December 2, 2007
The First Sunday of Advent (Year A)
Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44
We begin a new year today, a new church year, as Advent One marks the beginning. It is the beginning of hope, the beginning of love, the beginning of life, and we know that something is coming, something important and wonderful.
Advent is always for me a season of pregnancy, of knowing that someone very special is about be born, and still knowing that person because they move within the womb of the mother.
My daughter E* is pregnant this Advent. The D*s and I are expecting our second grandchild in May, and so my daughter is for me this season an icon of Advent, of expectancy, of hope, and of knowing that someone very special is going to be born. She knows that child as Mary knew Jesus, as Elisabeth knew John, as every mother knows her unborn child.
And we who follow Christ, male or female, parent or not, also know that hope and expectancy and promise that pregnancy foretells. We know Christ even as we wait for Christ to come again. It is one of the true mysteries of our faith, the knowing and the not knowing. Both true at the same time. And I would suggest that as long as we are human, we will always be in a state of not knowing and knowing at the same time. For none of us knows the whole, any more than the mother who holds her babe in her womb knows the whole of who that child will be.
Scripture, of course, gives us clues about who Christ is and who Christ will be, and how and what that means for us and for our understanding of ourselves as people of faith, and for how we know the unknowable God who is circling around us while yet we wait for God to come again. Isaiah in this morning’s reading suggests that when Christ comes again as when Jesus was born two thousand years ago, the kingdom of God will have certain traits that will make it recognizable as God’s reign. And those signs will be a kind of peace the world has never known, not when Jesus was born the last time, nor in the world today, a kind of peace where swords are plows and spears are used for pruning food, enough for the world to eat. It will be a time when war is no more.
The gospel warns us that when the time comes, we had best be ready for it, and that some will be lifted up to be with God and some will not. Most of us, of course, assume that we are the one that will be lifted up, either as individuals or as a nation, for our lives are filled with the abundance of what seems like God’s favor. We are educated; we have roofs over our heads; we have medical care; and we have an abundance of entertainment and resources for about anything that can be imagined. And sometimes we mistake that for God’s favor.
But I think the value of this pregnant time of waiting, of setting a season apart for actively waiting, is in re-reading the lessons that foretold the coming of Jesus and seeing that the expectations of the writer and the readers of them in their day were far different from the reality of Jesus. I would like to suggest that our abundant lives are not so much a sign of God’s favor as an opportunity for us to be instigators and co-creators of a planet that is ready for God’s coming again, by working to make this planet a place as described in Isaiah, a place where we are not looking at our neighbor and wondering how they will feel when they are left behind but maybe just seeing our neighbor, maybe redefining who our neighbor is.
This struck me particularly this year as I read the gospel and it said, “Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken up and one will be left.” And I remembered the grandmother I met this summer in Tanzania who was grinding maize for her family in a stone trough using another stone. Two hours a day she grinds maize to feed the large family her son has amassed. The memory of her work, back bent over, knees on the un-cushioned dry ground which is the floor of her cow dung and stick home, reminded me that she perhaps is the one who will be lifted, and I, who had the privilege of returning to my luxurious tent with percale sheets and running water and gourmet food, was probably the one who would be left behind. I have never even ground meal. The lesson challenges me; and thus I am challenging you: to remember that the things that I think of as grace and gifts from God, the abundance of my life, the abundance of our lives, is certainly not a sign of God’s favor, but an opportunity for me, for you, for us, to be ones who prepare the world for the coming of Jesus again.
And I also thought of the prayer we pray each week with thousands of other people of faith, “The world now has the means to end extreme poverty. We pray we will have the will.” And I thought of these lessons of promise and hope and the coming of Jesus, and the preparing of the world, the pregnancy of the world, ripe with anticipation and hope; and I wondered, could we really end extreme poverty? And if we did, would there be no woman grinding maize for two hours every day to feed her family because abundant food didn’t require that of her and because we, you and I, believed in the promises enough to act on them to make the world a place fit for Jesus to come again, a place we can hand back to God, grateful that God entrusted us with the stewardship of this planet earth?
I wonder if we can together get excited about doing our part to prepare for the coming of Jesus again. Today we have symbols of that preparation in our service, not only in the words of the service and the now familiar prayer that we pray at the end of the service, but in the actions of our children who will bring forward food for those who cannot afford it, in our pledges that we will deposit in the basket as we come forward for communion, in the prayers we will pray for healing, and in the meeting we will have after church to begin to work hand in hand with Esperanza Academy, to provide education for seventh and eighth grade girls that they will never have to grind corn as their grandmothers do or did, but will know that with their wit and their education and their bellies full, because they get three healthy meals every day, that they can be part of changing the world around them. And we can help.
These are, of course, only a few of the ways that this parish is already acting as we live out our faith and live into the expectation that Jesus is coming again. But act we must, not expecting a savior who will come and do it all for us, but expecting a savior who will work with us, hand in hand, heart to heart, to make sure that all people are wanted and beloved and provided for. “Be ready,” says the lesson from Matthew this morning; be ready like a mother who prepares for the birth of her child; be ready and get ready by following the life and the values that Jesus taught us when he was here the last time. For now is the beginning of hope, the beginning of love, the beginning of life. And we know that something, someone is coming, something, someone, important and wonderful. Be ready.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd