First Parish Unitarian Universalist"In Waiting"
Sermon by the Rev. Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
December 3, 2000
As you may know, I became a Unitarian Universalists minister later in life than some. I was just short of 39 years old when I entered Harvard Divinity School to prepare for the ministry. My decision likely surprised some of my friends and not others; all but one were supportive. She grew up a "PK," or "preacher's kid." So, she knew something about what I was getting into. And, she said, "Are you sure you have enough patience?"
I'm not sure I do, even now. But, I'm glad she asked the question. Because, thanks to her, when I feel impatience rising in myself, I am far more likely than I would ever have been otherwise, I'm sure, to let it go, and wait.
In the United States, now, we all are waiting—all of us, that is, who care about who will be our next president. Though some may feel their impatience rising, by and large, we've been letting it go, and waiting.
In the Christian calendar, Advent (which begins today) is a time of waiting. The time period marked by the four Sundays before Christmas, Advent is a time of waiting, but it's not a passive kind of waiting. The waiting associated with Advent is an active kind of waiting, a time to prepare—spiritually—for Christmas.
In the secular calendar, however, Advent is a time of impatience and material preparation. You can't venture out to buy even a roll of toilet paper without being accosted by the marketing world's message that it's time to shop for Christmas. Even the auto parts store has a Santa near the door!
This year, with Christmas falling on a Monday, Advent starts as late into the month of December as is possible. Usually, it is the Sunday of Thanksgiving Weekend, the Sunday after the busiest shopping day of the year. So, if we're feeling a little less rushed in our material preparations for the holidays this year, that may be why. This year, we are blessed with five, not four, Saturdays between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. Even Hanukkah is on the late side this year.
It's a wonderful gift, the gift of more time this year. It will happen again next year. How lovely! I, too, feel grateful for a bit more time for the preparations that are important to me during the winter holidays–the decorating, shopping, baking, wrapping, shipping…whatever. (Not that I've started yet, as usual!) But, this gift of time might also be used for spiritual preparations for the winter holidays.
I've used the word "holidays" so as to not focus entirely on Christmas, but I recognize that those of you who don't celebrate Christmas very likely don't experience the impatience and material emphasis I'm describing. For those of you for whom that may be true, I invite you to listen today for whatever meaning you may find for yourself in the Christian tradition of Advent, much as those of us not celebrating Ramadan would listen to a sermon about the month of fasting in the Muslim tradition that began last Tuesday or as those not celebrating Bodhi Day would listen to a sermon about the anniversary of the Buddha's enlightenment which will be honored this Friday. Think of this as a sermon on an interesting tradition in one of the world's great religions.
Those of you who are Christmas-celebrating Unitarian Universalists, I hope, will listen with an open mind as I explore why I think that we should not underrate Advent as I think we do. In this, I include myself. Because, even as I've sought over the years to "unplug the Christmas machine" and make careful choices about how much of all that material preparation is actually enjoyable for me and those I love, I've not tended as much as I might to the more interior kinds of spiritual preparation that could make the holiday season not only enjoyable, but joyful.
This has been so in my personal and family life, but in my ministry also. For example, this is my fifth Advent as an ordained minister, but it's the first time I am including the Advent Wreath in my worship services on each of the four Sundays prior to Christmas. Admittedly, some years, there's been a practical reason for this: the first Sunday of Advent has sometimes fallen on my Sunday off and it is awkward to ask a guest minister to start a multi-week ritual.
But, there have been other reasons. As this is not a Christian church, I've felt celebrating Advent for four weeks would be an over-emphasis on Christianity, and overshadow Hanukkah. In the past, I've not wanted to call even more attention to Christmas, by celebrating Advent, than the secular culture already does. And, I've thought worship services in December should provide a haven from the celebration of Christmas— right up until Christmas Eve, which then should be celebrated quite traditionally, by candlelight, with familiar carols and Bible lessons (which is exactly what we will do next Sunday evening).
