The In-Between Time (a sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent and Christmas Eve)

This is a sermon I preached on December 24, 2017, in the chapel at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. 

The texts were Isaiah 9:2-7; Hebrews 1:1-4; and Luke 1:26-38. The service ended with the lighting of the Christ candle and the reading of the Nativity story from Luke's Gospel. 

The bulletin cover image, which I've included here, is by contemporary Palestinian artist Zaki Baboun.

Please pray for all those at the Clinical Center during this season, who are courageously volunteering their very bodies in the search for new cures for some of the world's most difficult-to-treat medical conditions. 

Depending on what branch of the Christian family tree you are used to sitting on, you might or might not be aware that, for many pastors and preachers, this Sunday morning presents something of a challenge. For congregations following the traditional Western church calendar, this is the Fourth Sunday of Advent. Advent is a 4-week period of waiting and preparation leading up to the celebration of Christmas. In contrast to the tone of the secular holiday season, Advent is a quiet, contemplative, inward-turning time. It is marked by somber colors of deep blue and purple; and hymns in minor keys. While stores in many parts of the U.S. deck their halls and hail the season to be jolly and generous with one’s credit cards, pastors who encourage their congregations to mark the season of Advent swim against the cultural current, saying: “Wait. Not yet.”

But, of course, this year’s Fourth Sunday of Advent is also December 24^th, Christmas Eve. Since December 25^th in the majority culture of the U.S. is generally a time for home and family, churches hold their Christmas services on December 24^th, celebrating the Incarnation and the birth of Jesus. The Christmas carols we’ve held onto for the four weeks of Advent are allowed to burst forth in joyous song, and we finally read our beloved Nativity stories from the gospels of Luke and Matthew.

So is this morning the first Sunday of Advent? Or is it Christmas Eve?

Well…it’s both.
            So, are we waiting still, preparing still, in quiet anticipation? Or are we finally celebrating the coming of the Prince of Peace?

Well….both.

You see the challenge for preachers? Today is a bit in between. It’s not yet Christmas. And it’s already Christmas. At the same time.

I wonder if anyone here this morning, or joining us over the CTV, resonates with this odd, ambivalent, in-between time. The Clinical Center, it seems to me, can be an in-between sort of place. It’s a place of already, and a place of not yet. Perhaps an exciting new scientific discovery has already been made, but its exact implications for those who waiting for a cure? We’re not sure yet. Perhaps you are waiting for a procedure, or, the procedure may already have happened, but the results? Not yet available. Perhaps you have already had the transplant, but time to go home? Not yet. Or perhaps the time to go home has arrived…and you know you’ll be back in the outpatient clinic soon. The time has arrived, and the waiting continues. Already. Not yet.

This is a place where great hope and great anxiety swirl around each other, and are at times difficult to separate. Which makes our Bible readings during this season remarkably relevant. This morning’s readings are a mixture of texts assigned for the Fourth Sunday of Advent and others traditionally associated with Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Yet all of them contain a mixture of hope and trepidation, of celebration and waiting. The Prophet Isaiah writes of a coming ruler who will bring about a reign of justice and peace. Yet Isaiah was not originally writing about Jesus, or about the time of Jesus. Isaiah wrote in the midst of the Assyrian invasion of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, a time of fear, even terror. Echoes of violence reverberate through this familiar text of hope. The letter to the Hebrews speaks of the coming of a Son and the glories of a new creation. Yet the “last days” that the author speaks of have been wearing on now for 2000 years, a promise not quite consummated. The letter says that this “reflection of God’s glory” “sustains all things,” but the word “sustains” can also be translated as “bears along” – God, in Christ, bearing along with the struggles and anxious waiting of humankind.

And of course there is our gospel text, the Annunciation to Mary. Perhaps you, like me, are used to seeing this scene depicted in art with soft, glowing light and a passive, reverent Mary dressed in pale blue. Yet the Angel Gabriel’s encouragement “not to fear” was not an empty platitude. There was plenty for Mary to realistically fear. Besides from the plain fact of a heavenly messenger suddenly appearing in your bedroom, Nazareth itself, in the Galilee, was not a tranquil place. It’s in the same northern part of the land about which Isaiah wrote centuries earlier, and just as in Isaiah’s time, the boots of tramping warriors were never far away. In Mary’s time, it was occupying Romans, rather than invading Assyrians, who would have made all this talk about “Son of God” and “claiming ancestral thrones” so dangerous. “Do not fear,” indeed.

For that matter, Gabriel’s charge to Mary contains its own swirling mix of hope and fear. God, Gabriel says, is going to do a new thing – a bit of a research experiment, you might say, a try at a new cure for the sorrows and sickness of the world. But this new cure needs a human subject, a volunteer willing to take on the risky task of bearing something new with only her vulnerable human body as the vessel. Despite the risk and the heartbreak that is bound to go along with this sort of thing, Mary courageously gives her consent. She says “Yes” to the Incarnation – to God’s first-in-human trial. Mary’s decision is not the triumph of hope over fear, exactly – rather, it’s the resilience and the courage to say “Yes” in the midst of all the swirling mess of “Already” and “Not Yet.”

This, then, is the tension in which the gospel, the good news, is proclaimed. Not only on this odd Sunday, both Advent and Christmas, but throughout this whole season – the anxiety and the celebration, the hope and the fear, the already and the not-yet. They are all there. The reality of these tensions does not, I would argue, undermine the spirit of this season. Rather, this is what the celebration of Christmas is always about. For it is into this very world of contradictions and tensions that Jesus is born to Mary. Born, as we will read at the end of our time together this morning, into a simple cave, his first bed a feeding trough. Light and darkness, hope and fear, all wrapped up together as tightly as any babe in swaddling clothes. And this, exactly this, is the good news – that Jesus is born here, in this already-not-yet place, in this real, messy world in which we actually live and struggle and dream and worry and hope. Pay close attention to the Nativity story, and you will notice, not scenes of snowy comfort, but something else. Something so important. There, in between the mother and her child, huddled in a darkened cave. There. Can you feel it?

It is a quiet, fierce joy.

For the people walking in darkness have seen a great light; those who live in a land of deep darkness on them light has shined.

Merry Christmas, and may it be so.