O God of our salvation, awaken us to your love and
enchant us by your grace ☩
in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Imagine a world in which different people got their news from different sources. Maybe there isn’t much imagination required. But imagine what it would be like to change the network and get our news from a completely different vantage point. At its best, this is what the season of Advent helps us to do. Advent reorients and repents our understanding of time, our vision of ourselves and the world, and our hopes and fears. Our assumptions about life are seen afresh and anew by the coming light of Christ. Advent helps to correct our vision.
A
significant part of what needs to be corrected is that we no longer see the
world in the way that God would have us to. It’s as if we are wearing blinders
or tinted glasses and everything is distorted. In 2007, the Canadian
philosopher Charles Taylor wrote a book that has sent waves through the fields
of religion and sociology. The book is called A Secular Age and many
books have been written in conversation with it since then. In particular, I’m
in the middle of reading a trilogy of books by Andrew Root that apply Taylor’s framework
of secularity to the Church, and they are some of the best books I’ve ever
read.
While
it is difficult, if not impossible, to summarize hundreds of pages in a
paragraph – the basic gist is that we have forgotten what our ancestors knew in
their bones: that we live in an enchanted world. It was not that long ago that
every moment and object was charged with possibility and layers of meaning.
Things were more than things and words were more than words; they conveyed a
power to make and shape reality. And these forces had a real impact on us –
clergy, potions, and legends were not fanciful things, but they gave meaning to
and could change the world. Taylor’s way of saying this is that the self was
porous – that is, open and able to be influenced by things outside of us. Simply
put, the world was enchanted with depth, possibility, and transcendence.
This
is not the world that we live in. We live in a secular age, a disenchanted
world. This process of disenchantment began in the Protestant Reformation when people
challenged the notions of the Eucharist actually having an innate sacredness
instead of a meaning that we give to it, and in the Scientific Revolution when
so much was reduced down cause and effect, bits and pieces. Instead of speech
or objects having a meaning unto themselves, they now only mean what we say
they do. And because they have no definitive meaning, they have no power over
us. Taylor says that we are now “buffered selves” – we are immune from having
meanings thrust upon us by anything we do not choose for ourselves. This is why
“authenticity” is so fetishized in our society. “Be true to thyself” is the
motto of this secular age. Instead of having meaning endowed to us, we have to
make it for ourselves, which explains why so many of us feel adrift, as if we
are searching for something we cannot find, trying to grasp onto something as
vapid as the mist. In this secular age, everything has an explanation, nothing
means more than we say it does, and we determine the meaning of our lives – it is
a disenchanted world.
You
all know that Julian of Norwich’s “All shall be well” is central to my understanding
of faith, but there’s another quote that is just as foundational. It comes from
the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She wrote, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and
every common bush afire with God, but only they who see take off their shoes; the
rest sit round and pluck blackberries.” If that’s all you remember from this
sermon, that will be plenty: “earth’s crammed with heaven.” That is a statement
about the enchanted nature of this world, for, indeed, every bush is afire with
God.
What
do I mean by this? I mean that Resurrection comes after death, that reconciliation
comes after estrangement, that grace is better than accomplishments, that
beauty surrounds us, that love is the truest thing that can ever be spoken or
done, that God is up to something. More concretely, I mean that we can find
peace after getting a tough diagnosis, we can have hope even after we’ve been
told about layoffs, we can find healing after a divorce, we can be joyful even
when we are struggling, we have a reason to love even though we have been hurt.
And these things are possible because we live in an enchanted world, a world
that is open and filled with possibilities that we cannot yet imagine or receive.
This
enchantedness is what Advent is all about. It began with our opening hymn, which
follows Jesus’ words in Matthew, “Sleepers, awake! A voice astounds us, the
shout of rampart guards surrounds us.” In other words, stop sitting around plucking
blackberries and wake up to reality. Stop living in a world created for us by advertisers,
politicians, and economists. These things shall not endure and are no more substantive
or real as a game of Monopoly. Awaken to the presence of the living, loving,
and liberating Holy Spirit who animates and enchants our lives and world.
Instead of taking our direction from forces that seek to use us, instead Advent
would have awaken to the vision we saw in Isaiah – of God’s holy mountain in
which we walk in the light of the Lord.
Our
Collect, which is based on the reading from Romans, also is an alarm clock sounding
to wake us up, for our salvation is near to us. If Charles Taylor had written
Romans instead of St. Paul, it might say “Salvation is the air we breathe, it
infuses every moment, it is the story of our lives.” We tend to think of faith,
forgiveness, salvation, blessing, all of these churchy words as something like
a status or an award. Sure, it’s nice to have titles and awards, but they
really don’t change much in us. Instead, faith is best described not as our
thoughts, but rather as a relationship.