This year, I'm realizing that an acknowledgement of Advent, at least at the beginning, might be spiritually wise. We will, let's admit it, spend time and money during the four weeks prior to Christmas on the material preparations for it, whatever we call that time period! Calling it Advent focuses some of our attention on the interior, spiritual kinds of preparation that would give us deeper satisfaction and the holiday greater meaning.
That there might be a spiritual dimension to this time of preparation may not be self-evident to those of us who celebrate Christmas as a cultural holiday–as a warm festive celebration of good cheer and giving at the darkest time of the year, but not a particularly religious holiday.
Even for those of us who celebrate Christmas as the birthday of Jesus, the great and moral teacher who spoke of God as love and said we ought to love our neighbors as ourselves, Advent may not be significant. We've heard the stories and the teachings a million times, so waiting for the teacher to show up seems to require little more than having paper and pen ready, while you chat with your classmates.
But, for observant Christians who await Christmas as the birth of the Christ-child, not the great teacher, and as something way more religious than a festive time of giving of gifts and good cheer, Advent may be rich indeed. It may be as pregnant with spiritual yearning as Mary is said to have been pregnant with Jesus. Or, it may be a trying time of soul-searching, as anxious as the efforts of Joseph and Mary to find a place to bed down for that holy night. It's a time of interior spiritual preparation, that every heart might prepare Him room, once again. Emmanuel means God with us. They believe that in Jesus Christ, God become as a Man. And that Christ can be born in any of us, and Christmas is a reminder of that.
For Thomas Merton, the twentieth century monk, author, and peace activist,
Advent was such a time of waiting and spiritual preparation. Just before Advent in 1941, he entered the Trappist abbey, Our Lady of Gethsemani, Kentucky, at age 26. His life up until then was that of a well-endowed young man– exciting, sophisticated–and it took him from Paris to Harlem, into Communist circles and out, from James Joyce to Duke Ellington to modern art. He wrote about his arrival at Gethsemani some years later in The Seven Storey Mountain and his words convey something of the awesome anticipation and the terrible struggle that is Advent, for some Christians.
"Liturgically speaking, you could hardly find a better time to become a monk than Advent…The soul of the monk is a Bethlehem where Christ comes to be born…The Advent Liturgy prepares that Bethlehem with songs and canticles of ardent desire.
It is a desire all the more powerful, in the spiritual order, because the world around you is dead. Life has ebbed to its dregs. The trees are stripped bare. The birds forget to sing. The grass is brown and grey…The sun gives its light, as it were, in faint intermittent explosions…not rays…
But the cold stones of the Abbey church ring with a chant that glows with living flame, with clean, profound desire. It is an austere warmth, the warmth of Gregorian chant. It is deep beyond ordinary emotion, and that is one reason why you never get tired of it. It never wears you out by making a lot of cheap demands on your sensibilities. Instead of drawing you out into the open field of feelings where… your own imagination and the inherent vulgarity of your own corrupted nature can get at you with their blades and cut you to pieces, it draws you within, where you are lulled in peace and recollection and where you find God.
You rest in [God]. [God] heals you with secret wisdom."
Lest the Advent liturgy and his first day in the Abbey sound too magical, Merton goes on to say, "That first evening in choir I tried to sing my first few notes of Gregorian chant with the worst cold I had ever had in my life–the fruit of my [efforts] to prepare for the low temperature of the monastery before I was even inside the place" by leaving the windows wide open wherever I was. (pp. 454-455).
The purpose of Advent, for Merton, is the readying of one's soul as a Bethlehem where Christ comes to be born. But the language of Merton, with its dismissal of imagination and emotion as corrupting (and inherently vulgar!), and with its Trinitarian concepts of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, is certainly not our language, despite the appeal of "peace and recollection."
A British Unitarian minister, Simon John Barlow, wrote of that for which one waits during Advent in a way that might speak to us more readily– calling the "inner-Christ child, the spark of holiness that lies deep in us all." In his words,
"Prepare the way to welcome your inner-Christ child–the being of love and light, the spark of holiness that lies deep in us all. Seek the signs of hope and promise in your life and the world around you–the stars that point the way to the Light of God. Make your way to the [stable] of peace and acceptance in the secret depths of your heart."
