The Rev. Josephine Robertson
All Saints Bellevue
Advent 1C, Nov 28 2021
Jeremiah 33:14-16
I think perhaps the Advent theme of upheaval and change seems particularly appropriate this year. Here we are, toes hanging over the edge of a new world, while we still mourn the old.
Advent cuts through the old year like a scythe through wheat. Something ends today, something begins today. Something that has already happened, is still happening, has not yet come to be.
Jeremiah cries out with the first birth pangs. Jesus, deep in his ministry counts the contractions. This is Advent. It is many things, a threshold, a door. A new thing, and old thing. The birth pangs, and the baby.
Our lives hang here in the dark of winter at the edge of what was, of the world that will be.
Did you notice? Christmas decorations went up very early this year. No waiting until after Thanksgiving, the stores were decked as soon as the Halloween candy went on clearance. Our society rushes for cheer, for excess, for something that feels familiar. But Advent begins with a litany of our sins and failings, with a reminder that this tired world is weighed down with brokenness. And yet, because we are who we are, we speak aloud our brokenness into God’s ears today. Because even our brokenness is transformed by beauty as we sing in anticipation of what isn’t yet.
While all around us the rush and press of the season pushes us faster and faster, grasps for an old world that doesn’t exist anymore, Advent sits beside the birthing chair counting contractions that cannot be hurried.
One of my favorite carols for this time of year is the Canticle of the Turning by Roy Cooney. It is a paraphrase of Mary’s prophetic Magnificat, and the refrain cries out:
My heart shall sing of the day you bring.
Let the fires of your justice burn.
Wipe away all tears,
For the dawn draws near,
And the world is about to turn.
This is Advent. The moment before the sun breaks above the horizon, when the sky is grey with potential but the fog is still thick as soup around us. We cannot see the shape of the new day, but we know it is coming. We trip over the moment of stillness and potential before the turn.
Here is the truth of Advent that speaks straight to our experience over the last two years: suffering is real. Human beings have been struggling and suffering and dying for generations.
But today both Jeremiah and Jesus look into the face of our pain and offer us a glimpse, a promise that there is another reality possible. It is a world of justice, a world where every tear is wiped away from very real cheeks, where the sick are made well, where fear is gone. Neither of today’s prophets offer us fantasy though. They do not promise that if we endure the suffering of this world in just the right way the next one will be different.
They promise something better, that this world can be different.
It is a promise of a world where fiery eyed young women like Mary and steel-spined old women like Elizabeth become God’s partner’s in a new creation.
Where the stories we have always told grow silent in the inhalation before someone new speaks.
This is Advent.
This is the strange season where we practice being time travelers. Waiting for something that has already happened; for the birth of a tiny helpless baby long ago. And we wait for something that is still happening, for the birth of the new thing that baby represents. Creation has been reborn; and creation is pregnant with something waiting to be born.
Jeremiah speaks to a people all but destroyed. To desperate people crying out for home, safety, peace. Jeremiah speaks to the climate refugees, the families broken by plague. He speaks to the homeless, under overpasses and blackberry brambles. His promise cries out to children sobbing in their mother’s arms, and lonely elders.
Advent is an invitation. To not cling to a dead old world. To let go of what has passed away, even if it was familiar. To become midwives for the new creation. Advent is an invitation for our lives to be different.
Instead we are offered a chance to live out the hope we have, to give ourselves (not just our money, not just stuff, ourselves), to share, to demonstrate what it looks like to live in hope even in the face of suffering, to sing even in the face of chaos, to stand together as siblings in Christ for the good of all. Advent invites us into a different kind of waiting.
We know what we are waiting for, because the prophets, from Jeremiah, to Mary has showed us the way. It is a way of imagination, of trusting that what seems wild and impossible is indeed a future we may dream with God.
This Advent let us imagine something new, let us tell the stories of God breaking into the world. Let us be lights in the darkness of this broken world, sharing healing and possibility with our whole lives.