Advent Hesitancy
Sermon by Paul Peters Derry on Luke 21:25-36
Advent has long been one of my favourite seasons. I remember feeling quite excited when blue was introduced/re-introduced as liturgical colour for this season, differentiating it from Lenten purple. The budding expectation, building week after week, candle after candle. It’s one of the times when I most miss being in the parish, though as I remember accurately back to my years as a congregational pastor, there was the ever-present tension between how we’re supposed to mark these Advent nights and days, and the pressure from all that is happening outside the church walls, to rush into celebrating Christmas almost immediately after we pass the mid-way point in the month of November.
And yet, this year, I’m feeling, well, something that might best be described as “Advent hesitancy.” I know that Advent is happening. The Salt of the Earth: Christian Seasons Calendar can’t be wrong. I know it’s recommended and good, perhaps even “safe,” for me to be inoculated with the Advent vaccine, complete with 4 doses. Frederick Buechner so marvellously captures the “gift” and “promise” of this season:
The house lights go off … the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait … for the curtain to rise. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised her baton.
In the silence of a midwinter dusk there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen.
You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second, you catch a whiff in the air of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart.
The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only
by the extraordinary moment just before it happens.
Advent is the name of that moment.
The Salvation Army Santa Claus clangs his bell… everybody is as bundled up against any sense of what all the fuss is really about as they are bundled up against the windchill factor.
But if you concentrate just for an instant... For all its madness and lostness, not to mention your own, you can hear the world itself holding its breath.
Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark
For reasons existential and otherwise, I find myself surprisingly – disturbingly, even – not sure I want to jump on board this Advent locomotive.
Tonight’s gospel reading doesn’t help. Phillips Brooks’ beloved Christmas carol announces, “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee, tonight,” I, and given any of the news reports flashing across our screens, I suspect many if not most of us are feeling more fears than hopes.
How could we not?
It’s to and with this “Advent hesitancy” that I hear Winnipeg-born, Oprah-endorsed and Duke University scholar Kate Bowler, in No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear), describe her release from hospital after being diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, “I did not realize how much I wanted a blueprint for how to live until the day I was released.” She admits, “I was elated to be leaving right up until the nurse pushed my wheelchair through the doors,” adding that “fear hit me with the first blast of fresh air.” As her husband tossed her bags into the trunk and her dad was adjusting the front seat to give me more leg room, she expresses, almost sotto voce, “How will I know if I’m doing this right?”
“Doing what right?”
Bowler admits, “I am suddenly embarrassed by the answer.”
How will we know if we’re doing this right? Each of us in our own particular and unique ways, and the world for which the Bethlehem Baby would one day be crucified and died, is longing for if not the inoculation, at least the assurance… “You’ve got this…” “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well…”
Kate Bowler’s experience connects with my experience, of 20 years ago this month, accompanying my partner Ingrid to a post-op appointment after removal of a pituitary brain tumour. If you’ve got to have a brain tumour, a pituitary brain tumour is the kind to have. The surgery had been successful, even as Ingrid’s stay in hospital turned out to be longer than anticipated. Ingrid was doing well. Her neurosurgeon concurred. I recall Ingrid’s neurosurgeon being positively gleeful in delight as he reviewed Ingrid’s post-op MRI, taken at the newly-installed MRI machine at Peterborough Regional Health Centre. As for me, not so much: I felt shaken, even traumatized. I was looking for something more. Unrealistically, even embarrassedly, I was looking for guarantee it was not going to happen again. I naively hoped that those months of intensity would never be repeated.
Back to No Cure for Being Human, Bowler continues:
While I believe that there may be rich meaning at every crossroad in our lives — each meeting and departure, car accident or chance encounter — I do not believe that God will provide for every need or prevent every sorrow. From my hospital room, I see no master plan to bring me to a higher level, guarantee my growth, or use my cancer to teach me. Good or bad, I will not get what I deserve. Nothing will exempt me from the pain of being human.
Today will be as ordinary as yesterday, days and weeks working out the consequences of the moments that came before. We like to imagine that we are starring in an extended morality play where lessons are learned and the hero never dies. But, in fact, we must make do with the fact that there will be weddings and funerals again this year, and everyone will still spend most of their evenings watching Netflix.
This is a kind of freedom. The only question is how we should live under the burden of it.
Therein lies the rub, for some of us all of the time, and all of us some of the time. It may even provide, if not a solution, at least the beginnings of an explanation for Advent hesitancy. Advent inoculations are not so much guarantee as they are burden, not only gift, but vocational challenge, even imperative. We are, in and through these Advent days and nights, and in and through this season of Advent promise, welcomed into the burden, the worldview, that not just a little baby, but a whole new world is being born. It will be neither easy nor straightforward, and as almost always seems to be the case for people of God, a most holy, winding, even circuitous road.
Overcoming Advent hesitancy, and along with all of our hopes and fears, even of all the years, into this most holy – and unpredictable – of seasons, has got to involve at least three things.
We root ourselves in the story, such that the story can take root in our lives. With each reading from scripture, and pray-tell, each Advent sermon, we repeat the ancient tales of God’s foolish ones. And we let the story have its way with us. Take one of the Advent readings, and simply but powerfully read it, again and again and again. Just read it. Don’t try to understand it, at least not at first. But let it take hold, as an alternative narrative for your life.
Advent hope and promise begins with loss and destruction. We’re familiar with that Advent verse from the prophet Isaiah, “A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” (11:1), but let’s never overlook the verses that precede it:
Look, the Sovereign, the Lord of hosts,
will lop the boughs with terrifying power;
the tallest trees will be cut down,
and the lofty will be brought low.
the Lord will hack down the thickets of the forest with an axe,
and Lebanon with its majestic trees will fall.
Grief and loss and uncertainty come before resurrection, hope and promise. I wonder if that’s part of what Walter Brueggeman had in mind when he proclaimed, “The world for which you have so carefully been preparing, is being taken away, by the grace of God.”
3.Finally, if we choose to be inoculated, overcoming, at least temporarily, our Advent hesitancy, let us remember to show compassion and mercy to all who for whatever reason, are not quite ready to make that same leap of faith. Our natural inclination may be to attempt to continue as before, to make do with band-aid solutions. Advent hesitancy is real. Without letting go or abdicating our discipleship calling, that may well be part of the “leave everything else to God.” If not this Advent, there will be another one, in less than 365 days. Advent 2022 begins on Sunday, November 27, 2022.
