BILLTESKA

SERMON ON ADVENT 3C ~ Joyful Longing and the Sanctification of Time
December 17, 2006
HOLY TRINITY & ST. ANSKAR

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice!

+ In the Name of God the holy and Undivided Trinity

“We are sorely hindered by our sins.” Ain’t that the truth! Although, in the elegantly reserved high style of the Prayerbook, it is something of an understatement. The fact is, we are not just “sorely hindered”, our sins are killing us. They trap us in a world that is getting ever darker, whose only destination is annihilation. As individuals, death is closer to each of us every day, and those days are ever shorter. And the world itself is doomed. My roses bloomed last week, in the middle of December, here in Minnesota. The polar ice caps are melting. Hurricanes, and tsunamis, and plagues in Africa. Meanwhile, our leaders, the spiritual descendants of John’s Brood of Vipers flail around making things worse, trying to get us to say “climate change” instead of “global warming” (as if there were really any doubt about what is happening), and to believe that Iraq is something other than an unmitigated calamity.

Have you ever driven around a corner too fast and gone off the road? There is a single instant when you go out of control, and there is nothing more you can do to avoid the crash. Before that instant you could recover and straighten out, but after it, all you can do is hope you won’t be hurt. That is the image that came to mind last week when I heard that the U.S. government was rounding people up and sending them to concentration camps. (Yes, concentration camps. I refuse to say climate change and I refuse to say detention facility. The torturing of language is a of mark of totalitarianism, along with the torturing of persons, as Orwell so memorably taught us.) Our concentration camps are private, for-profit prisons in remote sections of the South, where the climate is slow to change and friendlier to the political purpose. The victims from Worthington, MN were first imprisoned in an army camp near Des Moines, until Gov. Bilsack decreed they be allowed to see their attorneys, whereupon the INS moved them to rural Georgia. The Latino workers were dragged away on the Feast of our Lady of Guadalupe. This is terror as propaganda, and there seems to be nothing we can do about it. Have we passed the point at which we can recover from the crash? From the Wrath that is to come?

I don’t know. But don’t kid yourself that it just can’t happen. (We have Abraham for our father!) You had better repent of that idea. The axe is laid to the root of the tree. That’s the proclamation of Advent. Forget the comforting sentimentality about pregnancy, and all the Christmas kitsch. Remember that kitsch goes hand-in-hand with fascism, just as the deformation of language, and torture, and mass deportations do. The message of Advent is the inescapable reality of death, both personal and national, death that inscribes its illegitimate authority in our flesh and in our lives: selfishness, arrogance, greed, stupidity, venality, cruelty ~ spiritual wickedness in our hearts and in high places, which is to say in the seats of power all over the world, and especially right now in Washington. And the Winnower has already lit His bonfire for the chaff and picked up His winnowing fork. THAT is the message of Advent.

So, Rejoice…and again I will say Rejoice! Today, the Sunday of the Brood of Vipers, is called Gaudete ~ Rejoice ~ after the first word of the proper Introit, taken from the Epistle. Here is one of those great paradoxes of the faith: even as we are dying both as individuals and as a nation, we are called to rejoice. And the joy to which we are called is not some lip-licking, self-satisfied schadenfreude, not a nasty delight in somebody else’s getting what we think they have coming, but joy in the midst of our own loss and annihilation. The Advent paradox is also a mystical paradox, expressed in apocalyptic terms. Our annihilation is our birth. Those who lose their life will find it.

We express the paradox today on Gaudete Sunday by a slight change in liturgical color: the purple of dread and mourning transfigured in the joy of anticipation. I think it significant that rose is increasingly popular today. There is something intuitively right about this little use. It is not merely a revival of some fussy, Tridentine vestige, but an expression of the Advent Mystery: joy in spite of all appearances to the contrary. The processes of this world ~ of the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son, Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility ~ may lead only to death ~ personally, politically, and historically ~ but Advent is here to tell us that this inexorable process can be transfigured ~ transformed into its opposite by God’s gracious Act.

Those death-dealing processes are what the Advent Collect means by the time of this mortal life. Time. Merciless time. Chronos who devours his children. Time as mortality. Time as slavery to death. Each of the Church’s seasons emphasizes an aspect of the Good News, and Advent shows us that this dreadful time is holy because God’s Son has entered it. Like the waters of the Red Sea, which blocked the way of the escaping Hebrew slaves, God has changed time itself from an enemy into an ally. The Spirit of God blew upon the waters, opening a way for the People of God to cross on dry land, the waters standing like walls on either side. And then the same water came crashing down upon the pursuing armies ~ the armies of Death ~ and destroyed them. The Spirit of God turned the enemy, the Sea, into an ally. Likewise, the Visit of the One greater than John in the time of this mortal life conquers, tames, and sanctifies time.

The Church, the creature of that same Spirit, lives in the world as the extension in time of the Incarnation of the Son, continuing His work of sanctifying time. That same time of growth and decay, birth and death, is redeemed by the life of the Church in its worship. One aspect of this work is holy longing: the tearful sense of emptiness and unfulfillment ~ of exile, of having not yet arrived, of separation from the Beloved. The Muslim ecstatic poet, Jelaluddin Rumi, compared our calling to that of a reed flute, or a lute ~ we can sing so beautifully only because we are empty:

The Prophet has said
that a true seeker must be completely empty like a lute
to make the sweet music of Lord, Lord.

