To Be Determined
A SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
Claire’s birthday, as some of you know, was this week. We have begun training her early in the process that we have adopted from my cousins. After just a few years of trying – unsuccessfully, one would imagine – to find just the right present for each other at all the various occasions that call for presents, they began to shop together. Buying what they wanted to get as a gift, the two of them would go home, wrap up the presents and, at the right moment, they would open their gifts and exclaim to each other: ‘It’s exactly what I wanted! How did you know?’
So the big gift was bought in a collaboration and instead of waiting until the day, she began using the cozy new coat straightaway. Even with the major gift got and being used, there are always a couple of small bits and bobs for the morning of the special day that are a surprise. Starting sometime late last week, Peter and I became aware that Claire had started, shall we say, browsing through our wardrobes and drawers and the cupboards around the house. She was looking around to see what we might have tucked away for her. As the days passed and her birthday neared, the looking got more frequent, and a bit more focussed and intense.
‘You used to hide things just inside your wardrobe,’ she said to Peter. ‘Where have you hidden my presents?’
In the tradition of parents since time immemorial, we responded kindly, ‘Presents? You think there are presents in the house?’
The conversation volleyed back and forth among the three of us over several days. Claire was impatient, if we are to take her searching seriously. As her birthday came within a day, she said to Peter, ‘So, if I don’t find my presents by my birthday, will you show me where you hid them?’ Not likely to happen.
On her birthday morning, there were a few presents laid out, and she was, I think, pleased and grateful for them. We got the appropriate words and the spontaneous hug that indicated that we had done all right.
I know how she feels with all this looking around for her gifts. I’m not a good one when it comes to such things as waiting for presents. I’m impatient and have been known on one or two occasions to open presents early or at a minimum to shake boxes and monitor the post as it comes. Waiting is something I have yet to perfect, though I try, and keep practising.
This week I was also struck by the impatience and eagerness of the season, especially as it is played out by the high street. For the first time since we moved here, I received some invitations from online retailers to join in sales on ‘Black Friday’ and these invitations came from merchants in the United Kingdom. Are you unaware of this ‘holiday’? Not to worry. It’s coming, no doubt to a retailer near to you over the next few years.
It’s an odd retail habit that’s developed and been exploited in the United States over the last couple of decades. The phrase, originally coined in Philadelphia because the shoppers on the day after American Thanksgiving caused such chaos, has picked up common usage and has in recent years gained the additional meaning of making money for the stores there. Retailers now use it to advertise specials that are on offer on that day, and indeed many open as early as 3 or 4 AM. Peter recounted a story of a woman who was waiting for two days in a queue in order to get a special deal at a store that was due to open early on this past Friday. She missed the opportunity to have a holiday with her family in order to buy something.
Watching a video of shoppers as they engage this practice of Black Friday shopping, we were just slack-jawed to see a crowd batter down the rolling aluminium doors at a Wal-Mart to gain access, others clawing one another in order to get to merchandise. It feels like a concentrated form of the madness of the winter holiday season that has lost its grounding in something more profound.
One role for religion – even liberal religion – is to be conservative. That is, religion at its best seeks to conserve and protect what is worthy and good in humanity. It has a role of reminding us of what matters in life, no matter the loud calls of the marketplace, no matter the din around us that seeks to distract us from what matters most.
Advent – of late more filled I think with the call of consumerism – taken as it is meant to be taken, can invite us back to the profound meanings that can be found in this season. Fr Christopher Jamison described the season well:
Advent is the traditional month of preparation before Christmas, a time of fasting and intense prayer, a time of eager expectation. It is above all a time to celebrate waiting as a normal part of human experience, when the Christian tradition invites us to wait for the birth of a child. In Advent we rejoice that we are waiting, that there is still time to prepare a way for the Lord and we celebrate the virtue of patience. By contrast, the consumer world tells us not to wait but to ‘buy now’. Greed cannot wait, so to learn to wait is a simple antidote to greed.
Advent has the dual message of encouraging us to await the moment, and that there is still time to prepare for what of goodness and light might be born into the world.
It is awaiting the moment that I hear in Denise Levertov’s poem. Of course, the poem refers to a moment in the Christmas narrative that would have happened 8 months ago, not now as we approach the birth. Still, this is the moment in the rhythm of the Christian calendar when attention is again turned to the impending birth and we are reminded of Mary who was the central character in the waiting.
What I love in the poem is both the illumination of the choice that she makes and the moment of courage of acceptance of the annunciation. Both leave me a bit breathless in anticipation. Levertov says:
This was the minute no one speaks of,
when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed,
Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.
________________________________________________
She did not cry, ‘I cannot, I am not worthy’
nor, ‘I have not the strength.’
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light,
the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.
Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.
The poet doesn’t leave this moment of courage and acceptance to only Mary, though, she acknowledges that many, maybe all of us have faced annunciations of all sorts:
Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride
uncomprehending.
More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
It is that moment we seek most in this season of Advent, that moment before she decides, when everything is still possible, when everything can still be, before the gate closes and the pathways vanish. Day by day we are all presented with choices about who we shall be in the world and how we shall live. They aren’t the kind of choices and annunciations that come with the flash of angel wings, but rather they come in any moment in which we pause to decide, to make a choice and step out on this path we’ve chosen.
It all sounds so grand when I say it like that, but I mean something much smaller and more intimate, and I believe wholly that it makes a difference. It is the moment we choose generosity over greed, the moment we choose kindness over efficiency, the moment we choose love over blindness, the moment we are conscious of the choice we make, in this moment, each one singular and filled with possibility.
Advent bids us to wait. To make the space, the space in which we choose.
The courage to make the choice is not insignificant either. We are bombarded with information: online, on the telly, in newspapers, adverts adorning every available surface. All of it asks us to pay attention: we are bid to buy until we are happy, until we are beautiful, until we no longer feel the emptiness that sometimes lives within our souls. We are nudged – even sometimes pushed – to watch out for our own, to beware the stranger, to look down upon those who are without, to ignore the lost and broken, to scorn those who are different. It is an act of courage to stop the noise and listen for the sound of our own heart, to hear the song of angels in the midst of the cacophony of the world. And in all of it to choose life, to choose hope, to choose peace, to choose love.
Advent is the time to wait, to pause, to be mindful and to choose. It is not easy to slow down and to be in this moment, especially in all the push of this season, but I invite you to open to the possibility. Breathe. Be in the moment. Don’t hurry. Choose.
The season is upon us well and truly now. I must admit that I will likely be shaking packages and glancing casually into cupboards as we now approach Christmas. But, as well, I will make time to simply wait, and to be present to the gift of everyday unwrapped and everpresent.
May it be so with you as well.
Prayer
Spirit of love and life
be with us this day
and in the days to come as
we wait.
Allow us the moment,
the breath in our lives,
that we may stop and choose,
that we may pause to listen to our heart
that we may pause and be present
to all the possibilities
stretched before us in each moment.
Shore up our strength that we may
live consciously in these days,
mindful of our needs,
mindful of the needs of the world.
Shape our days to the deepest hopes and loves
that reside in our hearts,
that our lives be filled with
what matters most.
So may it be with us this day,
and in the days to come.
Amen.