Home
Minister
Young Church
Music
Governance
Calendar
This Week
Waiting
December 8, 2002
"Advent says to us that life is a continual process of waiting, of waiting expectantly for what will come to be. Sometimes we get what we wait for, sometimes we don't."Recently, I attended a preaching lecture at Harvard Divinity School on the topic of “Preaching to Themes, Seasons, and Occasions.” The speaker was the Rev. Peter Gomes, minister of Harvard's Memorial Church, and once upon a time my academic advisor at the Divinity School. I didn't particularly care for Peter as an advisor--I think he was much too busy for the job--but I have come to appreciate his books, lectures, sermons, and occasional speeches. He is a master of the spoken word and he has a wonderful sense of humor. Though we differ theologically--he is a Baptist, after all--I am usually interested in what he has to say on most any religious topic.--Richard M. Fewkes
Part of Peter's recent lecture had to do with the season of Advent. Peter pointed out that in Christian theology, Advent is not a particularly cheerful season, despite its run up to the joyful celebration of Christmas. It is “a time of watchfulness and waiting,” and waiting, as we know, is never an easy thing to do. As one who always arrives early, I can personally attest to the truth of that.
Advent, Peter said, is actually pretty “grim.” It is the time when traditional Christians look forward to the Second Coming of Christ, which will not necessarily be a happy time, as according to the scriptures Christ will come as judge of both “the quick and the dead.” Advent is a time, especially, when our awareness is drawn to “the shortness and futility of human life.”
In other words, Advent is not just a time of happy anticipation for Christmas. Rather, it is about the renewal of courage in the face of despair. Its purpose is “to take people from where they are and to move them toward where they want to be.” At the moment of our greatest existential despair--and at the darkest time of year,-- Advent would lead us toward what Christians believe will be “the ultimate expression of peace and justice and mercy.” Advent, then, in Peter's words, is a time of “anticipation of the un-experienced.” It is a season of hope and promise rather than one of fulfillment.
I have thought a lot about this in recent weeks. As events in the world continue their downward spiral and the specter of war looms, I have felt my own spirits begin to flag, my own hope begin to fail. The Advent season might be seen as giving us permission to look on the dark side. As Roy Phillips reminded us in the morning's reading, “misery is an ever-present fact in this world.” Not everyone is feeling cheerful this time of year. All of us have darkness in our lives “right now.” As Roy suggested, that darkness consists of such things as “failure, guilt, shame, sadness, disappointment, compulsion, puzzlement, loneliness, frenzy, boredom, fear, hopelessness.” The reality, as Peter Gomes said, is “grim.”
Advent asks us to look into the darkness that is there in all our lives. It asks us to face our shortcomings and to accept our weakness. It offers us the opportunity to face our grief and to consider our losses. It assumes that we cannot make spiritual progress until our pride and our defenses have been stripped away, until we face ourselves as we truly are, and until we acknowledge our powerlessness to change all the things that need to be changed in our lives.
I don't think we have to believe in a literal “second coming” in order for this to be a useful exercise. Advent is about the anticipation of light and hope. “Now is our salvation near. The night is far spent; the day is at hand.” “The light shines on in the darkness and the darkness has not put it out.” Advent is not about realization--not yet at least--but it does affirm the possibility, even the probability evidenced by hard experience, that things will get better eventually.
“What is the light for your life?” asked Roy Phillips, “Not merely for someone else in another time and place. The darkness and the light and salvation--here and now in your life, our lives . . . ?” Advent asks us to strip away our protective layers, to expose ourselves, if you will, to see ourselves clear and as we truly are. It asks us to look our mortality directly in the eye. Then it asks us to do the hard work of searching out the hopeful places in our lives, the watered places of our parched and arid spirits. Advent is a desert time, and so it should provoke our thirst for higher things. It asks us to get on with it.
My colleague Richard Fewkes once wrote of the Advent season of waiting, “. . .that we don't always get what we want and hope for, in fact rarely, and . . . we must all the days of our lives wait expectantly and with patience for what will only be a partial fulfillment of our hopes and longings.”
