Have you ever felt out-of-balance? That feeling that something in the world just doesn’t seem right … in the world outside and your own personal space inside? It is as if everything is tilted … all the pictures hanging in the room need to be straightened … and all the pictures in your head need to be straightened as well.
In the name of the God of all Creation,
The God alive in each of us as God was alive in Jesus,
And the power of God known in the Spirit.
Amen.
The God alive in each of us as God was alive in Jesus,
And the power of God known in the Spirit.
Amen.
Have Have you ever felt out-of-balance? That feeling that something in the world just doesn’t seem right … in the world outside and your own personal space inside? It is as if everything is tilted … all the pictures hanging in the room need to be straightened … and all the pictures in your head need to be straightened as well.
When I was younger I had a habit of leaning back in a chair so that I was balanced on the two back legs. Every once and a while I would lean too far and the chair would begin to fall backwards. Sometimes I ended up sprawled on the floor. But other times my legs would reflexively jerk out in front of me and I would regain my balance … but my heart would skip a beat, I would have to catch my breath, and my stomach would do a flip. Maybe you’ve had the same sensation at times. You almost fall … but you don’t. However, your visceral reaction makes your heart skip a beat and it takes your breath away. Comedian Steven Wright … with his dry sense of humor … says that his whole life is like that.
At times I think I know what he means. The world around us not only throws me off balance at times, but it makes my heart skip a beat, and it takes my breath away and makes my stomach do flips. Beheadings in Syria, riots in Ferguson, shooting at a police station in Austin, Texas, a bombing at a mosque in Nigeria that killed 100 people, and hit-and-run accidents that kill pedestrians and bicyclists in our own backyard … the world feels out-of-balance.
"O that you would tear open the heavens and come down," cries Isaiah in our reading for this first Sunday in Advent. "Restore us, O Lord of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved," pleads the Psalmist. "The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken," says the writer of Mark's Gospel, describing a state of catastrophe I wish I didn't recognize in the world around me. One can only hope that there is some relief in sight … a light at the end of the tunnel.
That is the nature of this season Advent. There is a light at the end of the tunnel … it is Christmas. But we have to go through the tunnel to get there. And it leaves us feeling a little out-of-balance.
According to the week's readings, we enter this first season of the Christian New Year with crying and mourning and weeping and grief. We enter Advent out-of-balance. "How long will you be angry with your people's prayers?" asks the Psalmist in desperation. "You have fed them with the bread of tears." During Advent … as the world around us tries to escape from reality through self-indulgent consumerism, the church is telling us … our faith is telling us … to stop posturing and pretending. Our faith is telling us … if we have any faith at all … to get real.
"Our world is not OK," these Advent readings declare in stark terms, and the question of where God might be isn't OK, either. We are surrounded by evil and suffering, and we're not sure our faith can endure what our eyes reluctantly witness each day. Though we long for a Savior to rend open the heavens and come down, the very strength of that longing and hope often wearies our souls. Sometimes hope itself seems like a grind.
So why observe Advent at all? Lots of people in the world get along just fine without it. I believe we observe this season in preparation for Christmas because we see Christmas as much more than a birthday celebration for Jesus. It is about a divine presence tearing open the curtain that so often separates us from the truly sacred life we are meant to lead so that hope for a better world … outside of us and inside us … can be a reality.
I believe that this season of Advent brings us gifts … even if it seems dark. The first gift of Advent is the permission to tell the truth, even if that truth is laced with sorrow. We are invited to describe life "on earth as it is," and not as we mistakenly disguise with manic shopping in stores with decorated trees and Santa and elves.
The second gift of Advent is a discipline of waiting. During Advent, we live with quiet anticipation in the "not yet." We stop rushing, and decide to call sacred what is yet in-process and unformed. As Paul puts it in this week's reading from his First Letter to the Christians in Corinth, we "wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ."
This is no easy task in the modern world, which rewards prompt arrivals, time-cutting shortcuts, and quick fixes far more than it does the meandering journey. The meandering journey is what the labyrinth in the Commons is all about. Anyone can walk across the path of the labyrinth straight to the middle, but our faith journey never seems to be that direct. That is why the path of the labyrinth wanders close to the center then out to the edge and back … again and again until one finally arrives at the destination.
