That'll be the day
Commentary
Approaching Advent and Christmas, it feels like the ante has been upped, the stakes have
been raised, and it is no time for bluffing here. As a child and young person growing up
in the '50s, the lectionary reading assigned for the first Sunday of Advent felt a bit forced
and fake. In the late '50s and the early '60s, talking apocalypse was not the primary skill
set of mainline folks. You sort of went through the motions on this, flattened the tension,
and ratcheted up the metaphors as best you could.
The reason for this was obvious. For the most part, we understood ourselves as people who had arrived at the culmination of human development and wisdom. This was somewhat easier to believe if you lived in an all-white prosperous suburb where the main concern was SAT scores and making the right contacts. In general, we believed that there was nothing that our own ingenuity, effort, and resources could not handle. Indeed, we believed that there was nothing wrong in the world that could not be fixed by simply making it possible for the teeming masses to live like us. The age that is feels fairly comfortable, there is no need to anticipate the age to come. This attitude was typified by a holdover from this age who on hearing the gospel lesson for this Sunday, came up to me and asked, "You don't really believe in this stuff, do you?"
The truth is that at first I held this stuff at arm's length as far too disturbing to inflict on a nice congregation that was looking for all the comfort and reassurance that the Christmas story could offer. However, when you begin to feel as Yeats had it, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood dimm'd tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned," things look and feel different. As a child, I heard conversations that would suggest that my elders felt "that'll be the day" when a woman would be considered for president, "that'll be the day" when the Republican Party would have the first two black citizens to be Secretary of State. "That'll be the day" that segregation would disappear, the Soviet Union would collapse, and apartheid end. "That'll be the day" has turned out to be today more often than not in my life. Most of these days have been openings to the kingdom. All of them have meant a self-discovery that has resulted in the loss of a presumed innocence for many and a deep pondering of what may be next.
All of these days have made apocalyptic language far more credible than it was in my youth -- a mixed blessing, no doubt. That was the point of my interrogator. Millions of earthly dollars are made by the authors of the Left Behind series and an alliance of nonobservant Jews and American religious fundamentalists who support the state of Israel. Who would have ever thought? Who could have ever foreseen any of this coming?
Of course, now we are on Advent territory. To paraphrase the late William Sloan Coffin, we do not know what is ahead exactly but we do know who our head is. We do not know what we will meet up with in the days to come, but we know whom we will meet. However, I don't think we have it right if we don't understand that the coming involves both certainty and mystery. In writing to the Corinthians of our ultimate day, Paul puts it this way, "Listen, I will tell you a mystery!" The events of my life persuade me that the coming into the world of God's presence and power is a mysterious mixture of both now and not yet. It is a mystery not to be fully explained but one that must be dealt with and honored. Before I say with too much certainty, "That will be the day," I need to be open to the mystery that is both now and not fully yet. Luke describes the coming as he depicts the transfiguration as a coming not on a cloud but in a cloud. Advent invites us to consider how we participate in this coming into the world that is both certainty and mystery at the same time. Out of this cloud will come blessing that will help us live with both the certainty and mystery of Emmanuel -- "God with us."
Jeremiah 33:14-16
"This is the name by which it will be called: 'The Lord is our righteousness.' " Now on what days can you say that with clarity and conviction? I suspect that it is not every day that we can say that with the kind of power that we want to.
The days that we cannot say that, are pretty evident. If this is written on our hearts, then how come we are not always sure of what the righteousness of the Lord is in the midst of global warming, diminishing supplies of energy, and the distressing reality of war and violence? Just from where will justice and righteousness be executed in the land where Christmas will look like for many a pageant of the haves leaving the have-nots behind. Many of our days I think that we can feel we have left God behind and we are unable to grasp the mystery of God's aims and plans. Sometimes we can even feel the presence of God as we experience the power of the Spirit's lift on Christmas Eve or when looking at the winter night sky we feel the light that is in the darkness and the darkness is not able to overcome. However, sensing that God is with us in the midst of the world that mocks "the meek shall inherit the earth" is a bit tougher. That God will raise up a branch for David or for the meek and the mourners seems beyond belief on many days.
