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The Third Sunday Of Advent (Gaudete)
Stir up thy power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let thy bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be honor and glory, world without end. Amen.
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The Third Sunday Of Advent (Gaudete)
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A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
✛
Advent Waiting
In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.
The tone of the season of Advent, these few weeks before Christmas, is one of expectation, a time of waiting and excitement. Many of us wait with joy for Christmas Day – the crowds on Fifth Avenue swelling, the bustle of families preparing for holidays together, the bells ringing and lights blinking, and, of course, the most lovely of music. As we observe Advent in the Church, we’re putting ourselves – like characters in a play – in the position of the world before Jesus of Nazareth, the world that was crying out for a Messiah, waiting for the coming of God that happened at what we call Christmas. Also, of course, as post-Christmas people, we ourselves are waiting, for when Jesus returns in glory. Both kinds of waiting at once.
But there are different ways of waiting. One of the most well-known depictions in the 20th century, for example, is in Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot,” the plot of which consists of two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who are, as the title says, waiting for a man named Godot; a man who, to their great consternation, never appears. They receive a few encouraging signs, some assurances that Godot will arrive soon – tomorrow perhaps. But, to their mounting distress, he remains a no-show. Even though eventually their patience runs out – they convince each other that they will wait no longer – still they remain, waiting, as if simply unable to do differently. The play is both hilariously funny and also one of the most painfully sad works to come out of the last century. It ends with the two characters in the same position they were in at the very beginning, in many productions gazing out at the audience, patiently enduring the pain of their unfulfilled need. No progress was made. No one’s state has improved. And still they wait, waiting for Godot. “I can’t go on like this,” Estragon says. “That’s what you think,” Vladimir replies.
If Beckett’s depiction of waiting is of one kind, our Christmas waiting may have more in common with an image of another kind of waiting – that described in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the beautiful poem known as “The Song of Songs.” It is, among other things, the story of a bride and groom, coming toward each other from some distance; the groom is drunk with desire for the beloved, the bride eager with the anticipation of their union. She says, “The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills.” And he answers, “You have ravished my heart with a glance of your eyes.”
Song of Songs, understood allegorically, recounts the story of Israel’s waiting for the Lord, and the Lord’s rushing toward Israel. Like the bride, the world waits with longing for the consummation of all things. This story of the coming Kingdom of God is what is foretold by the prophets; by John the Baptist; by Jesus; by Paul. “The day of the Lord is already here,” Paul says in this evening’s reading from Thessalonians. The coming of the Messiah, the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, this heralds the new kingdom – already here, and not yet accomplished. Christmas is the initiation of this new Kingdom, its beginning. Unlike Vladimir and Estragon, we have the Incarnation to attest to the fact that the wedding day has already arrived; it’s only the commencement that we wait for.
However, there is another difference between our season of Advent, and that of Vladimir and Estragon. When the curtain falls at the end of their play, little has changed in the lives of the protagonists. In addition to being futile, their waiting was static as well. Not so with us, hopefully: our time of Advent waiting – in both the short and long-term senses – is also a time of preparation; we can prepare ourselves for the arrival of the Messiah, and that involves changing our lives, changing our stories. Our waiting is an active waiting. We don’t remain frozen in some earlier version of ourselves; the last word about us has not yet been spoken. There is time – even if we don’t know how much – but there is time to change the narrative of our lives; so that, at that last day, we can rejoice, and not fear.
The theologian James Alison gives this example: think about the story of Cain and Abel. Two brothers, they were the sons of Adam and Eve. Cain was a farmer, Abel a shepherd, and in a fit of jealousy one day Cain took Abel out into his fields, and killed him. And God comes to Cain and says, “Where’s your brother Abel?” and Cain answers, “What am I, my brother’s keeper?” And for this murder Cain is cursed and driven out of the land and made to wander the earth as a fugitive.
But, Alison asks, what if, much later, Abel was raised from the dead, to come and confront his brother, the brother who had killed him? And Alison says that the time between Abel’s death and Abel’s return would be a time of opportunity for Cain to change the direction of his story. Cain, 20 years later, in other words, doesn’t have to be defined only as a murderer. “Yes, I did that horrible thing,” perhaps he could say. “I can never undo that. But in the last twenty years I have changed my life. Through prayer and the guidance of the Spirit I have constructed a new life, a new story, so that I can now look in the mirror and say: this is a man who killed his brother, yes; and he is also a man who has since then dedicated his life to works of mercy and love, who has not been static, who has repented and turned towards God and peace. Twenty years has passed, the story has grown and changed, and the man has grown and changed, too.”
Were that to happen, that twenty year interval would have been a time of grace; a time of not just passively waiting, but a time of preparation. An opportunity to not be condemned by one’s past, but to construct new directions for our stories so that, as Alison says, at his coming, we can “look into [our] brother’s eyes neither with pride nor with shame.”
So it is entirely appropriate to ask during Advent: what’s our story going to be, on that day of the coming of Jesus Christ? We know what our story is today, and there’s not a lot we can do about it now. Perhaps we, like Cain, have things in our lives that plague our wanderings and suffocate our days. But there is time to change – this time of grace. Where Beckett’s waiting was a waiting without hope that anything can change for the better; Advent waiting is the active turning away from sin, from greed, from cruelty. Repent now, so we can greet our coming Savior with joy then.
Because, also unlike Beckett’s seemingly indifferent Godot, the God who approaches us does so like the groom drunk with love; eager to forgive, happy to receive us, even in our betrayal. Anything to accomplish the marriage, even death itself. This is the story of Israel, the story of the Gospel: we are pursued by the one who loved us before we knew that we were lovable.
We hold onto this hope, this faith, that we live our lives as the objects of a greater love than the world has ever seen, one greater than we can understand. We worship a God who is utterly besotted with desire for us, a groom rushing toward his bride. But the groom comes at night, in the darkness, perhaps when we have given up hope that the redemption that will come at his arrival is even possible.
“And if he comes?” Estragon asks. “We’ll be saved,” Vladimir answers.
And still they wait; and so do we.
In the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen.
