second sunday of Advent
isaiah 40:1-11
2 peter 3:8-15a
the gospel of mark 1:1-8
preached at St. John’s Christopher St, NYC
december 6th, 2020
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Grace and peace to you, beloveds, from God the Creator, Christ the Liberator, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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Welcome to the second Sunday of Advent, where we continue to dwell in this season of waiting, expectation, and preparation. These themes – waiting, expectation, and preparation – are all connected to time, and how we experience time. Advent itself is a season wrapped up in time.
I know I have had a hard time anchoring myself in time over the past year, and it’s affecting how I’m experiencing Advent. When I think back over the past year, some months seemed to fly by in a single breath. Others felt like they lasted years. Holding together the months before the pandemic – which included travel, and work, and hosting game nights – with the months since the pandemic – which includes long lines for testing, digital communication, and adjusting to new guidelines as they come out – has been an exercise in holding together different experiences of time. I can’t believe it is already the second Sunday of Advent, and it also seems like we have been in this season of waiting, expectation, and preparation, for the better part of 10 months. It seems like this is not an uncommon experience this year.
A colleague described feeling like she’s in the movie Groundhog Day – experiencing the same day, over and over. Others have shared that it still feels like March, and has for the past 10 months. Others have been wrestling with these conflicting experiences of time, and how they impact our actions – feeling both great urgency to address long-entrenched injustice, and also the necessity of slowing down to avoid burnout or repeating harmful dynamics. The pandemic itself holds together conflicting notions of time – we are asked to make swift decisions, but those decisions are in response to numbers that aren’t fully developed until weeks later.
Something that has been helpful and challenging for me is unlearning the idea that time is linear. I can no longer imagine time as a straight line. One of the earliest book series my mom read to me, The Unicorns of Balinor, included a convention that time passed differently in different worlds – so two weeks in Balinor was 15 minutes in their home world. A lot of fantasy and sci-fi stories play around with this concept. Each moment is fleeting, and each moment is infinite.
In 2nd Peter, Peter asks us to “not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” Our experience of time is not fixed, not linear. Our experience of God is not fixed, not linear. What might seem unbearably slow to us passes as quickly as the grass fading away for God. What might last a few seconds for us could be so Divine we savor it for years to come. God is both present with us, right now, in our bodies, in our breath, and God stretches across the cosmos.
This is a gift, because it gives us time to learn, and grow, and become. To name our sins, to repent from them, and to turn towards God, allowing God’s love and grace to shape our lives. God doesn’t want to leave anyone behind. Again, from 2nd Peter: “The Lord is not slow about God’s promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” It is the work of our lives, to prepare the way of the Lord. To come to repentance. To seek God. It’s not just another checkbox, for us to move on to the next task. The anticipation of God breaking into the world like a thief in the night, and how we prepare in the waiting, how we respond when we encounter God in glimpses and moments and dreams, is the work of our lives. It’s the communal and personal work we were baptized into. It requires slowing down.
But then how does this affect our experience of Advent? A season that is bounded in time – we know the day of the Christ-child’s birth. We can cross off on our calendars the days until Christmas. We know that the Christ-child is the one John speaks of – the one coming to baptize with the Holy Spirit. Time is imminent, and urgent. We are in Mark’s lectionary cycle, and Mark is perhaps the most urgent of the gospels. There is no birth story, we are immediately dropped into John’s cries for repentance, and baptism for the forgiveness of sins. The story moves quickly, and will continue to do so throughout Mark’s gospel. God is coming, the Kingdom is coming, and soon.
This urgency is reflected in how many of us live our lives today. Onto the next deadline, the next task, the next season. And this urgency isn’t always bad. God’s love and justice is breaking into the world, and we are called to respond to that. To make big changes. To imagine different possibilities. Creation is groaning and crying out, and swift action is needed to divest from the systems and corporations that are destroying our home. For many communities that have experienced violence, and oppression, urgency is sacred and critical. It’s not enough to create another committee, another taskforce, when nothing material changes. Even before the pandemic brought widespread job loss, food insecurity, and threat of eviction, there were millions who have been failed and left out of communal systems of support. Even before the murder of Mike Brown, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, police violence brutalized Black communities. Too many have died, and we are rightly being asked to make big changes. To try other ways of relating, and structuring our world.
