November 29, 2009 First Sunday of Advent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36
Advent is the season of waiting in the darkness for the light.
It is as if the season has finally caught up with the reality that this
congregation has been going through for months. Sickness; death and the threat
of death; job loss and the threat of job loss; struggles in the nation and the world
that are not going well—we have had plenty of darkness, and we are still in the
thick of it.
And yet when I think back over the last three months, the image that
comes to mind is this sanctuary filled with light. We filled it with the light of
hope at the healing service we had when Eleanor Zue was about to begin
chemotherapy for her cancer. We have filled it with the light of love Sunday
after Sunday as more people among us have needed our comfort and support.
We have had moments of peace moved by the beauty of the music or the stillness
of silent prayer, and we have had many, many moments of joy, of laughing or
celebrating together, right up to last week when Wendy MacNeil announced that
Caleb’s new little brother, Andrew, is about to arrive from Kazakhstan.
Despite the affirmation of this fall that the light does indeed shine in the
darkness and the darkness does not overcome it, it still feels hard to have to
stand here and do my duty of inviting you into the spirit of Advent. Advent
requires that I urge you to wait and watch and prepare in the dark, to narrow the
scope of your life at the very time of year when society is demanding that you do
more, and that is hard enough; but today Jesus is leading us into greater darkness
than that.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a famous 20th Century German Lutheran pastor
and theologian. He opposed the Nazi regime and was eventually arrested.
Advent was important to Bonhoeffer, and he wrote much about it. He spent two
has last two Advents in a Nazi prison, and he used that setting as a metaphor. He
said that Advent was like a prison cell “in which one waits and hopes and does
various nonessential things…but is completely dependent on the fact that the
door of freedom has to be opened from the outside.” (Watch for the Light p xvi)
This is the darkness that we need to enter into if we are to find the light
that this Sunday has to offer. It is the darkness of facing the fact of all that is
beyond our control.
Seeking to control our destiny is as old as recorded history, as old as any
art form. Bargaining with forces beyond human control was the beginning of
religion, making sacrifices in the hope of swaying nature and deferring death.
Control has also been the driving force behind the development of science and
technology. The twentieth century saw our society develop medicines and
procedures and equipment to extend the average lifespan, it saw us learn to
harness the atom and the gene to our designs, and yet it also saw world wars and
genocides and the threat of global environmental catastrophe. On the one hand,
we have ever greater control, and on the other, ever greater chaos, and they seem
to be escalating together.
Jesus speaks with his apocalyptic prophetic voice to tell us that we are not
in control, that we are merely part of an unfolding cosmic struggle between chaos
and light, and that the day will come when our part of it will end, and there is
nothing we can do to stop it.
That is the thick darkness, the prison cell Jesus placed us in as he talked to
his disciples there in Jerusalem in the week of his own death. Only God will be
able to open that door and release us from the struggle and the chaos, only the
coming of the Son of Man on a cloud of power and glory, as Jesus puts it, only
the Lord rising upon us and the glory of the Lord appearing over us, as the
prophet Isaiah puts it. Jeremiah puts it this way: “The days are surely coming,
says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made…In those days and at that
time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute
justice and righteousness in the land.”
This is the hope we are given by Jesus and all the prophets of old. God
will open the door in the night. The light will shine and will not be overcome.
The world will be transformed by a Messiah executing justice and righteousness.
But for people who are obsessed with control, this does not feel like a great hope.
Give us something to do, we say in the face of whatever chaos comes into our
lives. And Jesus does give us some things to do.
He says, “Stand up and raise your heads.” He says, “Be on guard so that
your hearts are not weighed down.” He says, “Be alert at all times.”
Last week I quoted another prisoner of the Nazis, Viktor Frankl, saying
that, “Everything can be taken from us but one thing: the last of the human
freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose
one’s own way.”
Jesus is saying to choose the attitude of watchful waiting in the darkness
and chaos. He warns us not to let this life weigh our hearts down with worry, nor
to escape into any form of drunkenness, nor to dissipate our souls in any form of
tempting distraction. He is showing us the sacred way that leads safely through
the darkness to the light, and it happens to be exactly what Advent asks us to
practice: the watchful waiting, the narrowing of the scope of our lives to focus
our spiritual energy.
