Sunday, November 30, 2008 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m

Advent Discipline

Calum I. MacLeod
Acting Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 80:1–7
Mark 13:24–37

God, our hope and desire,
we wait for your coming
as a woman longs for the birth,
the exile for her home,
the lover for the touch of his beloved,
and the humble poor for justice.

Janet Morley

If I were to wish you all a happy new year this morning, you might think that the preacher had gone crazy. Or at best had mistaken the end of November for the end of December and was a month early. We always have a few religious professionals (as we like to call them) sitting in the pews here at Fourth Church, and I bet they all know what I mean by saying “Happy New Year.” This first Sunday of Advent marks the beginning of the Christian calendar. We work under many different kinds of calendars. We have the calendar year—January to the end of December. We have the school year, which the church follows as its program year, and there are different academic calendars. But for the purposes of preaching and marking the seasons of the Christian year, this is the first Sunday, the first day of the New Year. So Happy New Year to you all!

The first Sunday in Advent: it would be interesting to do a little brainstorming exercise—what does Advent mean? what is Advent? I wonder what kind of responses we might get from the congregation. Some of you would say, “Well, it’s the run-up to Christmas, the four weeks before Christmas Day.” The wise old heads among you might say it’s a time of preparation for the celebration of the Incarnation, which we celebrate on the twenty fifth of December. It is certainly a time for preparation in different ways: shopping, as we know, and parties and preparation for families gathering and celebrating Christmas.

My favorite preparation story comes from a friend and is about a father who lives in Glasgow, my hometown in Scotland. One week before Christmas he calls his grown son who lives in London. He gets his son on the phone and says, “Son, your mother and I are getting a divorce.” The son is surprised and says, “Dad, what are you talking about? You’ve been married for forty-five years nearly and you’ve been happy most of that time. What’s brought this about?” “Oh,” the father says, “it’s just been too long and we’re done with each other, so we’re getting divorced.” “Hold on,” says the son, “I need to talk to my sister; don’t do anything drastic.”

So the son calls his sister in Leeds and says, “You won’t believe it. I just spoke to Dad, and he says that he and Mum are getting a divorce.” “They most certainly are not,” says the daughter. “I’m going to call them right now. We should get ready to go there and stop this madness.” So she calls her dad and says, “Don’t do anything. My brother and I are coming up, and we’ll be there next week.”

The father puts down the phone and shouts to his wife, “Are you there, dear? I’ve got good news: the kids are coming home for Christmas, and they’re paying their own way.”

Advent is a different kind of preparation. Advent means coming or arrival. We prepare for the arrival of our Lord in the baby born in Bethlehem. We know Jesus is coming. We know that we are preparing for the celebration of the coming of Jesus, and yet we may ask whether we’re engaging in some kind of elaborate game at this time of the year. We know all the words and themes about watching and waiting; we understand that. But, the reality is we all know when Christmas is coming. It’s not a secret; it’s the same every year. We know that we’ll gather right here, many of us, on Christmas Eve, and we’ll sing the same old carols that tug our heartstrings. We’ll hear the familiar readings; we’ll light the Christ candle in the middle of the Advent wreath. And we’ll go home to sleep and then open presents on Christmas morning. It’s all quite familiar. So what does the Advent piece mean?

I hope our scripture for today might give us a little shock, jolt us out of the familiarity of the season. Give us pause to come away from the shopping and the busyness with words of suffering, of darkness, of blood, warnings of signs, commands from Jesus. I hope it might help to reorient our understanding of what Advent is and how we might faithfully live into this season.

So I think the first thing we should be clear about is that when we mark Advent, it is not about this coming Christmas Day—or better, I should say Advent is not only about Christmas Day 2008. It’s not just the counting down of the days until this December 25. In the Christian tradition, marking Advent has about not just about the calendar year but about the deep promises of our faith, promises of hope and redemption and reconciliation for the world through Jesus Christ. Advent is not just about the first coming of the baby in Bethlehem, but about what the tradition calls the second coming. And unless we begin our Advent with at least some sense of what that is or what that might be, we’re not getting the full meaning of Advent. There’s a fine twentieth-century American writer and critic, William Stringfellow, who wrote a meditation on this. He wrote that it is impossible to understand either Advent, except through the relationship of both Advents. We are at the same time preparing for the coming of Christmas and also looking forward to the promised coming and fullness of time, of hope and redemption.