John the Baptist emerges from the wilderness, proclaiming “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”. And people from all over flocked to the wilderness, to confess their sins and be baptized. We are called to make a path for the Lord. To repent, and to do the work of the Kingdom. We are not static, stuck in one moment of time – we contain all of our past experiences, and our dreams of what the world could-be. We contain the moments we’ve fallen short, and the moments we’ve glimpsed the ever-present, ever-living God. We are both sinner and saint. And, because this needs to be named, again and again to counter historical harm that has been done – you are not sinful because of your class, or your race, or your gender, or your sexuality, or your ability. Our bodies, our identities, are not sinful. But sin is real. We turn away from God, and turn away from our neighbor.
God is coming, and God is already here. This is true with or without us, and our preparation. Like Jesus will be born to Mary, God is born into the world, and we can’t stop it or bring it faster. And still, we are asked to prepare the way. We are being invited into God’s Kingdom, and God’s work. And God has infinite patience for us.
The Rev. Carla Christopher writes this: “2nd Peter helps us understand at least a little bit about how God’s patience works. The very same frustration and hurt we feel about how much pain and suffering exists in the world is God showing love to us, giving us the chance to get it right, learn valuable lessons, and perhaps do better. Even in struggle and challenge, even when we are having trouble seeing it, there is Good News. In the moments when it can be hard to have faith in humanity, God is the embodiment of hope. God has never stopped believing in us.”
Which is good news, because preparing the way of the Lord? Repentance for the forgiveness of sins? It is simultaneously urgent and the work of our lives.
Sometimes, repentance can be as simple as acknowledging a harm that occurred. Sometimes, it includes changed behavior – not repeating the sinful pattern. Sometimes, it might mean reparations need to be paid, and systems changed to account for historical violence. Sometimes, it is as challenging as transforming the very pattern of our lives to conform to God’s love and mercy, and not our fears – of scarcity, or of the other.
In this Advent season of anticipation, where we are waiting, marking the days, until the birth of the Christ-child, how are each of us preparing the way for the Lord?
Are you someone who is being called to slow down, to rest, to grieve, to let your body feel what it’s feeling? To carve out time to listen for, and talk to, God? And to know that that is holy, and enough?
Are you someone being called to repentance, to transform an aspect of how you’re moving through the world? To deeply listen to those crying out for justice, and learn how to authentically support your neighbors?
Are you someone being called to act with urgency, at a policy or set of rules that has been harmful for years, and never addressed? To know in your heart that God is coming, the Kingdom is coming, like a thief in the night and we are to be ready?
Are you someone who will prepare the way with shouts of joy and blessing?
Are you someone who will prepare the way by naming challenging truths, risking comfort for the sake of God?
Beloveds, in this season of waiting, anticipation, and expectation, we are being reminded that we hold multitudes. We are holding together a sense of urgency and the need to slow down. We are holding together our identities as sinners, and saints. God is coming, and God is already here.
God constantly invites us to the work of the Kingdom – the work of our lives. Invites us to turn towards God in thought, word, and deed. God doesn’t want anyone to perish. We are baptized into God’s promises of comfort. Of grace. And of transformation. And we wait, expectantly, in anticipation of the Christ-child, who reminds us again and again that our God is a God of promise and hope.
As a blessing for your week, this is an excerpt of a poem by the Rev. M Barclay of enfleshed:
“Nothing much of value grows quickly –
not courage nor healing,
not love that liberates,
nor justice that transforms.
Not the new world we hope to grow
from the ruins of all that is destroyed.
Everything we need the most
for our collective soul to make it through this alive
requires great urgency and abundant patience.”
Amen.
Reed Fowler 