A Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent

Welcome this morning. You’ve made it through Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Shop Small Saturday. You may be here spent from hours of travel, worn thin by family interactions and obligations. Your pants may be uncomfortable after a few days of overeating. Your wallet may be lighter as the spending of this consumer season kicks into high gear. Your schedule may look like it’s time to get a personal assistant or it may be far less busy than you had hoped it would be.

And you’ve arrived here this morning to begin preparing for Christmas in this season of Advent. Advent, meaning coming or arrival, is the beginning of the liturgical calendar, the way we tell time in the church. Today we begin a new year of lectionary readings working our way through the Bible again in the third of our three-year cycle of designated scripture readings for each day, each Sunday. This year we will be hearing from the Gospel of Luke. It is from Luke that most of the infancy narrative of Jesus comes. You may have come hoping to hear from that story today.

And then we get this gospel. Maybe not what you expected. Not the story of Jesus’ birth or anything leading up to it. Not anything remotely tinged with tidings of comfort and joy. In fact, this reading from Luke comes from the last portion of the gospel before Jesus’ passion begins. Jesus is preparing his disciples for his departure. Honest to goodness, just two verses from the ending of today’s gospel we find this: “The chief priests and scribes were looking for a way to put Jesus to death”, … Not exactly cheerful good news.

As I was thinking about, or really fretting about this gospel and what I would say, I suddenly remembered something my daughter had taught me.

When Wyly was around three, she was at the office with me playing with a pile of wooden nativity pieces and other items. As I was working on something I heard her tapping or really banging two of the wooden pieces together. “Look mama, they the same! They the same!” she said as she came over to me with the two pieces in her hands.
Into my palms she placed a carved olive-wood baby Jesus with the swaddled baby’s arms outstretched and then she handed me a cross that was roughly the same size.

“See mama, they the same,” she said proudly, showing me how the baby’s outstretched arms fit along the arms of the cross.

“I do see,” I said, holding the pieces in my palm. But, in truth, that was the first time I’d seen it quite that clearly. I wanted to tell her why they weren’t the same. I wanted to separate the dearness of a swaddled baby and the brutal instrument of that child’s death. To tell her that these two things were very different. But I saw that they were not different at all.

They are the same. Jesus at his humble birth. Jesus at his humiliating death. God made man to live and die as one of us.

Christ was born. Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again. We are here in this in-between time, trying to make the pieces fit together, trying to live into the great mystery of God’s redeeming love.

To romanticize the humble birth of Jesus into a glowy Hallmark card is wholly inadequate.

Looking at the infant Jesus’ face without seeing the brutality of the cross is woefully insufficient.

To brush aside end-of-times readings like today’s as inconvenient scripture is sidestepping the power of God.

Also, treating today’s reading with certainty as if it is an exact forecast of the end, that Jesus’ return is within our ability to predict, is prideful, arrogant even.

So, even though it may make us uncomfortable, this reading is a very rational place to start our whole church year. In a place where we are in the dark, in a place where we are watching for signs, signs that God can indeed make all of this fit together.

Today’s reading is an invitation to consider what the incoming of the Kingdom of God might be like and what it is we are to do while we wait and watch. How do we shape ourselves into something that when our piece is held up against the baby with outstretched arms and the cross, we are in some humble semblance, the same. That’s our work this season, to find ways to do just that.

Our Friday Book Group selection is theologian Paula Gooder’s book, The Meaning Is in the Waiting. Gooder discusses how the Hebrew word to come is the same word used for to go. She points out that this makes the word dependent on who is saying it and where you are standing. “If you are with the person then the command is to go, but if you stand a way off and call, then the command is to come.” And she says, “With God, the command is both to go and to come.”

It gives a whole new meaning to the expression I don’t know if I’m coming or going, doesn’t it?

Both God and Jesus command us to go out into the world, leaving behind what is comfortable and known AND they command us to come, to come to them and follow. Coming and going with God, with Jesus, is the same, because no matter the direction we are headed, we are never alone. We are either heading out with them as companions on our way. Or we are coming to God, to Jesus, whose arms are always outstretched waiting for us.

Whether we are going to enter the Kingdom of God or whether it is coming into our very midst. Whether we are following Jesus or whether Jesus is stepping into our very lives. It is the same. Our call is still to be alert, watchful, expectant.

It is up to us to pay attention and watch for God being revealed, unveiled right in front of us. This is what apocalypse means biblically. Not some kind of mushroom cloud of destruction, but a revealing, the curtains being pulled away to show us what we could not or would not see with our human eyes and hearts.

The signs in the sun and the stars are not a warning about some coming destruction but a vision of hope, a vision of how God is at work to continue redeeming this world. And we are called to come and to be a part of that and then go out showing forth God’s love in this life right now.

Some of y’all might know how much I love gospel music. One of my favorites is the great Mahalia Jackson. In my regular rotation of songs, Advent, Christmas or not, is Mahalia Jackson singing “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” I was singing along the other day and realized that there were verses she was singing not in our hymnal. Ones I hadn’t heard in church.

The last verse of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is

He made me a watchman,
Upon the city walls
And if I am a Christian
I am the least of all.

We are called to be watchman in this season of waiting. Going to the mountain, or coming to the mountain to TELL IT OUT, to tell out how we see signs of hope.

Last night one of those signs of hope happened in my family. My collected family that has been graced to me. You know the ones, the people God has given you along the way, often just when you need them most. The Wilson sisters welcomed a fourth strong woman to their girl gang. Baby Tootwo, that’s her name for right now, came into this world just as Advent began. Or she was set forth into this world depending on where you are standing. A miraculous sign of hope to us that God is not done with us yet. And she is also a sign for us that we have work to do for her and for the one we are waiting for.

May we learn to become watchman on the city walls looking for the unveiling of love in this world. And may we also come down from our posts and into the world learning to stretch out our arms in God’s love, making the outline of our lives, held up against the outstretched arms of the baby in the manger, somehow a little more the same.

Amelia McDaniel