First Sunday of Advent, Year A

And here is a sermon from early December that feels soo sooo long ago and yet was really just a couple weeks ago. 

Here are the readings.

God put a rainbow in the sky, a rainbow in the sky, a rainbow in the sky.

            Sometimes it breaks my heart a little when I learn about something—and think to myself, wow, how did I go so long not knowing this existed and how much this will improve my life. It’s that “where have you been all my life feeling!” It happened with coffee…but it happened last week too with a song. It’s a song called “God Put a Rainbow in the Sky,” and the recording I heard had Mahalia Jackson singing it. My friend, Isabel, mentioned a moving speech she heard by poet Maya Angelou where she referenced this song. Angelou called her friends and the literary community who were honoring her at the National Book Awards her personal rainbows in the sky. Rainbows are powerful images for us, but I think we often forget their meaning. It’s more than the result of weather patterns. And more than just a sign to Noah that the rain was over---the rainbow is a sign of God’s covenant never to destroy all of humanity again. It is a sign of light when it seemed like all there would be is darkness. Mahalia sings, “the sun grew dim and the days was dark, then God put a rainbow in the sky.” As we have moved into the dim, dark winter months, and as we enter the season of Advent aware of the meaning of light and dark we need the powerful image of the rainbow, as a reminder of God’s promise to all of us. The rainbow is a connecter between us and the divine.

            The rainbow as a reminder of God’s covenant helps me understand a distinction between eschatology and apocalypse which is helpful in approaching our Gospel reading. Eschatology is one of those fancy theological words that needs defining before we move on. Translated literally from the Greek it is the study of the last. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “The study concerned with the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell.” And while this is a perfectly good definition, I think it misses an essential part of our Judeo-Christian worldview: the last times are not all destruction and ruin, but the last times are the perfection and culmination of God’s created order. Culturally we understand the apocalyptical langue to be the destruction at the end of time—but as we enter into Advent and approach our scripture for today—let’s look at it from the perspective of people who know our rainbow covenant with God, and looking at culmination, completion and perfection rather than gloom, destruction and God’s fiery wrathful return.  

            So then as we approach our Gospel text we can do so knowing that we are entering Advent a time of wonder and awe. We know it is a season of preparation, but our Gospel passage suggests it is not a gentle preparation. There is urgency to our preparation. We aren’t talking about preparing for Christmas. Not talking about checking your lists, and preparing for family and fun. We aren’t talking about preparing the church with greens and poinsettias. In some ways, Jesus seems to suggest it will be hard to prepare, since we won’t know what time this will happen. But this is in part because we are in the mode of Advent-Calendar like preparation. We want to open the little boxes and draw closer to a day we know is coming, and a day we have experienced before. But this first Sunday of Advent is about something bigger than Christmas. It is a larger scale preparation. It is an eschatological preparation. How are we going to be in the last times? How will we be living? How will we as the church have transformed our society into one of Justice and love? How will we help our neighbors and friends turn their swords into plowshares? How will we help them make their spears into pruning hooks? And how will we help articulate a vision for how God wants this world to be? This is the sort of preparation that we are asked to consider on this first Sunday of Advent.

            When Jesus compares the last times to a thief in the night that we are unprepared for, there is a part of us that in our world of fear and terrorism thinks the response to this is to hunker down, to be always prepared, to see something and say something, to be suspicious of people who seem different, or to make assumptions about people of different religions. But the thing about this thief in the night is that there is no way we will know when they are coming. There is very little in truth we can do at that time--but we can change how we live up until that moment. We can begin to live into a life full of the knowledge and love of Jesus: knowing he has come, and knowing he will come again. We aren't going to know when that will be--no matter how ready we are. Similarly no one but Noah and his family knew when the flood would be--there is nothing those people could have done to know the time. So then the point is not to focus on the when-or even really the what of it. But instead we are to make the lives we are living, and the life of our community one that is prepared for transformation.

            In order to be prepared for transformation during Advent, we must first make it seem possible. I don't mean that we have to make the whole transformation in these next four weeks, but I do think part of our Christian witness is to vision an alternative. An alternative to what? you might be thinking. Fair question. Our passage from Isaiah suggests an alternative to a state of war to a state of growth and harvest. Here we have a literal transformation. The very implements of war become those that provide food. The transformation is also one filled with imagination—think of the creative genius that imagined a sword turning into a ploughshare. And in Romans Paul suggests a shift from darkness to light, from living for the flesh to living honorably. These two examples tell us about the transformation that is possible with God. Things that seem intractable and unchanging, like war, darkness and fleshy living are transformed into something new. These visions are an alternative to things in our lives that feel like inevitability--by this I mean things like climate change, global capitalism, domestic violence. Maybe those things feel to large. How about the inevitability of hungery people in our neighborhood? What about repairing a relationship with a friend or family member that has frayed? What about visioning ways of helping folks who feel vulnerable and lonely around the holidays? Those seem smaller, and more possible. And we will have an opportunity with our December outreach project to buy Christmas presents for New Yorkers in need--which will vision a world in which we at St. Ann's are better and better connected to folks in need all around us. And even the bigger visions, only have to be visions. If we take on the inevitability of Global Capitalism we don't have to start a new, more love and justice filled economy--but we do need to think about what that might look like.

            How do we do that work? How do we vision? It won't happen on it's own. And it won't happen by accident. We need to make time to sit together, talk together, and make this a priority. Somehow I think we have come to the other side of the rainbow. We understand Advent in light of God's enduring promises to us, and the transformations we are asked to prepare for at this time of year.  Our end of the bargain, our side of the covenant has to be receiving the rainbow and understanding it's significance. The significance for us of this light this first Sunday of Advent is that we must use the light to help us to see better. I know there is a lot we all have on our plates, especially at this time of year. I know we are each caught up in making plans, or maybe caught up in imagining the holidays without a loved one, or maybe just caught up in the year end crush at work. But we are compelled during this Season of Advent, and during this first week to make a concerted effort to focus on envisioning a transformation. Certainly we have some sort of an opportunity to do this as a group next week at our Annual meeting. But I would like to give each of us an assignment during this week, and it is to encourage each of us to ask someone for coffee or lunch, or maybe a walk around the block to talk about a vision. Maybe it's someone from this congregation who you have been wanting an opportunity to sit with. Or maybe someone in your wider community whose values or views you admire. It should be someone you don’t talk to every day. And more than one person is fine too—but not too large a group that everyone doesn’t get a chance to talk. It will take some time and effort--but it is our work this week. During Advent you will see our focus begins here on large transformations, and down narrows down to the Christ child over the course of four short weeks. This narrowing reminds us of our lives transformed in Christ, and God's transformation in giving us Jesus to live and die as one of us. But this week we get to think big: remember that God put a rainbow in the sky, and we have the opportunity to imagine a different end.

AMEN.