Yet, does not the pilgrimage of Advent call us to have our strength renewed by waiting on this possibility? Isn't this possibility precisely what happens in human history where leadership is raised from places that are as obscure and unexpected as Bethlehem of Judea in ways that surprise everyone? A young man described as a third-rate intellect came out of a bout of polio transformed into someone to be reckoned with as the thirty- third president of the United States -- Franklin D. Roosevelt. A political loser whose career was nearly ended became the sixteenth president -- Abraham Lincoln. Tossed off a slowly moving train, the debonair young man-about-town lawyer rose up to become Mahatma Gandhi. Her life a mess and somewhat out of control, Dorothy Day inspired millions. What is going on here? It remains as mysterious as any birthing process. Just when things happen and when the baby makes his or her move down the birth canal remains a mystery beyond the scientific measurement. We have here a mystery that cannot be fully explained but never completely shut out of human experience.
What are we to do? Advent suggests that waiting for the moment renews our strength. We cannot make it happen but in our attentive waiting, we can be open to it happening. Perhaps we should be open to it happening not only to us but through us. Before you say, "That will be the day," consider those unlikely characters through whom it has happened before.
What should we be ready for? We should be open, like Joseph, not pressing for what the law always permits or entitles people to. In trusting the angel in a dream, he gave up his right to dismiss Mary. We should watch the stars. We might be called to a far country because in the journey we will discover God's power to challenge the powers that be for the sake of the power that comes into the world. We might be asked to leave our fields to be hosted by heaven.
We know neither the day nor the hour, but be prepared to become part of the drama of what God is trying to give birth to in the world.
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
It often seems that the approach of Christmas invites us into many worlds -- the world that was, the world that could be, and the world that never was. Christmas is a powerful time of nostalgia and memory. You cannot say Christmas without there appearing before my eyes visions of bubble lights on the tree and those pesky strands where if one of the bulbs went out, the whole string crashed. We had real Christmas lights in our home, the kind that could smelt steel and would dry out a tree in 48 hours. For many of us, the new Christmas classic movie is Jean Shepherd's A Christmas Story. Watching the reruns each year reaffirms that world I grew up in and the blessings I knew. It is like receiving them all over again in knowing that I share that world with others and it is not all in my head. Of course, for some, the season is about a world that never was. Some historians remind us that much of the Christmas celebration that we know was an attempt to domesticate the holiday as a method of social control for unruly street mobs that had come to use the day as an excuse for mayhem. The day was probably not always a Currier and Ives print or Coca-Cola Santa Claus kind of day but an opportunity for drunken revelry. For some families, in their brokenness, it could never be a Christmas Carol kind of moment. For many, Christmas is about the world that could be -- peace on earth if only we could gather at the manger.
This is where the Thessalonians seemed to have gotten off balance. They so anticipated the world to come, that anticipation got out of sync with the world that is. In this life, love that does not expand seems to have a way of contracting in upon itself. That day has not come when folks can kick back and be satisfied with the current level of love. "And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you." Complete contentment and full satiation is not something that is available to us this side of the Parousia. As a matter of fact, such thoughts can be downright detrimental to the faith and the faithful. When Paul writes, "Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith." He seems to be reflecting on the general human condition. This side of the Parousia, we are always coming up short. Certainly, the Thessalonians have avoided some of the big errors that have befallen the other churches that Paul has founded and written letters to. We do not hear of people eating and drinking judgment to themselves as they participate in communion. No one is running around with the circumcision knife. Neither is the church divided over speaking in tongues. However, they are at risk, for in their preoccupation with the world to come, they have grown complacent in the world that is to the point of idleness waiting for the world to come.
Paul is saying that because there is a world to come, it is time to deepen love and strengthen holiness because when that world comes, you will be held accountable for failure to respond to the opportunities to be ready for it when it comes. Be ready when it breaks in: to expand love, broaden relationships, and present opportunities to advance the rule of God. Be alert for there will be days ahead when the world to come will break into the world that is. Those who are waiting upon the Lord find themselves engaged in the kind of activity that could bring about the meaning of Christmas Day every day.
