A sermon preached by the Rev. Robert Lee Nichols, Jr. at the Fox Chapel Presbyterian Church on November 25, 2007
Seasons in a Life Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
This is one of those rare years when the Sunday following Thanksgiving is not the first Sunday in Advent. Usually that’s the case. Normally we launch into preparing for Christmas before the leftovers have cooled. But this year we have a Sunday to catch our breath, today, and then next Sunday we’ll begin with the first Sunday of Advent.
And I want to take advantage of that by talking with you about what lies ahead of us: Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. To stop and actually think about what’s to come with this holy season that will unfold in the days before us.
We’ll begin with where we are now, and where we have come from. We have been in what’s called “Ordinary Time.” It serves as the backdrop for Advent and Christmas.
We’ve been there since last spring. Ordinary Time is the preponderance of the year, lasting from Pentecost until Advent, which means most of spring, all of Summer, part of Winter.
What is it like living in Ordinary Time? Things are just regular, nothing special.
It’s ordinary. Mama’s not rich and daddy’s not good looking. There are chores to do, washing and vacuuming and cleaning, garbage to be taken out, diapers to be changed, the laundry to be done. The dog needs walking and the kids have the sniffles.
There is work and school and sleep and then we start the day over again. Ordinary time is filled with drudgery. The great Southern novelist, Walker Percy, coined the word “everydayness” to describe the condition.
It’s the children of Israel wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. There’s no special measure of grace beyond the ordinary. It can be monotonous if you let it. The season, consisting of two thirds of the year, reminds us that most of our days are ordinary. Maybe your life is filled with awesome adventures every day. Not mine. It’s pretty humdrum most of the time. Yet, it’s what we do with our humdrum days that matters most. Living in the valleys and the mountaintops is easy.
When I think of ordinary time I think of Mother Theresa and the extraordinary story that came to recently. They called her “The Saint of the Gutters” because of her work helping the poor and dying in Calcutta, India, a work which grew from a one woman folly in 1948 to a beacon of care worldwide. In 1979 she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her work.
Yet, with the recent publication of her letters, we learned this great disciple lived most of her life in a vast wasteland, a spiritual desert, where she had no experience of God’s presence or God’s love. She wrote to one of her friends,
Jesus has a very special love for you. But as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, - listen and do not hear – the tongue moves in prayer but does not speak.
In her final 66 years of life she felt no presence of God whatsoever. As she says, neither in her heart nor in the Eucharist. She confesses she has come to doubt the very existence of God. How remarkable. This is what ordinary time looks like at its worst. But here’s what’s important. If you are there now you need to keep doing the faithful things. Don’t give up. Don’t stop doing good. Don’t stop loving and caring and don’t stop working for the right things and don’t stop being faithful. Mother Theresa may have lived in Ordinary Time but this did not prevent her from doing extraordinary things.
Next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent. And we begin our march to Christmas. The season of Advent lasts four weeks, four Sundays in which we light candles on the wreath and long for Christmas. The hallmark of Advent is longing. When you live in Ordinary Time, when you wander through the desert for 40 years, without God, without hope, without love, there wells up deep in the human heart a massive longing for something different, something more, something better.
It’s one of the great qualities we human beings have. Hope indeed does spring eternal in the human heart. No matter how desperate the condition, there is always that flicker of hope, there’s always that longing for something more. That’s what Advent is about. It’s the longing deep in our hearts for a better time, for a better world, for a better us.
Candles are the perfect symbol. It’s as if we begin the season in total darkness and then we light one tiny candle on the wreath. And a week later we light another, then another, and another. And during this time we nourish the great gifts of the Spirit deep in our souls – faith, hope, love, and joy. Here’s how my devotional book puts it:
Life is a constant Advent season: we are continually waiting to become, to discover, to complete, to fulfill. Hope, struggle, fear, expectation and fulfillment are all part of our Advent experience.
The world is not as just, not as loving, not as whole as we know it can and should be. But the coming of Christ and his presence among us —as one of us — give us reason to live in hope: that light will shatter the darkness, that we can be liberated from our fears and prejudices, that we are never alone or abandoned.
