What Are We Waiting For?
SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
It must be 20 years ago now that I went to an Advent lecture given by Miriam Therese Winter, a Medical Mission Sister, a woman religious – a nun – and a professor of liturgy. She asked the question that I’m asking today: What are we waiting for? And while I don’t remember her answer particularly, I do remember some of the directions of the path toward an answer that she took. Sometimes, as you well know, the questions can be much more interesting than the answers.
Like the young man who goes to his rabbi and says, “Rabbi, why is it that you always answer a question with another question?” “Why do you ask?” replied the rabbi.
It is true sometimes that the questions are more interesting than the answers that we get and the path that takes us there is more the point. I think that can be especially true of Advent.
Now, Advent wasn’t particularly a season of celebration in my family or in my church growing up. That is, it wasn’t any more a season of celebration than the usual so-called holiday season that takes place in the States. From the last Thursday in November – American Thanksgiving – there’s a mad dash about of parties and events and endless shopping through to Christmas and the beyond. If the day after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day in the US, then the second biggest must be Boxing day, because everyone seems to go shopping to get the good after Christmas deals, and to stock up for next year. While my family didn’t necessarily engage in the whole crazy event while I was growing up, still we were drawn along into the mad dash. Even if one seeks to resist the headlong fall into consumerism and overindulgence as I have tried to do in my adult life, the draw is powerful, and it is far too easy to be pulled into an unhappy participation.
From what I’ve been able to discern, the pull here is not unlike that in the US, though it sounds like there is a more enforced Sabbath here, Christmas day itself is a real day of rest. Still, here it is only the second day in December, and I’ve gone by several Christmas fairs and festivals, the mad dash well underway.
Which is why it’s worth asking some questions, considering our path over the next few weeks to Christmas day.
Advent is these days of waiting, of expecting. It is the late stage of pregnancy for Mary, if we follow the story, a time of journeying toward Bethlehem, where she will be delivered of a son. Surely she aches in these last weeks. Surely, too, does Joseph, loving her and vulnerable, and lost, yet by her side. On these days of travel for the couple, it must be easier than facing the judgement of their families, in their small village. On the road and anonymous, no one the wiser about their life, no one the wiser about the holy one who is about to be born.
But I get ahead of myself in telling the story of what is to come. Here at the start of advent, with only one candle burning, let us consider waiting, consider this question of what we are waiting for.
What, do you suppose, are we waiting for?
We live in a secular age, an age when the myths and legends of the past come to us as so much fairy tale and fanciful reverie, not as some sort of explanation, usually. Explanations, those are the purview of science, the collection of facts and truths that once constructed in the right way tell us something correct and, we hope, useful. The myths that we feel sure people constructed in order to make sense of their world aeons ago were their early attempts at science, their attempts to make sense of their universe.
Yet, year in and out over nearly two millennia people have gathered and told this story: a babe born as low as could be, who is the one who will bring peace to all the nations, the one who will save us all from despair and fear, save us from being lost and abandoned, save us from the emptiness that fills us sometimes.
And every year, fighting with my own cynicism as I consider
the amount of hatred that cloaks itself in Christianity,
and the millennia of failed hopes,
and the chaos of a world still not saved,
still in peril,
still guided more by greed than goodness,
still armed beyond human reason much less beyond the realm of God’s love,
every year – nonetheless, I listen to the story and wait for the hope to be reborn in the stable of my heart.
That’s what I’m waiting for.
But I have to remind myself, year after year, that I’m not waiting for that big old Daddy God who will break in and fix everything. I have to remind myself that I’m not waiting for some magical, supernatural, being who can swoop in and transform the world that we live in into a more gentle and peaceful place. I’m not even waiting for something fully formed and defined: I’m waiting for that lamb of God to be born, the one that Denise Levertov describes so well.