Luke 21:25-36
Season's greetings: In recent years there has been a considerable amount of effort put into trying to keep Christ in Christmas. Christmas parades have been sternly criticized for failing to embrace the religious meaning of the coming holiday. The abbreviation Xmas has been viewed by some as a conspiracy to keep Christ at arm's length. In some circles, woe betide the person who wishes anyone a mere, "Happy holidays." I am not entirely unsympathetic with such efforts. Who can be entirely comfortable with what the civic version of Christmas does to one's bank account, one's waistline, and one's soul. However, I do not hear anyone crying out, "Let's keep the apocalypse in Advent." Indeed, I don't hear an outcry to keep Advent before Christmas.
"People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken." The mood seems very different here from our preoccupation with when we can sing Christmas carols in worship, will this year's pageant be as cute as last year's, and how much brandy is permissible in the fruit cake recipe. The holidays can be a clergyperson's worst nightmare of theological appropriateness gone wrong. However, "Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." When such activity is taking place, it is often a sign that something is at stake here. The craziness of the season reminds me of the mad activity that surrounds a wedding. Then, too, we eat special food, drink too much, wear special clothes, fret about the music, and often go into meltdown. "Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth." It often seems that we get trapped in the holiday cycle making sure that our card list is responsive to our current friendships, making sure that everything is just right, covering all the bases. The trap, of course, is that we pour so much into this day that we lose sight of the other days that God is with us.
According to Jesus' brief parable, it is a seasonal thing. "Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near." Watch the seasons and you can tell that God is near us. No matter where you are on the face of the earth, there is the season of hibernation and stillness, but God is with us then as much as at any other. As a matter of fact, try to avoid the time of stillness, the waiting for the sign of spring to come, and you discover you can't push it. Church could use the ritualizing of down time, could institute litanies to come off the high of the holidays. We are prepared for Christmas Day but what about the day after and the potential feelings that Christmas Day did not deliver? The church has pretty well left us on our own to deal with the other side of Christmas. Beware, lest that day catch you unaware. But the good news is that God is with us that day as much as any other. What of the days of decay? Mainline folks have been ill prepared to deal with the decline of the recent years. Yet the seasons of decay and falling leaves fertilize the earth and make possible the new life that can come in spring. Are we ready for the growth of spring? Or have many of us found ourselves in a naysayer mood? Sometimes, churches cannot enter into the spring that God intends. What goes on in most churches in summer is nothing much. Sometimes, I think that we are not very good at nothing much -- the little small talk that establishes relationships and that makes the big talk possible. Sometimes we are not good at the permission the days of summer give to do things differently or to experiment.
As we prepare ourselves for the big day, Jesus' invitation to look at the fig tree invites us to consider all the seasons that a fig tree must live through and the days that God is with us in each of those seasons -- of growth and opportunity, of coming down and resting, of nothing much, of decay that makes for growth. Each of them is the day when Emmanuel - - God -- is with us.
Application
With fear and trepidation the preacher approaches Advent and Christmas. The expectations are so high and the traditions are so ingrained that it can feel like you are doing a high-wire act. You can fall off on the side of the trite and trivial or the radical, new, innovative. A few years ago, I stayed up to watch a nationally broadcast Christmas Eve service that featured a recently composed anthem. Let us just say that few of my expectations for an old-fashioned Christmas were met.
How do we strike a balance? I suspect while that is our worry, it is not the concern of the texts because when they were written, the birth of Christ had not quite yet taken on the burden of being the society's principle antidote to the seasonal affective disorder that comes with the depressing shortening of daylight. The texts are in many ways uninterested in how we count the days leading up to the big day. They do seem to direct our attention to what we can count on in the days ahead, how to make our days count, and the countless times the seasons of our lives change. In the countdown of days to Christmas, if we are to prepare the way of the Lord, it might have less to do with striking a balance between tradition and innovation and more on striking out in the direction that these texts lead us.
