Advent – here already,
and our minds rush forward to Christmas.
Lists appear in our thoughts:
gift lists
to do lists
calendar events
Thank God this Advent is a bit longer.
Christmas coming on a Saturday and all.
We have a few more days.
Our lives are full – like the inn:
no room there for a new born Christ.
The only room to be found is in the stable,
in the poverty and misery of a place we would think unfit
for the birth of a new human being,
there among the aroma of cow dung
and barnyard animals with fleas
and flies and who knows what other bugs.
Advent – a word that means coming,
which many of you know already,
but there may also be some here
for whom Advent is an unknown or new observance.
Advent means coming, and we can think of 3 comings:
first the coming in Bethlehem,
then what they call the Second Coming, the Coming at the end of time,
and also, number 3, what happens personally for each of us as a coming of our Lord
into our lives, realizing His Presence with us and in us.
But that second coming at the end of time,
that may not be quite what you think,
yet it is certainly an end of time as we understand it
and an end of the old creation, and now a New Creation.
Let’s see: the Gospel reading for today would tell us
that this coming of our Lord is like a flood
that unexpectedly sweeps away
all the holiday parties and eggnog and busy-ness.
So here at Emmanuel, as we begin another new church year
this is what we are going to do:
we are going to be keeping the old traditions.
We are going to keep Advent as Advent
and wait until Christmas before singing Christmas carols and celebrating.
Liturgically the way we will worship these four Sunday mornings
will demonstrate a really counter-cultural life style
in comparison with the shopping mall.
First off, there are parts slowed down for reflection.
When we come to the creed next, we will encounter several pauses.
And you may have noticed right off that we are using Rite One,
and right in the middle of the Eucharistic Prayer
everyone will join with the priest in saying the words
which Jesus spoke over the bread and wine
– yes, it’s all right;
this draws us with all our attention into the meaning being expressed –
and then we will be praying together an extra prayer
after the breaking of the bread before you come forward for communion
the Prayer of Humble Access.
For some of us these are old familiar words from the 1928 prayer book,
for others they are a startling confession of spiritual neediness
just before we come get fed.
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful
Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold
and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather
up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord
whose property is always to have mercy.
This in addition to saying the General Confession.
Why?
Well, look at it this way:
We here today are mostly white northern European types
many of us from pioneer stock
living in the West, the Far West
and brought up on the idea of rugged individualism
prideful about our self-sufficiency
In the eyes of the world we are successful beyond measure.
In the Seattle-Metro area we on Mercer Island
are better than average, to say the least.
We aren’t in need,
at least in terms of our own life support and success on the material level.
But we are in need
as evidenced by the spiritual hunger, the longing,
the dissatisfaction and dis-ease that can be felt all around us
and is reflected in the pervasive, free-floating anxiety
of this culture and society.
So this liturgy for Advent has been constructed to be
something of a reality check for us.
Consider this: See the liturgy as an aid to our consciousness,
like a flood sweeping away for this morning
all the ways we are distracted from the reality of
His coming/of His immediate Presence with us.
In the gospel reading, Jesus is saying that encounter with
the full Presence of God expressed through the Son of Man “coming in glory”
is so powerful that it will be like the flood in Noah’s days.
The people didn’t see it coming.
It was business as usual and occasions for feasting
right up until the moment when it was all washed away.
It took them by surprise.
Believe you me, when God shows up, really shows up,
it will surprise you,
and it will blow you away.
It will be a catastrophe, which is what the Greek says, the word used for flood.
It will be a catastrophe, in that the old way of looking at things will be blown away
and a new way of seeing and being will present itself.
When?
At some point in the future at the end of time,
the Second Coming as some believe?
Individually for each of us at some crisis point?
At death?
For some there are profound moments of encounter with God,
such as the disciples experienced on numerous occasions around Jesus.
And often the gospel text describes the disciples at these times as
“astounded,” a mild translation which is more accurately conveyed as
“knocked out of their senses.”
Encounters with the divine
that blow away everything they previously had thought,
that pulled their understanding of reality right out from under them,
that left them without their usual bearings.
A catastrophe we might think,
but for them, and also for us,
the opening up of a whole new vista of perception,
a whole new way of thinking and doing and being,
a whole new life, a whole New Creation.
And this incredible breakthrough of God realization happens spontaneously
and not just in times of prayer but at any moment, any time,
day or night, even in the midst of the very ordinary:
Two men will be working in the field,
one will be blown away and the other will be left oblivious
to the huge advent of God’s Presence occurring right then.
Two women will be grinding wheat into flour,
one will be taken up completely into the divine revelation
totally transforming even how she sees the meal she is grinding, and the other won’t sense any change at all.
It’s a huge secret, but God is not good at keeping secrets.
Those who are willing to be alert, who are poised in wakefulness,
like the meerkat sentry in a colony of meerkats
standing erect and surveying the horizon,
those ones are in a good place to recognize
and be blown away in the best possible way
by God’s transforming Presence in our midst.
There’s a whole other world out there, or in here, to be realized!
So, let us use the not-so-subtle shifts in the liturgy
as aids in helping us become alert and watching
as the spiritual task and purpose of Advent.
Advent a brief season,
not just for doing Christmas shopping and having parties
and baking cookies and drinking eggnog
but more than that, a season for active anticipation in wakefulness and watching
so as to be blown away by God, by the Holy Spirit,
by the Spirit of the Risen Lord and his resurrection appearance.
As Paul wrote to the Romans, and which we heard just read:
“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.
Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”