The story, after all, is about the birth of a baby. This is no Athena, springing fully formed from the head of God. It is a tiny creature, unable to live without the care and love of his parents, unable to live without the intervention of kind strangers, a baby threatened before he even knows well how to suckle his mother’s breast. The God who is born is not much more than that wisp of wool. This is the God that Advent awaits:
God then,
encompassing all things, is
defenseless? Omnipotence
has been tossed away, reduced
To a wisp of damp wool?And we,
frightened, bored, wanting,
only to sleep till catastrophe
has raged, clashed, seethed and gone by without us,
wanting then
to awaken in quietude without remembrance of agony,we who in shamefaced private hope
had looked to be plucked from fire and given
a bliss we deserved for having imagined it,is it implied that we
must protect this perversely weak
animal, whose muzzle’s nudgings
suppose there is milk to be found in us?
Must hold to our icy hearts
a shivering God?
The parents will not find a proper place for the baby to be born into the world, shivering though wrapped in swaddling clothes, only the rough trough used for feeding the animals to lay the infant. A shivering God that needs each of us to be born.
This season, I wait. I wait to finally be able to say with the poet:
So be it.
Come, rag of pungent
quiverings,
dim star.
Let’s try
if something human still
can shield you,
spark
of remote light.
Christmas comes not with a saviour entering stage left, with magical powers, or sword drawn. Christmas comes with that which is vulnerable, and tiny and utterly dependent on us, utterly dependent upon us to bring it to life, to nurture, to cradle and help grow.
Through the blare of tinny carols played on bad sound systems in the shops, past the too bright tinsel and glitter of the season, may we all remember what it is that we’re waiting for.
But the question can be taken another way as well. What, after, are we waiting for? Why do we wait for a day, an arbitrary day, for something to be born?
Here again, the secular world of reason barges in uninvited. Christmas, as we know it as a wintertime festival is misplaced. Shepherds wouldn’t be in their fields at night at this time of year. They would be back at home, the flock safely bedded down and eating the fodder that the women had put aside for the winter when there is little that is growing and green in the world. Nowhere in any gospel does it say that Jesus was born in winter. The truth is that the timing of this festival is more likely to be more related to the celebration of the solstice. It was simply taken over by the Christians at some point and the focus shifted to the birth of God, not the birth of the sun as it begins to spin back to the northern climes.
There is, indeed, something satisfying about a festival at this time of year. As the days shorten – I was stunned to see that by weeks end there will be only just 8 hours between sunrise and sunset – as the days shorten, many, if not all of us, crave light. There is something truly satisfying about hanging twinkling lights, and touching flame to candles. There is something about this time of year, too, that can draw us to contemplation, and the dark lends itself to stories and quiet reflection.
Still if we are to listen to the one whose birth we await, there is nothing to wait for, really. ‘The kingdom of God is at hand,’ he is reported to have said. And while that could mean that it is about to be born, it is nearby, I am more convinced by Nancy Mair’s mystical experience, and the insight that she gained from it. What does ‘at hand’ mean? Here’s what she said about it:
Stretching out my hands, I can reach the Bible in my lap and, on my desk, my computer, my printer and the tottering pile of books on it, a forty-four-ounce Thirstbuster now sucked dry, a box of floppy disks, an old letter from Aunt Jane, and the trifocals I wear when I’m not peering at my monitor screen. This is at-handness: not what is about to be given us, but what is near enough to be grasped and used.
What is near enough to be grasped and used. What is that in our lives? This God whose birth we await, this vulnerable, lost, helpless God whose birth we await isn’t coming. This God is here, and ever and always awaiting birth by what we can do and embody and be in the world. And none of us, none of us need await the arbitrary date to bring about what we can. ‘The trick,’ Mairs tells us, ‘is not to squint hopefully into some distant future, but to look around you....’
It is likely that the most profound religious and spiritual truths have this paradoxical quality to them. The God we await, is already here, already present and awaiting birth in our lives. Advent is a season that is about waiting, about gestation, about expecting and hoping about what is coming, but it is also, profoundly, about what is already present, what exists within us all the time and needs not wait for an appointed time in order to emerge, but only needs our attention. As is said in the gospel of Luke, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, “Lo, here it is!” or “There!” for behold the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.’
In this season, as we go into the dark ever more, may our days be filled by more by the call of the spirit, than the commercial clamour. May we in these days celebrate, truly, Emmanuel, God among us.