If the secular world speeds past darkness to the safe certainty of light, then Advent reminds us that necessary things … things worth waiting for … happen in the dark. Next spring's seeds break open in dark winter soil. God's Spirit hovers over dark water, preparing to create worlds. The child we yearn for grows in the deep darkness of the womb. In this season, we strive to find, "not perfection, but possibility."
Thirdly, Advent prepares us for the God who is coming … a God who will turn out to be very different from the one we expect and maybe even hope to find.
I am always struck by the difference between the Biblical passages we read during Advent, and the ones we shift to when Christmas finally arrives. This week, Isaiah longs for a Very Big God to do Very Big Things. Recalling the history of the Exodus, he asks God to once again do "Awesome Deeds" … deeds that will make the mountains quake and the nations tremble. Come to us as fire, he pleads. Fire that kindles and burns, fire that sets the world boiling. Who among us has not had a similar hope … maybe even a prayer?
Wouldn’t it be nice if our Very Big God always acted in Very Big Ways. For the past several weeks my prayers have been for the people of Ferguson, Missouri, the families of the hit-and-run accident victims, and for those who live in fear that is caused by the random shootings around the country. But why stop there? Why not have this Very Big God eradicate Ebola. Thwart terrorism. Prevent rape. End hunger. Root out corruption, racism, and all corporate greed. Protect this wounded planet before we ravage it past saving, and shield us, O Lord, from our sinful, self-destructive selves. In the words the prophet Isaiah, "O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!"
I don't believe I can … or should … ever stop praying these prayers. God is big, and when I come to God in prayer, dreaming of a just and whole world, I know I'm dreaming a tiny version of God's own dream. But during Advent, I am asked to prepare myself for something else. Someone else. Someone so unexpected and so small, I'm tempted to either laugh or cry. The world is falling apart, I feel out-of-balance, my heart is exhausted, and God chooses to send me not a warrior on a white horse … but a baby. And not just any baby, but a poor baby born in a barn.
Author Frederick Buechner describes the Incarnation as a kind of scandal … one that requires us to ponder the shocking unpredictability of God: "Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of God again. Once they have seen God in the stable, they can never be sure where God will appear or to what lengths God will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation God will descend in this wild pursuit of humankind. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant's child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too."
We have sanitized the scandalous story of the birth of Jesus. If it were to happen today this baby would be born on a cold night to an unwed mother in the backseat of a broken down car on the street in front of a homeless shelter … because there were no beds left. And the scandal is not that the mother is poor, or didn’t get to the hospital, or was refused shelter when she was about to deliver … the scandal is that this child is the hope of the world … this child is the holy one that the world has been waiting for. The same world that marginalizes and judges … and condemns homeless people as if it is their fault and not the fault of the society they live in. Talk about out-of-balance!
What are we to make of all this? The God who is limitless chooses limits: one womb, one backwater town, one bygone century, one brief life, one agonizing death. The salvation we long for is not the salvation God brings. These are not easy or comfortable truths to accept; they're truths to wrestle with hard and long. They are truths to ponder. In other words, if we're not at least slightly bewildered, we haven't been paying attention. If we are not out-of-balance we are missing the point.
Come Christmas, I want to be ready to receive God as God is … not as I might wish God to be, or insist that God become. Advent is my time to prepare for the God who is.
Friday evening I had a wedding rehearsal in this sacred space … the wedding is this afternoon. Just as we got started the father of the groom got a phone call … another cell phone going off and interrupting the proceedings. It turns out it wasn’t just another phone call. The father of the groom is the Vice-President for Trauma Services at Shands Hospital in Jacksonville. He had gotten a call about an auto accident where a woman died and others were being life-flighted to the hospital. Sadly, it turns out that the victims were all personal family friends. A man accustomed to tragedy had his breath taken away and his heart skipped a beat. His world had just gone out-of-balance. In the face of life events such as this, we need the container of sacred space, holy words, and a beloved community to hold us. The church on Friday evening was that container … if only for a few moments.
What if the same thing were true of Advent? Maybe we need to be here in this set-aside time. We need this sacred season to voice our grief and register our yearnings. We need this time to prepare ourselves for the God who is coming. And we need to remember, always, that our hopes are not in vain.