Alternative Application
Jeremiah 33:14-16. I get caught, every once in a while, on just one word that will not leave me alone. Something just jumps out and hooks me. In verse 33:15 the NRSV says that a righteous branch will spring up for David. I had expected it to say from the line of David -- a thoroughgoing affirmation of the David line and royal theology. I did find one translation that said, "from," but it was the distinct minority version. Advent sometimes forces me to do a head check on what I may have read into the texts over the years -- three wise men? -- the donkey that Mary rode on?
I wonder what would happen if I sat down without the text in front of me to write out the Christmas story. What would I elaborate, minimize, add to, or subtract from? In such an exercise are the parts of the story that we gravitate to or run from. Inviting the congregation to tell the story from memory might tell something about the congregation's story.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 25:1-10
This first Sunday in Advent is the beginning of a powerful journey. On this day, Christian community steps onto the birthing path together. It is a time of expectancy. It is a time of pregnancy, both in the sense of Mary's gestation, and our own. And, as any woman who has given birth can tell you, pregnancy is a time of anticipation, pain, wonder, deep intensity, fear, and exhilaration. There is no other time like it.
As we follow this pathway to the stable door, we "lift up our souls to God" (v. 1) in surrender to God's will and ways. This surrender, this placing of trust in God is no mean feat. For most people who attempt it, this process of submission becomes a lifelong journey, and not a task we finish up with a six-week course, like Lamaze or some other birthing class offered at the hospital.
Trusting God is, in many ways, like trusting anyone. Trust means risk. Like the dad who entrusts his new car to his teenage son for a date, like lovers falling into relationship, risk is involved. Things can happen. Things do happen. This sense of foreboding is heard and felt in this psalm. Trust is offered, but there is tenuousness in the writer's voice that fills the heart with empathy. We know, with the psalmist, that trusting in God will not necessarily keep us safe. Indeed, sometimes this birthing path will lead directly to suffering's gate and beyond.
New life can be like that. Pregnancies are full of risks. Our birthing path, too, has risks. When Christian community moves with intention toward new life, risks are there. But for Mary and for us, the promise of new life keeps the heart on the path that leads to Bethlehem. Our trust, even if it is at times a nervous trust, is in God, upon whom we wait. And while we wait, we ponder with anticipation the floodgates of new life that are about to open in Christ Jesus.
The reason for this was obvious. For the most part, we understood ourselves as people who had arrived at the culmination of human development and wisdom. This was somewhat easier to believe if you lived in an all-white prosperous suburb where the main concern was SAT scores and making the right contacts. In general, we believed that there was nothing that our own ingenuity, effort, and resources could not handle. Indeed, we believed that there was nothing wrong in the world that could not be fixed by simply making it possible for the teeming masses to live like us. The age that is feels fairly comfortable, there is no need to anticipate the age to come. This attitude was typified by a holdover from this age who on hearing the gospel lesson for this Sunday, came up to me and asked, "You don't really believe in this stuff, do you?"
The truth is that at first I held this stuff at arm's length as far too disturbing to inflict on a nice congregation that was looking for all the comfort and reassurance that the Christmas story could offer. However, when you begin to feel as Yeats had it, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood dimm'd tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned," things look and feel different. As a child, I heard conversations that would suggest that my elders felt "that'll be the day" when a woman would be considered for president, "that'll be the day" when the Republican Party would have the first two black citizens to be Secretary of State. "That'll be the day" that segregation would disappear, the Soviet Union would collapse, and apartheid end. "That'll be the day" has turned out to be today more often than not in my life. Most of these days have been openings to the kingdom. All of them have meant a self-discovery that has resulted in the loss of a presumed innocence for many and a deep pondering of what may be next.
All of these days have made apocalyptic language far more credible than it was in my youth -- a mixed blessing, no doubt. That was the point of my interrogator. Millions of earthly dollars are made by the authors of the Left Behind series and an alliance of nonobservant Jews and American religious fundamentalists who support the state of Israel. Who would have ever thought? Who could have ever foreseen any of this coming?
