Sermon
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
December 4, 2016
I lived in Maine for 8 years. In the winter it is cold.
But what really got me was the darkness. At 4:00 pm it is pitch black. You go to work in the dark and you get home in the dark.
But if you went to my friend Anna’s house, even while there was still snow on the ground, you’d find her in her basement preparing her vegetable garden. There in the basement: tables filled with black trays of dirt, bright warm grow lights above the trays, nourishing tiny seeds.
Anna was waiting, watching, preparing, longing for those red tomatoes, yellow squash, ruby beets…
WAITING
Waiting, watching, preparing, longing – those are the verbs that describe the Christian season of Advent which began last Sunday.
The Christian church calendar restarts every year not on Jesus’ birthday, but at the start of Advent, four weeks before Christmas. So, the Christian calendar begins with waiting, with anticipation.
And of course, like many Christian holidays that aligned themselves with pagan holidays, Christmas was probably aligned with the pagan festival of Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year.
And thus the season of Advent, fittingly, mirrors the season of our year in which we wait in the darkness, preparing for the light.
After the Autumnal Equinox on Sept 22, every day is shorter and shorter. Every day we wake up in the morning and it is darker and darker, harder to get up and out of bed and out into the world.
Like my friend Anna, while it is dark, we wait, we long, we prepare.
And, then the Winter Solstice comes on December 21 and every day the light returns, little by little, almost imperceptibly, until my friend Anna can take those tiny green seedlings outside and plant them in the ground where by summer they will produce full, heavy fruits, gathered by the basketful.
NOT-YET-HERE
…But we are not yet at that time of fruits.
Whether we speak simply of the dark and cold season of winter, or this post-election time in our country, or some longing or lack in your own life – we are not yet past it.
The world we dream of is very much not yet here.
Often we respond to a sense of not-yet-here… a sense of longing or need… with urgency, with a tightly-clenched fist, a holding of the breath, perhaps a certainty, even a tunnel vision. Sometimes that focus is helpful, essential – but sometimes it is foolish, or at the least: unsustainable. We cannot plant seeds in frozen ground. We cannot see which seeds will germinate.
In our opening hymn we sang, “Love is on the Way” … “On the Way” …not yet here.
What do we do in the not-yet-here? Let us look to the spiritual messages of Advent.
The texts read by Christians during Advent are not about the babe in the manger or the wise men. They are strange, apocalyptic texts. One of them is this text:
But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. – Matthew 24:36, 40-44
Especially for those of us with a lot of understandable baggage around Christianity, you may hear this strange text and dismiss it, but I lean on many of my Christian colleagues who interpret it with fresh eyes.
A HOLY THIEF
The irreverent Reverend Nadia Bolz Weber says she loves this text because it inspires her to think of Jesus as a “holy thief.”
She says:
Maybe the idea that Jesus wants to break in and jack some of your stuff is really good news. I started thinking that maybe we should make Advent lists — kind of like Christmas lists, but instead of things we want Santa to bring us, we write down what we want Christ to take from us. You know, in hopes he could pickpocket the stupid junk in our houses, or abscond with our self-loathing or resentment … maybe break in and take off with our compulsive eating or our love of money in the middle of the night.
What do you wish could be taken from you?
Perhaps something you have tried so hard to let go of but haven’t been able to on your own…?
That’s why Nadia Bolz Weber says we need a holy thief.
NOT KNOWING
Listen to that text about the thief again. People tend to emphasize the line about, “Keep awake.”
But as Bolz Weber says, the greater emphasis in the text might not be about wakefulness but about not-knowing.
The text says, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. …for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” (my emphasis)
So maybe a state of not-knowing is the best one to prepare us for the unexpected, and maybe being robbed is not such a bad thing if it means finally letting go of something that does not serve us.
Buddhists talk about non-attachment, and also about not-knowing in terms of beginner’s mind – a mind that has not become closed in by the limitations of what it supposedly already knows.
If we want to be best prepared for the not-yet-here, perhaps we can “keep awake” but also open, waiting in a receptive position of not-knowing.
LEAVE THE WINDOW UNLOCKED
Is there an area of your life to which you could apply some not-knowing, so that there’s some room for the unexpected?
Is there a window you can leave unlocked for the holy thief that breaks in and robs you of the stuff that’s limiting you?
Think about Mary, who embraced not-knowing when she said yes to carrying God within her.
Think about Joseph, who embraced not-knowing when he said yes to defying all cultural codes and staying with his pregnant girlfriend.
Embracing the spiritual messages of Advent might require us to do the counter-intuitive: In the midst of great need, admit uncertainty. In the midst of great anticipation, let go.
As Advent prepares Christians for the birth of Jesus – so, too, for all of us – embracing a season of waiting and not-knowing could help something new and different be born in our lives.
What needs to be born in your world?
What do you hope the holy thief will abscond with in the night?
How can you leave the window unlocked?
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon