Scripture: Isaiah selections
I want to talk in a way this morning about waiting. I want to talk about preparing. I want to talk about anticipating and hoping and leaning into the future. I want to talk about giving birth. Not so much just today but also in the weeks ahead.
It’s Advent after all, officially, today, and those are all the kinds of things we’re supposed to talk about during Advent. I have to admit it doesn’t feel too much like Advent yet to me, it still being November and all. Since Christmas falls on a Saturday this year, and we’re supposed to get in four Sundays in Advent before Christmas, that makes the first Sunday in Advent this year just about as early as it can be. And as always it seems to be here before you know it. One day it’s, oh maybe Columbus Day and the next day somehow it’s Advent. So in some ways it really doesn’t feel much like Advent yet.
But in some ways it does. Being part of Sojourners and being in the situation we’re in, it does feel to me quite a bit actually like Advent around here. I’m remembering one of our congregational meetings this fall when at the end of a discussion that had begun to feel like it was leading nowhere and that in any case had not produced a decision, Cliff Kavanaugh reminded us that “we are already pregnant”. I’m reminded of that because now, in a slightly different context, having completed the purchase of a building, though only beginning the process of raising the money we really needed to buy the building in the first place, and not yet quite ready to move in, and not being clear precisely when or how that is going to take place, and being even less clear about what life will be like once we do, it feels to me a lot like we are collectively pregnant—though of course I admit that I am not the best person to talk about what being pregnant feels like. There’s a certain lack of credibility here.
But I do have a sense that we are together in a period of waiting, not thumb-twiddling waiting but expectant waiting, eager waiting, a time of preparation and anticipation and leaning into the future. And I have a sense that we will be giving birth to something new sometime soon in the course of our moving. To describe this as a time of transition for Sojourners is true enough but for me not quite adequate. It’s more than that. I hope it will be more than that. And I want to talk about the waiting and the preparation and the anticipation and the “more” a little bit today and then some more in the weeks of Advent to come.
I have a text for today that is not scripture. It’s a poem. I know poetry, at least some kinds of poetry, can be hard to listen to. It goes by quickly, and there are a lot of poems that I at least have to read very slowly, line by line, sometimes over and over until I begin to get a vague idea of what the words are all about. Nevertheless, I want to read you a poem by Arnold Kenseth, a writer who is not simple but who does speak to me, and in addition is a writer who is in a quite open and unapologetic way Christian. This is called, “A Praise in Advent”.
See, as we stumble in the Advent snows,
God comes to fathom us. He sends his Son,
A gentleness by whom our fear’s undone,
A jubilance who overcomes our woes.
At first, we hold him in the ancient picture:
Skoaled by great angels, crooned by watching beasts,
Thick-footed shepherds by his side, deep frosts;
Love’s history: for you and me hope’s texture.
Now he is with us, at our village stones,
Fingering the mortar, testing. His mirth
Assaults our streets, and daily he goes forth
Troubling our elegant houses with unknowns
That were and are before whatever is
Began to be. By him was made the air,
Sparrows, eagles, Asias, the sweet despair
Of the free mind. All honest things are his.
He is the Holy One we waited for, the Word
Who speaks to us who stammer back, the plot
Against the rich and poor, the Gordian knot
Our wit cannot untie. He is time’s Lord.
Thus, shall we sing him well these Christmas days
And at his birth-feast practice him with praise.
I’m generally not fond of turning poetry into prose: analyzing, dissecting, explaining, expounding until what is left at the end is a lot less than what we started with. But I wouldn’t read the poem to you if I had nothing to say about it, so without, I hope, doing too much damage, just some comments on a few of the words or phrases that stirred up something for me.
God comes to fathom us. I think that is not our ordinary way of thinking. We are more accustomed to thinking in terms of our search for God. We think of God as being beyond our knowing, somehow distant, or hidden maybe, not necessarily distant, but if not hidden in the deep recesses of the universe, then maybe close by, within or among us somehow, but not visible, mysterious, yet somehow crucial and for many of us an object of our searching. The poet turns all this upside down and around. What if it is not so much like that? What if God is in search of us? What if instead of us trying to find our way to God to share in the life of God, what if God is trying to find a way to us? What if we are the ones who are hard to find and hard to know? What if we are the ones who are distant, hidden, or mysterious? What if it is God struggling to understand who we are, strange creatures that we have become? God comes to fathom us…because in many ways we have become a mystery, even to ourselves.
I have sometimes remarked in an off-handed sort of way that in the process of acquiring and eventually inhabiting a church building, we will learn something about ourselves as a congregation. I usually mean that in a kind of mundane and prosaic sort of way. We will learn how together we really are as a congregation. We will learn how resourceful we are. We will have our priorities tested. In everyday ways, we will discover what we are able to do, not able to do, unwilling to do.
In some everyday ways and in maybe not so everyday ways faith is about this, not just the search for God but the search for us, who we are, who we mean to be, how serious we are about it, things like that. It’s not all about the church. It’s not all wrapped up in the church, and moving into a building and the rest. But it’s about that too, and I can’t help thinking that in this on-the-edge-of-something state that we’re in, this Advent adventure we’re about to embark on is in significant ways a journey of self-discovery in both superficial and profound ways, and if we pay attention we will find out some things about ourselves. Let’s not forget to ask, sometime down the road, what we have found out.
“At first we hold him in the ancient picture…” says Kenseth, which of course is the danger of the season. It is always our temptation to think we are talking about the past, a literal past, a mythical past, it doesn’t matter, a past where Christ remains stuck as a figure in the tableaus we have made, the carefully carved crèches and painted pictures. We admire him or not, worship him or not, find the picture comforting or overly sentimental, find the story rich with meaning or time-worn, believe in the incarnation or not, it all doesn’t matter much really as long as Christ remains imprisoned in our pictures of him. He needs to be let loose on the world, which is what we might pray for this Advent, and what happens in the poem…
“Now he is with us, at our village stones, fingering the mortar, testing…and daily he goes forth, troubling our elegant houses with unknowns…” I like the image: Jesus fingering mortar, testing. Is it too corny to admit that reading the poem I pictured him fingering the mortar at 1017 Elliott Ave.? I confess that it’s true. And I have tried to imagine what he might be thinking as he does. What kind of a place is this, and what kind of a place will it become? Will it be a fit place for my people to gather? What that is good will be born here? What of holiness or humanity will these bricks provide a home for? Jesus, fingering the mortar, testing…and wondering…
And troubling our elegant, or not so elegant, houses with unknowns. It’s his job, after all. To trouble us with unknowns. To invade our structures of certainty with something better, to inhabit all those areas of our lives where we try to make ourselves comfortable with a disquieting presence, to work his holy, hopeful way into our lives, thereby making us less stable, less sane, less well-adjusted, less sure of ourselves, less at home in the world as it is. In this regard, Christ has a lot less work to do with some of us than with others. I find myself hoping as Advent begins this year, that this house we are about to move into as a congregation will be a dwelling place for this Christ who is at large among us, and that it will be a place sufficiently troubled by Christ’s presence, a place where people looking for certainty will be disappointed, where people looking for something they cannot name will find something they cannot name, where answers will not have a resting place but where reverence and mystery will.
At the same time, although we are dealing with a Christ who puts into question our structures of brick and undermines our various structures of certainty, this something-we-are-about-to-be will make us more substantial, more visible, more tangible, more enfleshed. The incarnation, the word becoming flesh, is only partly about Jesus. It’s also about how the Christ-spirit takes shape in some given time and place, how it becomes concrete, how it becomes earthly and real. A building does not answer the question of how the Christ spirit becomes incarnate. It just poses the question a little more boldly, and suggests a range of possibilities. We stand this Advent on the edge of those possibilities.
Kenseth again: “He is the Holy One we have waited for, the Word who speaks to us who stammer back…” A building now has come to symbolize this future that we are on the edge of, that we are waiting for and anticipating, and all those good Advent things. A building has come to symbolize that future that will be our way of stammering back an answer to whatever it is that we have heard or seen or felt or known of God. Of course we have already been doing that. Of course we will be the same people and we will do many of the same things when we move into a new place. Of course a building is just a building, really rather ordinary and is there to be used for ordinary, everyday things. And maybe moving into a building is just a time for talk of what, when, where, and how-to. Maybe it’s not a time for spirit-talk.
But I think it is a time for spirit talk too. And Advent provides a good context for such talk this year. A time to stand on the verge, waiting for some new revealing, anticipating a future that is almost but not yet, preparing not only for how we will handle this and that but for how we will be God’s people in a different place, thinking of giving birth, wondering, hoping, being drawn toward a happy unknown, and, in the poet’s words, “Thus shall we sing him well these Christmas days, and at his birth-feast practice him with praise.” Amen.
Jim Bundy
November 28, 2004