Third Sunday of Advent Year A

I am feeling great because now we are all caught up! Here is last week's sermon. Amazing.

Here is a link to the readings.

I am an impatient cook. I might be an impatient everything, really, but my impatience is especially noteworthy while cooking. I am also a cook who has very little time. Most evenings by the time I get home, I am so hungry that all I want is a meal that can be on the table with in a half hour. This week I have been thinking a lot about stirring and have come to say, that I am not very good at stirring. Our collect, the prayer which gathers us at the beginning of the service today, asks that God stir up God’s power and with great might come among us. So here is what I know about stirring: It’s not the same as mixing together. Mixing is done at the very beginning when everything is still its own separate thing. Stirring is when it is already in the same pot or bowl. It has maybe been in there for a while. Some things require constant stirring to keep them together, but many more things require delicate occasional stirring. That is the kind of stirring I have the most trouble with. This is the kind of stirring in our collect today. We ask God to stir us once a year! The third Sunday of Advent. It’s hard to tell when to occasionally stir something. You don’t want to over do it. It needs to rest, or sometimes to rise. But you do want to keep everything altogether. And you want those little bits that have sunk to the bottom and are maybe getting a little burned to bring their flavors and tastes to the top of the pot again to enrich the whole thing. I have a tendency to over stir—because really I am in need of an activity. I am impatient after all.

Maybe my impatience comes from a lack of trust. I don’t know if I can trust those bits on the bottom to brown and not to burn. And maybe the soup doesn’t know if it can trust me to leave it alone, or get to it on time. You see, one of my coping mechanisms as an impatient cook is to do other things while I am cooking. This means that while the pot is simmering away, I try to do the rest of the dishes, or wipe down the counters; sometimes I even try putting in a load of laundry. But since I am not a good cook, I often get distracted by my activity. And I didn’t really feel like I knew when I was supposed to stir anyway—I read the recipe, and it said occasional, or every 20 minutes. The thing I have learned is that really good cooks just know. Their pots seem to signal to them, it is time.  Or maybe they catch a tiny whiff of something, the hint of a smell, and then they know it’s time. I think part of the problem for me is that I am impatient, and forget to see all the activity that is taking place when I am waiting. Sometimes, I forget that the ingredients, and the pot and the fire beneath it are working hard while I am resisting the urge to uncover it and stir it all up.

Now if we properly understand our collect, we are the ingredients in the pot, and God is the one with the power and the precision to stir us up.  It seems to me that God is a patient cook. God has confidence and faith that we will be cooking while God waits to stir us up. God has confidence that we will be preparing.

Preparing is an important word in Advent. It is what this season is all about. Two weeks ago in my sermon I suggested that the preparation required in advent is not preparing for Christmas, but for the much larger concept of God with us, and for Jesus’ second coming. So I wonder then, what is the preparation that we are called into this third week of Advent. How do we prepare for God to stir us up?

As I consider our lectionary readings for the day, it seems to me the Letter to James suggests that we can prepare for stirring up with patience. Though this initially seemed frustrating to me, because patience is not one of my virtues. But as I looked more closely at the letter, patience isn’t idle waiting. Being patient is not the same is doing nothing. Rather it is being calm and relaxed about the time frame during which something will happen. In the letter we are given three examples that I want to talk about this morning about what being patient while preparing might mean.

The first patience in preparation example we are presented with is the farmer.  We are told the farmer waits not only for the early rains patiently, but she also waits for the late rains too. The rains that should have already come, the rains that make her worry that they might never come, or that the crops will be ruined in the waiting. The farmer isn’t anxious while she waits. She does not sit at home looking out the window wondering whether it will ever rain again. No. She has to have confidence that it will rain. The patience of the farmer is about confidence and faith rather than fear and anxiety. Advent gives us the opportunity to practice waiting, practice preparing while remaining calm, and faithful.

The second type of preparation in patience from James we are given is the idea that we can strengthen our hearts to be ready for the coming of the Lord. I wonder what strengthening the heart would have meant to ancient readers and hearers of this letter. For us though my first thought about heart strengthening was physical. Perhaps this activity while we are being patient is about taking care of our physical selves: eating well, exercising, caring for our bodies. But surely there is an emotional component to this heart strength. Our hearts are strengthened when we deepen love relationships, when we treat ourselves with love, when we give love to people we meet, when we are shown love from an unexpected source, and when we first begin to love someone new. Love is connected indelibly to patience in our scriptural vocabulary thanks to Paul telling us that: “love is patient, love is kind.” Our hearts can be strengthened while we wait because we are preparing for the radical nature of God who loves us so much that God sends Jesus, God’s child, to live with us, to show us God’s love for us. Our hearts must be strong enough to receive God’s love because God’s love is transformative. It sustains us, it inspires us, it helps us to love others.

The third example of patience as preparation is the prophet—which seems contradictory at first. The letter says: “As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.” Prophets seem to me to be very impatient. They are calling for us to take actions, to live differently, and that God will utterly transform our physical experiences, crooked things will be made straight. So how could prophets be examples of patience? Perhaps even as then call for change the prophet knows that they are speaking to the people of their day and age, but the prophet also has a mode of speaking that is into the future. The prophet is patient in knowing that their voice should be heard as they are speaking, but also into countless generations. God’s message of upending our world order as we know it, of waters breaking forth in the wilderness, of streams in the desert are necessary because of the deep flaws in human society, back when Isaiah was first telling folks this thousands of years ago, and today. Isaiah has to be patient—not necessarily with his own generation—but patient because it will take a few thousand years for us to hear this. The patience of the prophet then reminds us that God’s voice, God’s message is an eternal one. One that forever calls us into changing our sinful ways, as individuals and as a society. The patience of the prophet then is in knowing something about eternal time.

Our letter to James helped us to see preparation during Advent as the idea of an active patience that is confident and faithful, that strengthens bonds of love, that keeps our bodies healthy, and that knows something of the nature of eternal time. We are better able to prepare now with these tools of patience. But then we have to go and ask God to come stir us up during Advent too. The truth is though, even though we may not use the language of stirring every week, we are stirred by God when we share in the Eucharistic meal. God is among us when we break the bread, and drink the wine, because we become Christ’s hands in the world. The Eucharist is a stirring event because we go from being individual bits and pieces in the same pot to being one.

When we prepare then to be stirred, we are preparing with patience for something that has happened already, is happening now, and will happen again. That is eternal time. Advent, and the nature of the church year, is one that we are constantly repeating, but also that we enter into new. We have done Advent before, we have even experienced the miracle of Christ with us, Emmanuel. And we are preparing for it as if we have never had this transformation. The same is true on a smaller weekly scale for the Eucharist. We have shared the transformation into the body of Christ before, but we will also await patiently this transformation each week. Truly we must learn patience as church-going folk who each year have to enter our liturgical seasons anew. Enter them knowing what is to come next and yet, we still must be patient until it does come.  As the way of the Lord is prepared among us, and in us, we ask that God stirs us up, as God has stirred us before, and God will surely stir us again.