people are not judged by what they wear, or whether they speak with an accent, or in some other language altogether; or whom they find themselves loving. We don’t have many signs of hope, there being so much conflict and animosity during the time being, but here and there, a shoot comes up from dead stumps. The question is, will we be the stump, on which the axe has fallen, or will we be the shoot?
Advent is warning and hope about the time of signs and the signs of the time—signs about the holy values of God. We live in the tension of the past, the time being, and the future. God’s good news is that God is always nurturing the little signs, the tender shoot. Let’s use this time of our tension to allow God’s extravagant welcome to nurture the tender shoot of peace and hope, of justice and faithfulness, of gentleness and desire for knowledge of God, in us, and in our church.