I encourage you, in this Advent, to be patient. Be still. Hope fiercely. Deep in the gathering dark, something tender is forming. Something beautiful … something for the world's saving … waits to be born. The world may seem a little out-of-balance right now … outside and inside. But it is just that awareness that some things are not “right” that is the opening for the sacred to come into our lives … maybe in some scandalous way.
Amen.
When I was younger I had a habit of leaning back in a chair so that I was balanced on the two back legs. Every once and a while I would lean too far and the chair would begin to fall backwards. Sometimes I ended up sprawled on the floor. But other times my legs would reflexively jerk out in front of me and I would regain my balance … but my heart would skip a beat, I would have to catch my breath, and my stomach would do a flip. Maybe you’ve had the same sensation at times. You almost fall … but you don’t. However, your visceral reaction makes your heart skip a beat and it takes your breath away. Comedian Steven Wright … with his dry sense of humor … says that his whole life is like that.
At times I think I know what he means. The world around us not only throws me off balance at times, but it makes my heart skip a beat, and it takes my breath away and makes my stomach do flips. Beheadings in Syria, riots in Ferguson, shooting at a police station in Austin, Texas, a bombing at a mosque in Nigeria that killed 100 people, and hit-and-run accidents that kill pedestrians and bicyclists in our own backyard … the world feels out-of-balance.
"O that you would tear open the heavens and come down," cries Isaiah in our reading for this first Sunday in Advent. "Restore us, O Lord of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved," pleads the Psalmist. "The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken," says the writer of Mark's Gospel, describing a state of catastrophe I wish I didn't recognize in the world around me. One can only hope that there is some relief in sight … a light at the end of the tunnel.
That is the nature of this season Advent. There is a light at the end of the tunnel … it is Christmas. But we have to go through the tunnel to get there. And it leaves us feeling a little out-of-balance.
According to the week's readings, we enter this first season of the Christian New Year with crying and mourning and weeping and grief. We enter Advent out-of-balance. "How long will you be angry with your people's prayers?" asks the Psalmist in desperation. "You have fed them with the bread of tears." During Advent … as the world around us tries to escape from reality through self-indulgent consumerism, the church is telling us … our faith is telling us … to stop posturing and pretending. Our faith is telling us … if we have any faith at all … to get real.
"Our world is not OK," these Advent readings declare in stark terms, and the question of where God might be isn't OK, either. We are surrounded by evil and suffering, and we're not sure our faith can endure what our eyes reluctantly witness each day. Though we long for a Savior to rend open the heavens and come down, the very strength of that longing and hope often wearies our souls. Sometimes hope itself seems like a grind.
So why observe Advent at all? Lots of people in the world get along just fine without it. I believe we observe this season in preparation for Christmas because we see Christmas as much more than a birthday celebration for Jesus. It is about a divine presence tearing open the curtain that so often separates us from the truly sacred life we are meant to lead so that hope for a better world … outside of us and inside us … can be a reality.
I believe that this season of Advent brings us gifts … even if it seems dark. The first gift of Advent is the permission to tell the truth, even if that truth is laced with sorrow. We are invited to describe life "on earth as it is," and not as we mistakenly disguise with manic shopping in stores with decorated trees and Santa and elves.
The second gift of Advent is a discipline of waiting. During Advent, we live with quiet anticipation in the "not yet." We stop rushing, and decide to call sacred what is yet in-process and unformed. As Paul puts it in this week's reading from his First Letter to the Christians in Corinth, we "wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ."
This is no easy task in the modern world, which rewards prompt arrivals, time-cutting shortcuts, and quick fixes far more than it does the meandering journey. The meandering journey is what the labyrinth in the Commons is all about. Anyone can walk across the path of the labyrinth straight to the middle, but our faith journey never seems to be that direct. That is why the path of the labyrinth wanders close to the center then out to the edge and back … again and again until one finally arrives at the destination.
If the secular world speeds past darkness to the safe certainty of light, then Advent reminds us that necessary things … things worth waiting for … happen in the dark. Next spring's seeds break open in dark winter soil. God's Spirit hovers over dark water, preparing to create worlds. The child we yearn for grows in the deep darkness of the womb. In this season, we strive to find, "not perfection, but possibility."