"Prepare a manger in your heart," he said, "built from the wood of your life; your body, your home, your physical comforts. Line it with the straw from your life: your loves and friendships, your memories, your harvest of sweet and bitter remembrances. Bring your life's gifts to your inner-Christ-child: your thankfulness, your contentments, your hopes, your experiences of growth. Surround your manger with your joys: your loves, the beauties of your life, with those you know and have known, with the Light of Lights."
What do you think? Do you like that language any better?
At first I do, but upon further reflection, Barlow's words are just too sweet. The only negative aspect of our lives he mentions is our "bitter remembrances." What about our struggles and shortcomings; our bad mistakes, even evil deeds; what about the pain and suffering we've known? We've got to acknowledge all that's there, too, in the manger of our heart, because it's just as real, just as soul-shaping (possibly more so), than the good, happy stuff of our lives.
No doubt that manger in the fabled stable long ago was a sorry, messy sight when Joseph and Mary first lay eyes on it. Hopefully, they lined it with clean straw, but I bet they took some pretty grimy straw out, first! And, no doubt, it later had to be changed!
Yet, Barlow's onto something important about the kind of active waiting that Advent might be for us. He goes on to say, "Commit yourself to nurture your inner-holiness, to seek joy wherever it may be found, to receive and give love every moment of life, to keep to the paths of beauty, truth and love. Remember that here in the manger of the heart is perpetual light, the comfort of true peace and the delight of universal serenity…remember your inner-holiness in all that you do and greet the holiness in all those you meet."
Nobody's got a manger of the heart that is "perpetual light and the delight of universal serenity." And, we never will. We're human! But, we can commit ourselves to make more room there for light and serenity, hope, beauty, truth, and love.
And, so, on Christmas Eve here at First Parish we will join our voices in singing "Joy to the World" with its resounding words, "Let every heart prepare a room, and heaven and nature sing…"
By then, the opportunity to prepare more room in our hearts for the spark of holiness and the light of love will have come and be nearly gone. By then, Advent, the time of interior spiritual preparation for Christmas, will almost be a thing of the past. Only a few hours will remain.
What will you and I have done during the time of waiting between now and then? Will we have made time for preparations of the heart?
Will impatience have been our mode of operation right up through Christmas Eve, "living in a hurry and waste of life?" as Henry David Thoreau put it in our reading this morning? Or, will we (in his words again) "live these few weeks deliberately," letting go of the least enjoyable of our material preparations, making time for preparations that will bring us and those around us joy?
As we light the four candles of the Advent Wreath–one each for Hope, Love, Joy, and Peace–in these few weeks, may we remember to let go of our impatience, and wait–preparing room in our hearts for all these good things. They will be, for us, as a "rebirth of wonder." Amen.
Benediction
The Rev. Jane Rzepka quoted an important notice that appeared in the Warrenton, VA newspaper: "if you are one of the hundreds of parachuting enthusiasts who bought our Easy Sky Diving book, please make the following correction: On page 8, line 7, the words 'state zip code' should have read 'pull rip cord.'"
Then she says, I worry about things like this during the Christmas season. Had I been a parachuting enthusiast, and had I breezed through Easy Sky Diving during the month of December, I'd still be flying through the air, picking up speed, shouting my zip code.
Zip codes aren't important. Rip cords are. During the Advent season, it's all too easy to confuse one for the other. The "zip codes" of the season–the replacement bulbs, the four sticks of butter, the fruit-by-mail catalogs, the party shoes–have our attention, and before we know it, we're picking up speed and shouting out those "zip codes" without every asking why.
Perhaps we should look to our rip cords. Our life-lines, in December as always, are our inner quiet, the love we exchange, and our efforts to make the world more whole. We can slow the descent. We can take in the view. And [then] we can anticipate a gentle landing on the twenty-fifth."
May it be so! Go in peace, gentlepeople.