Of course, now we are on Advent territory. To paraphrase the late William Sloan Coffin, we do not know what is ahead exactly but we do know who our head is. We do not know what we will meet up with in the days to come, but we know whom we will meet. However, I don't think we have it right if we don't understand that the coming involves both certainty and mystery. In writing to the Corinthians of our ultimate day, Paul puts it this way, "Listen, I will tell you a mystery!" The events of my life persuade me that the coming into the world of God's presence and power is a mysterious mixture of both now and not yet. It is a mystery not to be fully explained but one that must be dealt with and honored. Before I say with too much certainty, "That will be the day," I need to be open to the mystery that is both now and not fully yet. Luke describes the coming as he depicts the transfiguration as a coming not on a cloud but in a cloud. Advent invites us to consider how we participate in this coming into the world that is both certainty and mystery at the same time. Out of this cloud will come blessing that will help us live with both the certainty and mystery of Emmanuel -- "God with us."
Jeremiah 33:14-16
"This is the name by which it will be called: 'The Lord is our righteousness.' " Now on what days can you say that with clarity and conviction? I suspect that it is not every day that we can say that with the kind of power that we want to.
The days that we cannot say that, are pretty evident. If this is written on our hearts, then how come we are not always sure of what the righteousness of the Lord is in the midst of global warming, diminishing supplies of energy, and the distressing reality of war and violence? Just from where will justice and righteousness be executed in the land where Christmas will look like for many a pageant of the haves leaving the have-nots behind. Many of our days I think that we can feel we have left God behind and we are unable to grasp the mystery of God's aims and plans. Sometimes we can even feel the presence of God as we experience the power of the Spirit's lift on Christmas Eve or when looking at the winter night sky we feel the light that is in the darkness and the darkness is not able to overcome. However, sensing that God is with us in the midst of the world that mocks "the meek shall inherit the earth" is a bit tougher. That God will raise up a branch for David or for the meek and the mourners seems beyond belief on many days.
Yet, does not the pilgrimage of Advent call us to have our strength renewed by waiting on this possibility? Isn't this possibility precisely what happens in human history where leadership is raised from places that are as obscure and unexpected as Bethlehem of Judea in ways that surprise everyone? A young man described as a third-rate intellect came out of a bout of polio transformed into someone to be reckoned with as the thirty- third president of the United States -- Franklin D. Roosevelt. A political loser whose career was nearly ended became the sixteenth president -- Abraham Lincoln. Tossed off a slowly moving train, the debonair young man-about-town lawyer rose up to become Mahatma Gandhi. Her life a mess and somewhat out of control, Dorothy Day inspired millions. What is going on here? It remains as mysterious as any birthing process. Just when things happen and when the baby makes his or her move down the birth canal remains a mystery beyond the scientific measurement. We have here a mystery that cannot be fully explained but never completely shut out of human experience.
What are we to do? Advent suggests that waiting for the moment renews our strength. We cannot make it happen but in our attentive waiting, we can be open to it happening. Perhaps we should be open to it happening not only to us but through us. Before you say, "That will be the day," consider those unlikely characters through whom it has happened before.
What should we be ready for? We should be open, like Joseph, not pressing for what the law always permits or entitles people to. In trusting the angel in a dream, he gave up his right to dismiss Mary. We should watch the stars. We might be called to a far country because in the journey we will discover God's power to challenge the powers that be for the sake of the power that comes into the world. We might be asked to leave our fields to be hosted by heaven.
We know neither the day nor the hour, but be prepared to become part of the drama of what God is trying to give birth to in the world.
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
It often seems that the approach of Christmas invites us into many worlds -- the world that was, the world that could be, and the world that never was. Christmas is a powerful time of nostalgia and memory. You cannot say Christmas without there appearing before my eyes visions of bubble lights on the tree and those pesky strands where if one of the bulbs went out, the whole string crashed. We had real Christmas lights in our home, the kind that could smelt steel and would dry out a tree in 48 hours. For many of us, the new Christmas classic movie is Jean Shepherd's A Christmas Story. Watching the reruns each year reaffirms that world I grew up in and the blessings I knew. It is like receiving them all over again in knowing that I share that world with others and it is not all in my head. Of course, for some, the season is about a world that never was. Some historians remind us that much of the Christmas celebration that we know was an attempt to domesticate the holiday as a method of social control for unruly street mobs that had come to use the day as an excuse for mayhem. The day was probably not always a Currier and Ives print or Coca-Cola Santa Claus kind of day but an opportunity for drunken revelry. For some families, in their brokenness, it could never be a Christmas Carol kind of moment. For many, Christmas is about the world that could be -- peace on earth if only we could gather at the manger.