That’s why on this first Sunday of Advent our texts are not focused on the Christmas story or preparing for the Christmas story in that sense, but are focusing on these words of Jesus, these warnings that Jesus gives to the disciples. And the language is complex, quite scary in some senses. Lamar Williamson, the New Testament scholar, offers this warning in his commentary: he writes,“The thirteenth chapter of Mark is a happy hunting ground for persons fascinated by the end of the world.” He’s talking about the people who write the books that you can find in Borders about the “end times,” about the rapture, about how there is going to be a cataclysmic end to the world and those whom God loves will be rescued and taken away and the rest will know the pain of living under the power of Satan and so on. I want to be clear this morning that in reading these texts and in thinking about this that we are not focusing on the end of the world in a series of violent acts, whether that is ecological catastrophe or nuclear winter. German theologian Jürgen Moltmann challenges this understanding of Advent as the coming of the end times. He calls that worldview, in haunting words, “looking for a religious final solution” and that’s not what we’re about. For Moltmann, Advent, the coming of God, is not “about the end at all. What it is about is the new creation of all things.”

Advent is about hope. About the promise of reconciliation, the promise of Emmanuel, the promise that God is with us. About the promise that God is with us in the baby born in the byre near Bethlehem and that God promises to be with us, calling us to new ways of living in our lives, challenging the old ways of doing things that are broken and hurtful and divisive for community and for the world.

And so there is a discipline to be undertaken in Advent. We don’t perhaps think of that in the way we may think of Lent as having Lenten disciplines such as fasting or giving up things. We don’t think about that so much in the holy season of Advent, but it’s there in the text: “ Beware. “ “Keep alert.” “Keep awake.”

Our Advent discipline is a discipline of watching and waiting. Watching for and waiting for the presence of Christ in our lives and in our world. Watching and waiting in the midst of all that the world throws at us, for the Advent discipline is not about engaging in, as they used to say, “pie in the sky when you die.” Rather it is about recognizing that the coming of Christ is transformational for our world and our lives. We’re not pretending that things are not hard, that there are not things to deal with. It is about watching and waiting while recognizing the perils of economic downturn, facing personal tragedy or loss, encountering—as we all have so much in these last days—the horror of what Robert Burns called “man’s inhumanity to man” (and it usually is men who are behind it): Mumbai, India; Nigeria; Congo; strife in our own cities. For you see, this is where Advent lives.

Advent lives in the midst of that reality and in the promise that there is hope. I think the truth about Advent is that it is not really just about these four weeks but that Advent is the place in which the church lives every Sunday, indeed every day of the year. I think Advent is about what it means to be church—to be the community that celebrates incarnation, that lives ministry, grieves death on the cross, and celebrates the resurrection. Advent is what it means to be church: to gather on a day like this, to take ourselves out of the hurly-burly of the shopping and of the season as the marketers would have it and to gather together, and to be able in the midst of it all to affirm, in the words of the famous anti-apartheid campaigner and churchman in South Africa, Allan Boesak,

It is not true that this world and its inhabitants are doomed to die and be lost. This is true: for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him shall not die, but have everlasting life.

It is not true that we must accept inhumanity and discrimination, hunger and poverty, death and destruction. This is true: I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.

It is not true that violence and hatred shall have the last word and that war and destruction have come to stay forever. This is true: for unto us a child is born; to us a son is given in whom authority will rest and whose name will be the Prince of Peace.

It is not true that we are simply victims of the powers of Evil that seek to rule the world. This is true: to me is given authority in heaven and in earth and lo, I am with you always to the end of the age.

It is not true that we have to wait for those who are specially gifted, who are prophets of the church, before we can do anything. This is true: I will pour out my spirit on all people and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young people shall see visions, and your old folks shall dream dreams.

It is not true that our dreams of liberation of humankind, our dreams of justice, of human dignity, of peace are not meant for this earth and its history. This is true: the hour comes and it is now.

So keep awake. Amen.