(Life Is an Advent Season . . . CONNECTIONS, 11-28-93)
Advent is a time of expectation, preparation, waiting, longing. It’s a time when we get in touch with that part of us which longs for something else. Think of lovers longing to be together. Think of a patient longing for a cure. Think of a family separated by war, hoping for their father to return from the war. What in you longs for something else? Something better. Something more. In Advent we tend to that longing in our hearts.
Then there’s Christmas. Christmas is the realization of the Advent longing. When God gives us, not what we expect, not what we desire, but what we need. The time for gifts given and received. First and foremost the gift of the child. The holy one.
Dietrich Bonheoffer thought of it this way. He said it’s like we’re living in a small prison cell in which one waits and hopes. And we are completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom, the door of salvation, the door of grace has to be opened from the outside by someone else. We cannot escape this cell by our own power. We’ve tried and it just won’t work. The gift of Christmas is God unlocking the door and letting us out so that we can live once again. God loved the world so much that he gave his Only Son.
So, we’ve longed for the gift in Advent, we receive the gift in Christmas, and now there’s one more step for the circle to be complete – there’s that coming to an awareness of what the gift means and how it will make a difference for us, then responding. When Christ came into our world, he didn’t come to brighten our Decembers, he came to transform our lives. And it’s that transformation, that awareness that we pay attention to during the season of Epiphany.
Epiphany begins on January 6th, every year and continues until Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. The star of Bethlehem is the great Epiphany symbol, along with the Kings, Magi, Wise Men, coming to visit Jesus in the manger in Bethlehem. Here’s the key. In Christmas all the action comes from God to us. We are passive recipients - happy, joyful, grateful, but passive. God comes to us. In Epiphany men and women and children, people of faith respond. We come to the child. We see the star and follow it.
We get up and come to God’s revelation with awareness and with faith that changes our lives.
Have you ever felt like you were sleepwalking through your life and then all of a sudden something happens that causes you to wake up? You wake up to your own life.
And then you come to an AHA! moment when you wake up, and you come to a clear awareness, a clear recognition and understanding of what you need to do, how you need to do it, when, and then you do it. That’s what Epiphany is all about.
I think of Mary Oliver’s famous poem, entitled The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
This is Epiphany, when you wake up from your life, when you wake up to your life, when you know what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.
This AHA experience is what caused Abraham and Sarah to leave their homeland and set off on their great adventure. It’s what happened to Paul on the Road to Damascus and the disciples by the Sea of Galilee.
It’s what happened to Andrew Carnegie. In the first part of his life he made a fortune supplying munitions for war. He dedicated the second part of his life to financing what he believed to be the antidote to war: education.
Likewise Alfred Nobel made his fortune making dynamite. His legacy is the Nobel Peace Prize – that same prize won by Mother Theresa.
Pat Tillman realized after 9/11 that he didn’t want to play professional football for the Arizona Cardinals any more. And so quit that job and joined the army, fought in Afghanistan, taking a pay cut from $1.2 million to the little more than $17,000 annual base salary for a new recruit.
It is not unique to the Christian faith. Zen Buddhists call it kensho – an awakening to the essence of things. Psychologist Howard Gardner calls it resonance – the sense that this is the right thing to do. It just feels right and it makes sense. In our tradition we call it epiphany.
Bill Gates came to a realization that he had to use his enormous wealth in a productive way and so he set up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which helps eradicate killer diseases around the world. These are his words, delivered to the Harvard community at their recent commencement.
I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences. But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequality is the highest human achievement.
I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries. It took me decades to find out. Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause – and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?
For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have. During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year – none of them in the United States. We were shocked. . . . So we began our work.
Well, enough. Here’s what matters most. No matter where you are on your journey God is with you. No matter whether you are living in the Everydayness of Ordinary Time or the anticipation of Advent or the giftedness of Christmas or the awareness of Epiphany, God is with you.
The song we sang to begin this service says it well:
Dance then wherever you may be. I am the Lord of the Dance, said He
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be. And I’ll lead you all in the dance, said He.