This is where the Thessalonians seemed to have gotten off balance. They so anticipated the world to come, that anticipation got out of sync with the world that is. In this life, love that does not expand seems to have a way of contracting in upon itself. That day has not come when folks can kick back and be satisfied with the current level of love. "And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you." Complete contentment and full satiation is not something that is available to us this side of the Parousia. As a matter of fact, such thoughts can be downright detrimental to the faith and the faithful. When Paul writes, "Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith." He seems to be reflecting on the general human condition. This side of the Parousia, we are always coming up short. Certainly, the Thessalonians have avoided some of the big errors that have befallen the other churches that Paul has founded and written letters to. We do not hear of people eating and drinking judgment to themselves as they participate in communion. No one is running around with the circumcision knife. Neither is the church divided over speaking in tongues. However, they are at risk, for in their preoccupation with the world to come, they have grown complacent in the world that is to the point of idleness waiting for the world to come.
Paul is saying that because there is a world to come, it is time to deepen love and strengthen holiness because when that world comes, you will be held accountable for failure to respond to the opportunities to be ready for it when it comes. Be ready when it breaks in: to expand love, broaden relationships, and present opportunities to advance the rule of God. Be alert for there will be days ahead when the world to come will break into the world that is. Those who are waiting upon the Lord find themselves engaged in the kind of activity that could bring about the meaning of Christmas Day every day.
Luke 21:25-36
Season's greetings: In recent years there has been a considerable amount of effort put into trying to keep Christ in Christmas. Christmas parades have been sternly criticized for failing to embrace the religious meaning of the coming holiday. The abbreviation Xmas has been viewed by some as a conspiracy to keep Christ at arm's length. In some circles, woe betide the person who wishes anyone a mere, "Happy holidays." I am not entirely unsympathetic with such efforts. Who can be entirely comfortable with what the civic version of Christmas does to one's bank account, one's waistline, and one's soul. However, I do not hear anyone crying out, "Let's keep the apocalypse in Advent." Indeed, I don't hear an outcry to keep Advent before Christmas.
"People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken." The mood seems very different here from our preoccupation with when we can sing Christmas carols in worship, will this year's pageant be as cute as last year's, and how much brandy is permissible in the fruit cake recipe. The holidays can be a clergyperson's worst nightmare of theological appropriateness gone wrong. However, "Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." When such activity is taking place, it is often a sign that something is at stake here. The craziness of the season reminds me of the mad activity that surrounds a wedding. Then, too, we eat special food, drink too much, wear special clothes, fret about the music, and often go into meltdown. "Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth." It often seems that we get trapped in the holiday cycle making sure that our card list is responsive to our current friendships, making sure that everything is just right, covering all the bases. The trap, of course, is that we pour so much into this day that we lose sight of the other days that God is with us.
According to Jesus' brief parable, it is a seasonal thing. "Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near." Watch the seasons and you can tell that God is near us. No matter where you are on the face of the earth, there is the season of hibernation and stillness, but God is with us then as much as at any other. As a matter of fact, try to avoid the time of stillness, the waiting for the sign of spring to come, and you discover you can't push it. Church could use the ritualizing of down time, could institute litanies to come off the high of the holidays. We are prepared for Christmas Day but what about the day after and the potential feelings that Christmas Day did not deliver? The church has pretty well left us on our own to deal with the other side of Christmas. Beware, lest that day catch you unaware. But the good news is that God is with us that day as much as any other. What of the days of decay? Mainline folks have been ill prepared to deal with the decline of the recent years. Yet the seasons of decay and falling leaves fertilize the earth and make possible the new life that can come in spring. Are we ready for the growth of spring? Or have many of us found ourselves in a naysayer mood? Sometimes, churches cannot enter into the spring that God intends. What goes on in most churches in summer is nothing much. Sometimes, I think that we are not very good at nothing much -- the little small talk that establishes relationships and that makes the big talk possible. Sometimes we are not good at the permission the days of summer give to do things differently or to experiment.
