November 27, 2016
Texts: Isaiah 2:1-5
Romans 13:11-14
Today’s the first Sunday of Advent; we’ve lit the first candle of the season, the candle of Hope. But as the implications of the national election sink in, it’s a little difficult, for me at least, to speak about hope.
We’re entering a period of political and spiritual darkness. Now, there’s been a lot of talk about the political darkness, but about the spiritual darkness, not so much.
There are good reasons for that.
First, while most of us here have disagreed strongly with Mr Trump, he was elected in a democratic process that reflects the genuine pain and loss experienced by so many Americans, and they’ve expressed their sincerely-held political beliefs clearly.
Second, there’s a proper separation in our country between church and state. While we’re free to speak about political issues in the church, we must be very careful about advocating from the pulpit against one person or one party. And there’s good spiritual reason for this. While we can speak against the policies a politician advocates, we can’t presume to know their heart.
Third, at least for me, I’m afraid of being Chicken Little again. “The sky is falling, the sky is falling.” In the last decades at least I have wondered several times whether the sky was falling. How do I know that this will be as bad as I believe it will? Well … I don’t … for sure.
Despite these considerable objections, we’re in an unprecedented period, at least within my lifetime. For many people—undocumented refugees, for instance—the sky is falling … or will be. The church—in its role as church—must speak out. We’ll see what Mr Trump actually does as President, but, taken together with his campaign speeches, his words and actions as President-elect are enough. We must recognize and name the spiritual darkness of our time.
So why this celebrate Advent? Advent is also a season of cold and darkness, a time of waiting, a time when the promise of Jesus’ birth seems much more fragile than usual. It’s a time not to shy away from how cold and dark it actually is. To truly experience the joy of Christmas, we’re invited to acknowledge the sin of the world that Jesus will take away.
Today’s lectionary scriptures also speak of a promise for a future kingdom but speak from amidst a present darkness. It’s how it will be at the fulfillment of that promise. From Isaiah:
In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. … They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Is 2: 1-5)
Notice that these verses are not the description of present reality; rather, they’re the promise of future newness. You have to go on to the following verses to understand the context in which this is spoken, which is a time of current darkness.
[They] have forsaken the ways of your people, O house of Jacob. … Their land is filled with silver and gold, and there is no end to their treasures; their land is filled with horses and there is no end to their chariots, and their land is filled with idols; they bow down to the works of their hands, to what their own fingers have made. So the people are humbled, and everyone is brought low – Do not forgive them.
So the glory of the days when swords are beaten into plowshares is really a promise given during an ugly time of greed and idolatry; the fulfillment of that promise must have looked pretty unlikely at the time.
In Romans there’s a similar movement. The promise: The day of our salvation is near … but for now “let us live … not in [the current] reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.” [Rom 13:11-14] Given that this letter was written about twenty-five years after Jesus’ crucifixion, that promise must have must have felt pretty fragile to the letter’s recipients. There may have been a promise but there was no guarantee and, in the usual sense, no fulfillment for them, either.
Each of these promises of salvation is made in the darkness and requires a period of waiting, a period of uncertainty and more darkness. Nevertheless, people live in hope because these are God’s promises.
What does it mean to live in a time of darkness such as this? Gayle Boss is a good friend from when we both attended the Potter’s House church in the ‘80s; she was here a couple of weeks ago to speak about her new book, All Creation Waits. Gayle lives in Michigan, and the book is a series of Advent meditations on how the animals of the North deal with the darkness and cold of the winter. The reflections seem appropriate for this period in the life of our country, too. This one is about the chickadees who come to the feeder outside her window.
Every cold night those cheery birds walk a tightrope between life and death to greet me the next morning. Half an ounce of feather, flesh, and hollow bone, the chickadee in your palm would feel like the weight of two nickels. Like any living thing lightweight relative to its length and width, it loses heat quickly. So the little bird must eat continually during winter’s short daylight hours to stoke its metabolic fires for the long night to come. Even so, on a below-zero night the fires can go out. Even tucked into the shelter of a tree hole, even with the ability to drop its body temperature substantially to save energy, a chickadee on a winter night burns through all the calories it ate during the day. Before dawn, as soon as there’s light enough to see, the chickadee flutters out, famished, its tiny brain intent on seeds.
Tiny its brain but bigger now in Advent than in spring.