When the emptiness starts to
get filled with something,
the one who plays it puts it down
and picks
up another.

There is nothing more subtle and delightful
than to make
that music.

Stay empty and held
between those fingers, where where
gets drunk with nowhere.*

The paradox of Advent, and the Mystery of the Sanctification of Time, is that emptiness is fulfillment. Our longing is the instrument of our vocation as the Sanctifier of Time. Our longing is what transforms time from an otherwise meaningless succession of events, in which our personal stories end in annihilation, into Holy History, history that has an End, in the sense of a purpose, but which is never finished. (Or, if it is, its conclusion is beyond human imagining ~ no man knows the day and the hour, not even the Son.) We never reach the rainbow’s end. The higher we get, the further the horizon recedes. And even as we long for the end ~ O, that you would rend the heavens and come down! ~ the delay of the consummation, as every carnal lover knows, is itself delicious. Advent is holy longing. Longing is our human vocation. And our longing itself is our joy.

AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!

*Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi

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The collect for today prays for the grace to forsake our sins. It does not pray that each of us may receive grace to forsake his or her individual sins, but that we may have the grace to forsake our sins. I will not suggest that there is no inner, individual meaning to this prayer, but isn’t it interesting that we usually think that is all it means. Our consciousness tends to be so individualist that our sins seems an obvious reference my own shortcomings and failings (not to mention yours!). But it says our sins, and that is a collective thing. However important it surely is for me to forsake my own individual sins, it is much more important for us to forsake our sins.

Reinhold Niebhur wrote an influential book entitled Moral Man and Immoral Society. I refer to the title only as a good expression of modern consciousness: right and wrong, sin and salvation, are an individual matter. Society is by nature corrupt and irredeemable. The best we can do is to avoid being too much tainted by it. This is a central theme of American Protestantism, alongside its reforming streak. From separatist communities, such as the Amish, to the early fundamentalists, who shunned any political activity, to the later rapturists, who believe that salvation is to be snatched bodily out of the world as an individual, while the rest of society and the world itself is consumed in the wrath of God, redemption has been seen as God’s gift to certain individuals, or separated elect groups, not to the whole society or the whole creation. The latter can, literally, go to hell.

This is by no means the only, nor even the dominant current in our religious history. There is also the reforming streak I mentioned, which sees social improvement as a religious duty, beginning with the abolition of slavery, and eventually extending to the liberation of other oppressed minorities, and the attempt to end all poverty and injustice. This too is American religion, just as authentically American as the over-sexed revival tent preacher. Martin Luther King Jr. is as American as Elmer Gantry. Still, when we hear someone speak of our sins, we are more likely to think of Elmer Gantry’s hypocrisy and sexual predation than of the social sins of racism and injustice. But those are the kinds of sins that interested the prophets, not Elmer Gantry’s zipper problem.

The sins that the prophets warn us to forsake in preparation for the Day of the LORD are sins of social injustice. Ancient apocalyptic writing shares this concern with still more ancient prophecy: the Day of the LORD is about the recreation of the world as a Kingdom of Peace and Justice. The prophets saw it as a restoration of the Golden Age of King David. Baruch exults in his vision of the Jews returning from Babylon to Jerusalem, on a royal road prepared by God. Isaiah sees the LORD Himself walking on that road, prepared by human agency at the call of the One Crying in the Wilderness: YOU prepare His Way. The prophets tended to think in historical terms. What they prophesied was to happen in time and history, ushering in a new age. The apocalyptic writers thought in cosmic terms ~ this world, time, and history was to be swept away, and a whole new creation to take its place.

But in both cases, the events were social and communal, not merely individual. The picture of chosen individuals hovering over the death throes of a damned world on their way to an otherworldly heaven is a strange mixture of ancient apocalyptic imagery and modern individualism. And there is no joy in it. Not for anyone who really loves creation or his fellow creatures. What joy could there be in watching them burn up? But the collect calls us to greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer ~ that is our Liberator. To do so, we must forsake our sins. Not just mine and yours (especially yours), but ours.

To see the coming of the Liberator as anything other than a disaster, we have to forsake our so-cial sins, the structures of oppression, because His mission is to destroy them. That is the nature of Redemption, of Liberation. As a society, we must forsake the structures of oppression, which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. For example, we must repent of our willingness to live easily at the expense of our fellow human beings, and we must repent of our suicidal assault on the planetary life-support systems. If we do not forsake these sins, there will be no joy in His coming.

Because these structures will be destroyed one way or another. Either we will forsake them and dismantle them with all deliberate speed (to quote a great phrase from the lexicon of American reformism), or they will be dissolved in Apocalyptic cataclysm, people fainting with fear and with foreboding for what is coming on the earth. The choice is ours. Either we will heed the prophets’ warnings or not. But one thing is clear to those who are able to listen to John the Forerunner ~ wild-eyed and ragged and disreputable and marginal as he is ~ the time is at hand. The Liberator is on His way.

His winnowing fork is in His hand, to clear His threshing floor, and to gather
the wheat into His granary; but the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire

This sounds frightful, but it is good news to be greeted with joy by all who will forsake that sin, whose hold on the world He is coming to loose.