This is the promise that leads to greater promise, the sacred way that leads
to the sacred realm. The reason we can enter into Advent or any other darkness
with hope is that it gives us the opportunity to practice walking on this path of
promise. Whatever hardship or fear or grief we face, the practice is the same. It
is to lift up our heads, to guard our hearts so that they are not weighed down, to
be alert in every moment. It is to practice mindful presence. Jesus promises that
those who do that will see the door open into the realm of light. They may pass
through suffering beyond their control, but those who wait faithfully will find the
light.
The traditional disciplines of Advent included fasting and extra time in
prayer. These would induce hardship and create a kind of laboratory darkness so
the devout could practice waiting and watching for the light. Even without trying,
ordinary life provides plenty of opportunities for us to practice not letting our
hearts be weighed down. Our life can be our spiritual laboratory if we get serious
about following the Advent path that Jesus is calling us to take.
A Buddhist teacher once said that a soldier behind enemy lines for three
days gains more skills in mindful awareness than a monk meditating for three
months. When every fluttering leaf could be an enemy aiming at you, you learn
what it means to be alert.
We each have our own enemy lines—wherever we find the pain or fear
that we try to avoid, or the line beyond which our rage or annoyance explodes—
any sickness, any loss, any hardship, small or large, can give us the chance to
practice.
A young woman who had recently graduated from college was living in an
apartment with two other women as she prepared to take her CPA exam. She
would come home from work in the evening determined to study, but one or the
other of her apartment mates would inevitably be there.
One was a party girl, and would often end up convincing the woman to
forget her studies and go out to a local bar or stay up late drinking and watching a
movie. The next day the woman would come home from work exhausted, but
determined. She would dive into her studies, but she would feel fuzzy and fall
asleep before covering much ground. If her other roommate was there, she would
feel worse, because that one drove her up the wall, and the woman found herself
always thrown off track one way or another—saying something that she regretted
and then feeling too guilty to focus on work, or else using the excuse of her
annoyance to have a drink or watch TV.
She finally realized she needed help changing these patterns. She went to
a pastoral counseling center where she learned Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy, two tools for doing what Jesus is
calling us to do. She learned how to be on guard to keep her heart from being
weighed down, how to watch her own reactions and begin to be able to free
herself from the dissipation and drunkenness and worries of this life that were
trapping her. She discovered that behind every fall into temptation was the
yearning to succeed and the resulting fear of failing her CPA exam that was
making her vulnerable. By watching her thoughts and feelings and being present
as she walked home from work and walked into the apartment, she was able in
time to change her pattern of living and do the studying she needed to do.
The suffering and struggle of our lives provide us all the opportunity for
Advent practice that we need. But Advent gives us the opportunity to move from
intention to action so that we actually do the spiritual practice that we have been
wishing we would.
Twelve years ago today, on the First Sunday of Advent, I invited the
congregation to come to a three session course on traditional Christian practices
designed to help us live mindfully in the present and wait patiently in
expectation of God’s presence. The course was called Prayer of the Heart, one of
the ancient names of contemplative prayer or meditation. At the end of those
three sessions the people who came asked that we keep going, and today Prayer
of the Heart is still going strong. It is available to be part of your Advent, if you
would like, and you can see a description of it in the bulletin supplement on the
table at the back of the sanctuary.
If silent prayer does not feel like the right tool for you, there are many
other disciplines that can help during Advent, and I would be happy to talk to
you about them. The important thing is that you be on your guard that your heart
is not weighed down by all that conspires to weigh it down this time of year, so
that you can be present in the moment, and wait and watch and pray for the light
that shines in the darkness. For the promise is that this practice will lead us into
the greater promise: into the presence of Emmanuel who has come, is coming
even now, and will come again. The promise is that if we learn to wait and watch,
we will find that this higher power is already at work in our lives transforming us
and helping us to transform the world through our own small contributions of
light.
Let us pray in silence, aware that Emmanuel is present, that God is with us,
and that our first task now and during all of Advent and for the rest of our lives is
to be fully present to God. Let us practice in the silence of our hearts…
Sermon 11/29/2009