Since late summer [he’s been collecting seeds] and his brain’s memory center has been growing, adding neurons to record the location of every single cached seed – thousands of them. As he eats them up through the rest of the winter, the map in his [brain] will shrink. Will the seed map be gone before the ice and snow?
Will he see another spring? That remains an open question.
We must keep on working, too, doing what there is to do, relying on the seeds of the spirit that we’ve stored before, eating from the birdfeeder that is our community, but we also need to recognize the danger of the cold. For many of us—some more than others—this season marks the beginning of a cold and uncertain time.
The church’s liturgical year—of which Advent is the first season—is marked by its ups and downs, joy and suffering. Christmas and Epiphany are the celebration of Christ’s birth and baptism, Lent marks a quiet period of reflection and penitence, Good Friday is the low point of the year followed by the great celebration of Easter. And so on throughout the year.
In our culture, however, we as individuals may have our ups and downs, but that’s personal. Time itself isn’t supposed to have peaks and valleys. Time is supposed to be homogenous, undifferentiated. We’re an officially optimistic people. It’s always time to go shopping; it’s always a time to feel good; there’s no good time for despair. Even a person who mourns the death of a loved one for “too long” is embarrassing. “Put on a happy face” is the mantra.
The liturgical year, however, allows for a collective experience of the ups and downs: joy and suffering, confession and restitution. Advent is the collective experience of darkness and waiting. It reminds us that we’re in this together, as a people, as a community. It invites us to experience this time and not deflect it. “Don’t get to Christmas too early,” it reminds us; “you don’t need to begin the Christmas carols right after Thanksgiving.” You can allow yourself the uncertainty.
And this is where the hope of that first candle comes in. Here in this particular Advent, we live in a deeper darkness and cold than usual. Given the mood of the country, fascism is almost as likely as recovery to a true democracy. But … hope is not real unless its fulfillment is uncertain.
Well, what are we to have hope in? Will our Christmas present be the Electoral College overturning the election results? Will it be a resolution of our fears of the future, a sense that, “well, it’s not that bad?” No, I suspect that none of us expects God’s promise to turn out that way. So, what is the promise of God?
In his book Lighten Our Darkness, Douglass John Hall reminds us that God does not promise to dispel the darkness completely; God promises to give us a candle to guide us through the darkness … with hope.
This is the promise of Advent hope: the light in our darkness. Unlike our usual conception, God lives within the darkness, too, with us. Even there, we will find God’s relentless love, unconditional forgiveness, and commitment to nonviolence; God still invites us to the strength and beauty of community. God promises us that though “the arc of the moral universe is long, [still] it bends towards justice.” In fact, no person has ever had the guarantee that “this is going to turn out all right.” Maybe this time it will; but in my lifetime, probably it won’t.
Living on those promises from within that darkness may sound like pretty thin hope. “That’s it!??” we say. “A prescription for love, forgiveness, nonviolence? What’s that up against the power of racism, the evil of xenophobia, the mental instability of a person with such power?” But, yeah, that’s it: in the darkness of Advent, God calls us to a life of faith. We may find it easier to feel that faith later next month in the light of Christ’s birth, but that thin hope is what we’re given now in this time of darkness. The faith to act out of relentless love, especially toward those who see things differently; to offer unconditional forgiveness to them; to continue to make sacrifices for others; to commit ourselves to nonviolence in word as well as deed; to keep ourselves rooted in our community. In a time like this, such hope is not, to say the least, easy. But that’s what we’re called to.
None of this, of course, denies the importance of action, of activism in this time of waiting. The faith that we’re given in this dark time is not a call to passivity or quietism. Some of us will intensify our activism; others will sit to pray in the darkness, to gather strength and wisdom for what comes next. But whether in activism or prayer, Advent reminds us that each must be bathed in love, forgiveness, nonviolence, sacrifice. Our faith serves to remind us that, although his policies may be evil, Mr Trump is not: he is no more, no less sinful than we. To demonize him or his supporters as the source of the evil we now face is to ignore the awesome power of the “principalities and powers of this age” who may co-opt any of us any time.
We burn the candle of hope, and hope is always born of uncertainty. A promise does not need hope unless there is uncertainty. Now, in this time after the election, in this particular time of darkness and cold, we’re given the assurance that God’s light will illuminate some small part of our darkness. Things may yet get much worse; there are no guarantees, but the promise, the hope, this community will still be here.