This is a sermon preached for St. Timothy's Episcopal Church in Wilson, NC, on this snowy 2nd Sunday of Advent. You can read the scripture texts for this Sunday by clicking here. My thanks to the Rev. Marty Stebbins for the invitation to share this message and the 30 or so hardy souls who braved the snow and freezing rain to make it to one of the services at St. Timothy's this morning!
You can listen to the audio or read the manuscript below:
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Advent is a strange sort of time.
There’s an obvious way in which this strangeness manifests itself. While the secular world gears up for Christmas with full tinsel-shimmer and holiday-music glee, this season of the church year is filled with urgings to wait, to prepare, to quiet down, to watch out, to keep awake. The mood of Advent is not celebratory so much as solemn, in marked contrast to the “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” pageantry going on around us. And this season is a season of contrast, of darkness and of light, as days continue to shorten and nights lengthen. The candle-light of Advent is, by its very nature, a juxtaposition, a flickering in the dark.
Advent is perched on an edge.
But Advent time is strange in a less obvious way as well. The texts of Advent, during this season of waiting for the coming of the Christ-child, do not proceed in neat chronological fashion from prediction to preparation to prophetic fulfillment. Rather, time in our Advent texts seems to exist outside of the boundaries of chronology. Take, for example, today’s gospel reading from Luke – here we are in the second Sunday of Advent, and we’ve jumped ahead to a story about John the Baptist in the wilderness, well after the birth of Jesus – in fact, “where we are in the story” is just before Jesus’ baptism and the beginning of Jesus’ adult ministry. And we also heard Paul’s words to the church in Phillipi, with his prayer for the “day of Christ” – by which Paul means, not the birth of baby Jesus in a manger, but the future second coming of this Jesus.
So we are here, in the second Sunday of Advent, waiting for something that, in the words we have read, has already happened and maybe will even happen again….
Time, in Advent, is strange.
And this strange chronological mashup is even more evident because the gospel text from Luke is so very time-bound. Hear again the not exactly scintillating words that open our gospel reading today: “In the 15th year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.”
This is the wrong way to start a story. You should start the story by saying, “THE WORD OF GOD CAME TO JOHN” – that’s the dramatic part – and then maybe you could footnote all the rulers and the reigns and the high priests.
But the writer of Luke’s gospel seems to make this choice quite intentionally. We, the hearers of this story, know at the very beginning that this is not “once upon a time” or “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” not the outside-of-time vagaries of a fairy tale or fantasy epic – this is a story grounded in a very specific place, a very specific time, a very specific political and religious and social context. We need to know that context, the story seems to tell us, in order for the coming of the Word of God to make much sense. And while scholars struggle to pin down exactly what year these various reigns and priesthoods would line up with, narratively the point has been made: the story you are about to hear happens in time. And this matters greatly, because things that happen in time also happen in reality. They happen, so to speak, “in the flesh.”
Which is exactly where we end up by the end of this morning’s gospel reading. “All flesh,” the text says. “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.” Not all spirits. Not all souls. Not even all people. All. Flesh. God’s salvation – the Greek word, by the way, could also be translated as “healing” or “making whole” – the salvation, the healing, the making whole of God will be experienced in the flesh.
And so Advent time is strange, for while we cannot seem to settle narratively on whether we are talking about the past, or the present, or the future, we at the same time are being told, rather directly, that Advent time is not timelessness. This thing we are preparing for, waiting for, paying attention to, keeping awake for – it is a thing that happens in the flesh, in real time. The images called up by today’s texts, of the leveling of heights and the filling of depths, the throwing off of sorrow and affliction, the harvesting of righteousness and the overflowing of love, these are not, Luke’s gospel seems to be telling us, realities of some imagined future but of the here, and the now – of this place, of this context, yes, even under these powerful and corrupt political and religious authorities – the Word of the Lord comes right here. Right now.
And yet we wait. And we prepare. For some future manifestation of this immediate demand. How do we make sense of the strange contradictions, the strange time, of Advent?
I am reminded of a story told by the great Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, Dean Emeritus of Marsh Chapel at Boston University and a mentor to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – a story that is particularly appropriate for a “wintry mix” sort of day. “Several years ago,” Thurman once wrote, “I spent three wintry days visiting Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. A young medical student drove me in his car to keep various appointments….There was quite a ceremony every time he started out. First, he would let his clutch out slowly, applying the gas very gently as he chanted, ‘Even a little energy applied directly to an object, however large, will move it, if steadily applied and given sufficient time to work.’ Not once during our experience was our car stalled in the snow.”
Thurman went on to say this: “Of course, this young man knew how to wait. Waiting was not inactivity; it was not resignation; it was a dynamic process….Sometimes I think that patience is one of the great characteristics that distinguishes God from humans. God knows how to wait, dynamically; everybody else is in a hurry. Some things cannot be forced but they must unfold, sending their tendrils deep into the heart of life, gathering strength and power with the unfolding days.”
To borrow Dr. Thurman’s language this morning: Advent is not forced. But it must unfold. And as unfolds, as it sends its tendrils deep into our hearts, we find ourselves recipients of the coming of the Word of God – not in some timeless, disembodied neverland, but here. Now. In real time. In the flesh. In times like these.
I need this Advent time. I am, I confess, often in a hurry for all the wrong reasons – a fear of missing appointments, a need to look busy, a rushing on to the next thing. I am, too often, driven by time, a victim of time, expending my little energy frenetically in all directions, rather than allowing for the steady unfolding of that which is essential. Our Advent narratives are not on to the next thing, and then the next, and then the next – rather, they orbit in time around the heart of things, the salvation which all flesh will see.
It seems to me, looking around at times like these, that the mountains and valleys which stand between the way of the Lord and all flesh are as high as ever. The divisions and barriers which keep us separated into our small worlds have not, despite the promises of technology and globalization, disappeared but have all the more so dug in their heels. The splitting up of “all flesh” into different kinds of flesh, different kinds of skin, different nationalities and ethnicities and political silos, seems to me to continue unabated. The economic gaps which separate rich from poor seem only to deepen and deepen. And sometimes these seem to me like immovable mountains to flatten, unbridgeable valleys to fill. And yet, as Howard Thurman’s young chauffeur reminds us, “Even a little energy applied directly to an object, however large, will move it, if steadily applied and given sufficient time to work.”
And so we begin, now, even with our limited human energy, steadily applying it to the mountains and the valleys of injustice, of violence, of disease, of addiction, of ignorance, of fear. Steadily applying our little energies to the barriers which seem to stand between our very human flesh and the healing of God. Steadily applying our voices, our actions, our prayers, our attention. Giving even our little energies sufficient time to work.
Perhaps Advent time,
however strange,
is sufficient time
to work.
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Quotation from Howard Thurman, Deep is the Hunger: Meditations for Apostles of Sensitiveness (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, Seventh Reprinting, 2000), pg. 53.
I owe the contrast between urgency and "that which is essential" to Henri Nouwen, as for example in his Letters to Marc About Jesus: Living a Spiritual Life in a Material World (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pg. 3: "if I were to let my life be taken over by what is urgent, I might very well never get around to what is essential."
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