The good news here--and I believe there is good news here!--is that we are not alone. We share in the universal human condition. Life is not always easy. It contains suffering--our own suffering--and it ends in the finality of death. It is filled with loss and grief. “All the generations have had to bear this heavy truth,” says a reading I often use to open a memorial service.
But it also contains all we shall ever know of love and joy and peace. That is the message of Christmas, which follows the dark time of Advent. “A child is born!” “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” But we cannot really experience the hope and light and joy of Christmas if we have not first traveled the dark journey into our own hearts.
As Roy Phillips suggested, Advent can be “an opportunity [not only] to become more fully aware of our own darkness” but most importantly “an opportunity, if we will enter into it, for our spiritual growth.”
For many years now, I have thought of the Advent and Christmas season as a time to deepen my own spiritual practice. Often, this has taken the form of spiritual reading, but it has also included making opportunities to listen to the wonderful music of the season, and to worship in the company of others. This is a season, above all, for communion with others, both friends and strangers. If Advent asks us to look more closely at ourselves, then Christmas invites us to look outward into the world. Both perspectives are necessary. We must look not only to what is separate and unique in us, but also to what is similar and universal and which joins us to others. True spiritual practice envisions both things: separation and communion.
What is the source of our hope? It is that “mighty cloud of witnesses” of which the old prayer speaks, which surrounds us and accompanies us on our perilous way. It is our friends and loved ones, and that untold multitude by whose invisible labors our lives are upheld. It is the comforting presence of those others who inspire us to be the better people we dream of being.
It is those, both the known and the unknown, who have lived good lives before us and who have striven to make the world a kinder and fairer place. It is the beauty of nature. It is work to do and charity to give and justice to make. It is peace in the midst of strife, courage in the face of loss and loneliness. It is the good fight fought, and it is the battle avoided. It is the gift of life: of being alive on this once only day in our lives, the only day we can be certain of, the only day that matters at all.
Dr. Alden Welch, who is the father of Amy Wallace [one of our members] and a Methodist minister, suggests in an Advent sermon that Advent is not about Jesus Christ returning but about what we should be doing to prepare ourselves to receive the Christ, however you conceive of that name. While we are waiting, he suggests, we should be:
Helping the needy. Caring for the little ones. Ministering to the sick and dying. Assisting those who are old or weak. Doing what [we] can to end violence. Treating everyone the way they want to be treated.“May it not be,” he writes, “that Christ is coming to us all the time, and that we just miss it, as we miss so many things? As the mystic Fenelon reminds us, 'How rare it is to find a soul quiet enough to hear God speak.'”
I am not an orthodox Christian, but I have always liked the ancient monastic tradition of greeting every stranger to the monastery door “as if he were the Christ.” “Oh Christ, is that you?” asks the ever-hopeful monk. What if we were really to treat everyone like a god incarnate? What if we put our waiting to good use in acts of mercy, righteousness, and justice? What if? Oh, what a different world this could be from the one we know now, the one we mistakenly believe to be the real world, because we have not yet done all we can to make it otherwise.
Advent, says my friend Bruce Clary, is “a time to consider those forgotten things that give birth to joy, peace, and goodwill.” It is a time, he says, “to say to those who sit in darkness that upon them the light will shine, that God is with them, and that the divine visits their lives not in golden splendor but in the rough-hewn simplicity of their needs and care.”
And so, we are waiting, waiting not only for the Christmas festival of joy, but waiting still for that better world of our dreams. What use shall we make of our time here? How shall we prepare our hearts for the Christmas promise to come? What works await our hearts and hands? What words of hope and sympathy and courage remain to be spoken by our mouths? What acts of resistance remain to be made by our minds and bodies to the powers that be?
These are the questions which Advent poses for us in this cold and darkening time. They await our answers, the answers that only we can give. May we make the best of this time, and of the times still to come. And may we find the light that shines in the darkness, in our own individual darknesses. May we use it well to light the way not only for ourselves, but for all those who stand in the darkness with us. May we always show “an affirming flame.” So be it. Amen.
The Rev. Harold E. Babcock