Thirdly, Advent prepares us for the God who is coming … a God who will turn out to be very different from the one we expect and maybe even hope to find.
I am always struck by the difference between the Biblical passages we read during Advent, and the ones we shift to when Christmas finally arrives. This week, Isaiah longs for a Very Big God to do Very Big Things. Recalling the history of the Exodus, he asks God to once again do "Awesome Deeds" … deeds that will make the mountains quake and the nations tremble. Come to us as fire, he pleads. Fire that kindles and burns, fire that sets the world boiling. Who among us has not had a similar hope … maybe even a prayer?
Wouldn’t it be nice if our Very Big God always acted in Very Big Ways. For the past several weeks my prayers have been for the people of Ferguson, Missouri, the families of the hit-and-run accident victims, and for those who live in fear that is caused by the random shootings around the country. But why stop there? Why not have this Very Big God eradicate Ebola. Thwart terrorism. Prevent rape. End hunger. Root out corruption, racism, and all corporate greed. Protect this wounded planet before we ravage it past saving, and shield us, O Lord, from our sinful, self-destructive selves. In the words the prophet Isaiah, "O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!"
I don't believe I can … or should … ever stop praying these prayers. God is big, and when I come to God in prayer, dreaming of a just and whole world, I know I'm dreaming a tiny version of God's own dream. But during Advent, I am asked to prepare myself for something else. Someone else. Someone so unexpected and so small, I'm tempted to either laugh or cry. The world is falling apart, I feel out-of-balance, my heart is exhausted, and God chooses to send me not a warrior on a white horse … but a baby. And not just any baby, but a poor baby born in a barn.
Author Frederick Buechner describes the Incarnation as a kind of scandal … one that requires us to ponder the shocking unpredictability of God: "Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of God again. Once they have seen God in the stable, they can never be sure where God will appear or to what lengths God will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation God will descend in this wild pursuit of humankind. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant's child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too."
We have sanitized the scandalous story of the birth of Jesus. If it were to happen today this baby would be born on a cold night to an unwed mother in the backseat of a broken down car on the street in front of a homeless shelter … because there were no beds left. And the scandal is not that the mother is poor, or didn’t get to the hospital, or was refused shelter when she was about to deliver … the scandal is that this child is the hope of the world … this child is the holy one that the world has been waiting for. The same world that marginalizes and judges … and condemns homeless people as if it is their fault and not the fault of the society they live in. Talk about out-of-balance!
What are we to make of all this? The God who is limitless chooses limits: one womb, one backwater town, one bygone century, one brief life, one agonizing death. The salvation we long for is not the salvation God brings. These are not easy or comfortable truths to accept; they're truths to wrestle with hard and long. They are truths to ponder. In other words, if we're not at least slightly bewildered, we haven't been paying attention. If we are not out-of-balance we are missing the point.
Come Christmas, I want to be ready to receive God as God is … not as I might wish God to be, or insist that God become. Advent is my time to prepare for the God who is.
Friday evening I had a wedding rehearsal in this sacred space … the wedding is this afternoon. Just as we got started the father of the groom got a phone call … another cell phone going off and interrupting the proceedings. It turns out it wasn’t just another phone call. The father of the groom is the Vice-President for Trauma Services at Shands Hospital in Jacksonville. He had gotten a call about an auto accident where a woman died and others were being life-flighted to the hospital. Sadly, it turns out that the victims were all personal family friends. A man accustomed to tragedy had his breath taken away and his heart skipped a beat. His world had just gone out-of-balance. In the face of life events such as this, we need the container of sacred space, holy words, and a beloved community to hold us. The church on Friday evening was that container … if only for a few moments.
What if the same thing were true of Advent? Maybe we need to be here in this set-aside time. We need this sacred season to voice our grief and register our yearnings. We need this time to prepare ourselves for the God who is coming. And we need to remember, always, that our hopes are not in vain.
I encourage you, in this Advent, to be patient. Be still. Hope fiercely. Deep in the gathering dark, something tender is forming. Something beautiful … something for the world's saving … waits to be born. The world may seem a little out-of-balance right now … outside and inside. But it is just that awareness that some things are not “right” that is the opening for the sacred to come into our lives … maybe in some scandalous way.
Amen.