As we prepare ourselves for the big day, Jesus' invitation to look at the fig tree invites us to consider all the seasons that a fig tree must live through and the days that God is with us in each of those seasons -- of growth and opportunity, of coming down and resting, of nothing much, of decay that makes for growth. Each of them is the day when Emmanuel - - God -- is with us.
Application
With fear and trepidation the preacher approaches Advent and Christmas. The expectations are so high and the traditions are so ingrained that it can feel like you are doing a high-wire act. You can fall off on the side of the trite and trivial or the radical, new, innovative. A few years ago, I stayed up to watch a nationally broadcast Christmas Eve service that featured a recently composed anthem. Let us just say that few of my expectations for an old-fashioned Christmas were met.
How do we strike a balance? I suspect while that is our worry, it is not the concern of the texts because when they were written, the birth of Christ had not quite yet taken on the burden of being the society's principle antidote to the seasonal affective disorder that comes with the depressing shortening of daylight. The texts are in many ways uninterested in how we count the days leading up to the big day. They do seem to direct our attention to what we can count on in the days ahead, how to make our days count, and the countless times the seasons of our lives change. In the countdown of days to Christmas, if we are to prepare the way of the Lord, it might have less to do with striking a balance between tradition and innovation and more on striking out in the direction that these texts lead us.
Alternative Application
Jeremiah 33:14-16. I get caught, every once in a while, on just one word that will not leave me alone. Something just jumps out and hooks me. In verse 33:15 the NRSV says that a righteous branch will spring up for David. I had expected it to say from the line of David -- a thoroughgoing affirmation of the David line and royal theology. I did find one translation that said, "from," but it was the distinct minority version. Advent sometimes forces me to do a head check on what I may have read into the texts over the years -- three wise men? -- the donkey that Mary rode on?
I wonder what would happen if I sat down without the text in front of me to write out the Christmas story. What would I elaborate, minimize, add to, or subtract from? In such an exercise are the parts of the story that we gravitate to or run from. Inviting the congregation to tell the story from memory might tell something about the congregation's story.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 25:1-10
This first Sunday in Advent is the beginning of a powerful journey. On this day, Christian community steps onto the birthing path together. It is a time of expectancy. It is a time of pregnancy, both in the sense of Mary's gestation, and our own. And, as any woman who has given birth can tell you, pregnancy is a time of anticipation, pain, wonder, deep intensity, fear, and exhilaration. There is no other time like it.
As we follow this pathway to the stable door, we "lift up our souls to God" (v. 1) in surrender to God's will and ways. This surrender, this placing of trust in God is no mean feat. For most people who attempt it, this process of submission becomes a lifelong journey, and not a task we finish up with a six-week course, like Lamaze or some other birthing class offered at the hospital.
Trusting God is, in many ways, like trusting anyone. Trust means risk. Like the dad who entrusts his new car to his teenage son for a date, like lovers falling into relationship, risk is involved. Things can happen. Things do happen. This sense of foreboding is heard and felt in this psalm. Trust is offered, but there is tenuousness in the writer's voice that fills the heart with empathy. We know, with the psalmist, that trusting in God will not necessarily keep us safe. Indeed, sometimes this birthing path will lead directly to suffering's gate and beyond.
New life can be like that. Pregnancies are full of risks. Our birthing path, too, has risks. When Christian community moves with intention toward new life, risks are there. But for Mary and for us, the promise of new life keeps the heart on the path that leads to Bethlehem. Our trust, even if it is at times a nervous trust, is in God, upon whom we wait. And while we wait, we ponder with anticipation the floodgates of new life that are about to open in Christ Jesus.
