First Sunday of Advent (#1)

Waiting

The first Sunday of Advent is kind of collapsed into the advent of Jesus. The birth of Jesus is a kind of premonition of the return of the establishment of the kingdom..., and that's all very nice. But, concretely, what is possible in the real lives of us people of the church, or the liturgy, our religious lives? What happens to us in Advent, which effectively does not exist? We're going to have a Christmas Carol concert at the college this evening, I heard Ave Maria two weeks ago at Masonville-How do you put all this stuff together? Advent, of course, is a time of waiting, of expectation, and yet everything kind of gets collapsed into everything else, effectively. We both want to have the thrills of shopping sprees, buying binges, and somehow anticipating that this is it... December Twenty-Fifth. Well, I think that one of the things that we ought to look to, to traditions, to the Saints, to the Biblical text,to the liturgy..., is a very simple thing, so that on the afternoon of December 25th, or early December 26th, we just don't wake up and say, "Thank God it's over for another year," which I am persuade is the normal response to this event for most of us every year..., every year. "Thank God it's over; what happened?" That might as well be the question.

I think that we can pretty much say, at least in the Christian understanding, that Advent is pretty much eclipsed by all kinds of other things, worrying about: "will get the Christmas cookies made? Whom shall I invite? How will the family get along when we get together? What is the menu? When are the office parties? Have we laid in enough liquor?" etc., etc., etc... All of which are real questions and good questions. But the fact is that there are so many of those questions, that kind of question, that they kind of eclipse everything else. So it may be a kind of settledness thing to expect that there is any thing that can withstand all that. That's real life for most of us-it certainly is for me. The college Christmas party is December Seventh, we've got caroling tonight..., it's all over the place...

I would like to suggest that the only thing, it seems to me, that might be a usable thing to keep very much in mind this notion of, let me get it out of the Gospel, "waiting." How do we wait? How do we "wait" when you wait twenty minutes to get a parking place at Masonville? You know, you drive around, White Oaks is even worse..., everyone has had this same experience. But what kind of waiting, and waiting for what? Okay, I think that this passage from Isaiah could be helpful. What does Isaiah say? He's trying to stir up in his hearers, presumably, a sense of sin. Which is what? What is sin? Sin is human inadequacy, the betrayal of one's humanity, that's the notion of sin-deformity. Humanity of course, as the Bible puts it out, is this radical openness to everybody else... How do we come to that? I mean we're so bloody tired. It's very simple: you can't think about that because you're exhausted, overblown with minutiae, which are no longer minutiae..., collectively they're everything.

Waiting... My suggestion for myself and for you is very simple: that I steadfastly say to myself, "As of today, I am going to take a minimum of five minutes everyday, a minimum of five minutes, in the hope that by the time Christmas comes that I can do it for more than five minutes," to think about this text in Isaiah and say, "Where am I in need of the Advent of God-concretely, where?" I mean it's a very simple, do-able exercise. And there's no alternative to doing that. You know, time is planned, as we all know, that's one of the problems of the next three or four weeks... There's not enough time... First of all, even before I take the time, I have to say: "What can I really exclude? What really need not be done?" I think that's for me an enormously useful first question: "What need not be done?" And the criterion for need, of course, is: what is going to so interfere with me that I'm not going to be able to take this Isaiah text seriously? What need not be done? Having put that question to myself, then I can say ,well, in the Scriptures, Isaiah 63: 16-17, and 64: 3-8..., I mean we can get these readings, they're all over the place..., but, where is my heart impenetrable...? Where is my heart impenetrable, using the metaphor of Isaiah?

It shouldn't be too onerous. In fact, I suspect that might be honest-to God refreshment, rejuvenation recreation... to do this because I, at least, experience most of the days of Advent as simply deterioration... They just break me down... I mean just weary, weary..., bone-weary... No wonder every one says: "Thank God it's over..." It's a very small thing: so it's the first Sunday of Advent, and I'm going to say "Okay, what can I exclude? What need not be done, or needs to be done in a lesser degree?" And just take five minutes and say: "where has my heart become impenetrable?" And I think, filling that out a little more..., the notion of sin, of impenetrability, is a really hard one to get hold of. I mean, I fully expect that in my own case it will take three weeks even to come up with that criterion. What is sin? What is sin? Now, I am a slow learner, and fairly obtuse, and if my heart is not hard, at least it is too beat-up to get very far. But I know that I have to do that-I have to do that so the passing of Christmas does not become a source of enormous relief instead of, somehow, the culmination of what I'm supposed to be doing over the next four weeks.

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