The First Sunday in Advent

December 2, 2007

 

We had three hours built into the schedule to prepare a sermon last week at the College of Preachers, at the end of which we were to preach the sermon to a group of colleagues. The experience, in my room with my laptop, felt rather like my experience a few years back taking the General Ordination Exams. I felt pressured a bit beyond my comfort level; there was a sense of immediacy to my task at hand; there was no room for beating around the bush.

 

I usually treat sermon preparation as an extended process; giving myself room to think in the abstract, to play around with ideas, to shape and reshape phrases. If I struggle along the way, if the right thought doesn’t leap into my mind at the moment, it doesn’t bother me, because the day of delivery, the day of sermon delivery, seems comfortably enough in the future. There is something peaceful and comforting about distance. It reinforces that there is time, no need to feel rushed to accomplish our goals.

 

One of the images associated with Advent season is the dark night sky into which the light of Christ will shine. I’ve always found that a comforting image. The sky seems so quiet and peaceful in contrast to the busyness around me here on earth. The stars are comfortably far away, such that in my mind they just hang there in the sky, perfectly ordered, testaments of the beauty of God’s creation. Their distance feels something like preparing for a sermon far in advance. In them I feel no pressure or anxiety. What better symbols could we find of the kingdom we proclaim: that great realm of God to come?

 

But then I thought, “what about the homeless people I passed on the sidewalk the other day? I wonder what they think about while gazing into the sky.” If I were in their place, I suspect I’d be more concerned about finding someplace warm to sleep, or finding something nourishing to eat. I suspect I wouldn’t experience the luxury of envisioning something in the distant future. I’d be more concerned about the here and now, kind of like how I felt the other night walking from the Tinley town Metro station to the National Cathedral, with the cold wind blowing in my face. I’m not sure I even noticed the stars in the sky; I just wanted to get back to my heated room at the Cathedral College.

 

But I digress. See how easy it is to become distracted from the task at hand. See how easy it is to distract myself from the urgency of preparing a sermon by thinking about the sky. There is a sense on the first Sunday of Advent that we are preparing for something far away—that this kingdom we proclaim is in the distant future—that the present time gives us a vast expanse of space for imagining that kingdom to come. Except of course, for some reason, our lectionary doesn’t exactly let us get away with that. It doesn’t give us the luxury of filing away thoughts about that kingdom to use in a future sermon. It gives us, rather, a sense of immediacy, a sense of urgency to the realization of that kingdom sooner, not later.

 

Paul says, in his Letter to the Romans, “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep, for salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.” Likewise Matthew conveys the words from Jesus, “as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man.”

 

We were asked at the College of Preachers to focus our sermon on the Social Gospel: the central topic of the week-long conference. Paul Rauschenbusch was the conference leader; in the late nineteenth century his great-grandfather Walter Rauschenbusch articulated a radical new understanding of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God articulated in the gospels, said the elder Rauschenbusch, is God’s call to us to address the social ills of society in the here and now, with a sense of immediacy—not waiting for the future, not being distracted by our personal pieties, but now. “Keep awake,” says Jesus, “for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.” Keep awake. There is a sense of urgency.

 

I didn’t know how to write a social gospel sermon, though, without seeming superficial and even hypocritical. I said to my colleagues, looking at the great issues of the day, my congregation seems already on board with many of these. We have environmental awareness. We watched “An Inconvenient Truth,” we participated in a “Living Lightly Fair,” we’re aware of global warming and the melting of polar ice caps as a result of poor corporate stewardship. We’re trying to be better stewards of the environment—not in the future, but now.

 

And we have awareness of issues of poverty. We raised money for the building of a well in the Sudan, we maintain an ongoing collection of food for a local food pantry, many of us support or are involved in Habitat for Humanity, we maintain a collection of socks for those who need them, some in the congregation are part of an organized effort to eliminate poverty in our area, we’ve supported organizations like A Better Way, the Alpha Center, and Christian Ministries. I mean, from my perspective at least, my congregation is already on top of these issues. What more can I say?

 

But then it occurred to me, Jesus’ words in today’s gospel were spoken not to those lax in the practice of religion, but to his disciples: his inner circle, doers, people confident enough in their faith to take risks—such as, for example, choosing to follow Jesus in the first place. There are other stories in which Jesus addresses strangers, and foreigners, and religious adversaries, but in this one he addresses those already in the circle. And there are numerous stories indicating the disciples’ imperfections: stories about their confusion, not getting his message, not understanding, making mistakes.

 

And Jesus’ disciples haven’t changed in two thousand years. The words apply every bit as much to us: “Keep awake.” We’ve left behind our fishing boats and we’ve set about to follow Jesus, and we’re doing great things as a result, but the words still sound, “Keep awake.” I hear in those words concern that we will allow ourselves to fall asleep, or grow complacent, or compartmentalize our good deeds as just another part of the daily routine, hoping that some good will eventually come out of them. I wait for just the right words to come to me in the preparation of a sermon. I gaze into the dark sky and relish the space, the openness, the expectation of a great kingdom to come.

 

The kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus is more radical than that, however. Jesus is shaking the world and trying to turn it upside down. The kingdom will be the fulfillment of Mary’s song: the poor will be fed and the rich will be turned away empty. And those words frighten me because by the standards of the world I am rich. Those are hard words to preach because by the standards of the world this congregation is rich. I donate to a food pantry but casually walk by the homeless people on the street to get to a place of warmth. I buy things I don’t need while some can’t even buy something to eat. I waste too many resources that could be better used. And I figure that someday society’s problems will be solved.

 

It’s an uncomfortable tension between now and then, between the kingdom of God revealed and the kingdom of God fulfilled. It is uncomfortable for some people because they continue in poverty or some other affliction in the meantime, and they want their afflictions resolved: not then, but now. It is uncomfortable for others of us because it may mean giving up some of the luxuries to which we’ve become accustomed. It requires a giant leap of faith to move from a perspective of scarcity toward one of abundance. Jesus wanted to feed five thousand people and his disciples were skeptical. There were only five loaves and two fish. And yet he managed to accomplish the task with more than enough to spare. There was urgency, and he acted.

 

I finished my sermon that day, not in polished form but enough to present to the group for helpful feedback. Anxious as I had been three hours earlier, somehow, unexplainably, God worked through me to accomplish his purposes on earth. I trusted God, worked faithfully and steadfastly, and found peace. And my experience at the College of Preachers may well be a parable for something on a larger scale. Anxious as we may be in this place of tension between now and then concerning the fulfillment of God’s kingdom, anxious about this call to “keep awake,” I believe we can trust God to empower us. By working faithfully and steadfastly toward this radical kingdom, I believe we will encounter the awesome and transforming peace of God.

 

Amen.