Think about a
relationship that means the most to you – perhaps it is child, parent, spouse, friend
– whoever that person is, we are different people because of that relationship.
The fact that I have a marriage certificate really means very little to me, but
the fact that I am married changes a lot about my life and the decisions I
make. My name being on my daughters’ birth certificates really doesn’t do much
for me, except for the child tax credit on my 1040. But being a father to Eleanor
and Rowen is, perhaps, the most formative thing that has ever happened to me. The
fact that I have very fancy titles and diplomas probably does me more harm than
good in terms of humility and ego, but the fact that a bishop laid his hands on
me and made me a deacon and then a priest transforms the very core of my
identity. Faith is a lived experience, a relationship with the God who is, and
it only works in a world that shimmers with the radiance of God’s grace, peace,
and love.
The question for us to
wrestle with is whether or not we’re drowsy and asleep to the enchantedness of
God all around us. Does it feel like we’re just going through the motions? Is the
spark of possibility gone? Is something new emerging or is it as if we’re
living in the movie Groundhog Day where every day is just like
yesterday? Are we aware of the Spirit of God moving among us? If we’re honest,
enchantment, if we ever feel it, is fleeting in this secular age in which we
live. Even when we do sense that we are part of something bigger, it can easily
be dismissed as the result of evolutionary psychology, or wishful thinking, or
just our opinion. Our modern world works by having us be asleep – just going
through patterns of producing and consuming. People who critique, challenge, or
subvert this are called instigators, or dreamers, or unrealistic, or naïve.
What is rewarded in our culture are people who follow the rules and fall in
line. Even those who are seen as creative or trendsetters aren’t really doing
much new, they’re just coloring in the lines with a different crayon.
As tempting as it might
be for me or the Church to say that we just need to reenchant the world, that’s
not possible without remaking our world. A few months ago I told Caroline that
I wanted to change her job title to “Chief Enchantress” – because we need to
give our children and youth the sense that life is bigger and more glorious
than the world we have handed them. But that is not easy work, and I’m not even
sure if it is possible. Our ancestors lived in a world in which a relic had
power, an incantation could do something, a demon could disturb us. Maybe we
can convince ourselves that Sacraments have meaning, but we live as buffered selves
in a closed world.
I very much doubt that I’m
the only one here who had the experience of reading the Lion, the Witch, and
the Wardrobe as a child and checking the back of our closet for an entrance
to Narnia. When I’ve read that book to both of our daughters, neither time did
I check to see what is beyond the coats in our closet. Try as we might, we
cannot force ourselves to think things that we do not believe. How Advent helps
us though is to awaken us to the fact that we do not have to reenchant our
imaginations or our world, rather we can come and see how God’s enchantment
never went away, even if we became blind to it.
When Advent is
misunderstood, it’s always a chronological error. Advent is not the season that
prepares us for Christmas. Advent is not about getting ready to remember that Christ
was born. If we make that the focus of Advent, then we’ve lost the enchantment
of the season. Instead, Advent is preparation for when all things shall be
culminated and made well in the love of Jesus Christ. Advent is intended to orient
us towards the openness of Creation, to the possibilities that God has for us
that we cannot yet see, to the hope that Christ is coming, to the fact that
every bush really is afire with God. Advent is about the future, a future that
is enchanted.
The surest signs of this enchantment
are the signs of love. Right before St. Paul tells us to “wake up,” he writes “Owe
no one anything, except to love one another… love is the fulfilling of the law.”
God is love. This love is what overflowed from the Holy Trinity and created all
that is. This love is what called the people of Israel into being and held back
the waters of the sea. Love is what was born of Mary’s womb. Love is what fed
the hungry, forgave the sinful, carried the cross, and overcame the tomb. Love
is what was sent to dwell in our hearts in the Holy Spirit. Love is the way.
Love is so enchanting because
it has no explanation, no reason for being. But love is what can move mountains,
love is what can repair that which been broken by sin, love is what is more enduring
than the grave, love is where all things are heading, love is what we fall into
– what catches us by surprise and makes our souls sing. Pay attention to where
you find love, for that is where we will find God. Choose love, for that is how
we align ourselves with God. Pray for love, that is how we open ourselves to
being enchanted. Love is what awakens us to a world of enchantment so that we
might have the eyes to see that, indeed, lo, he is coming with clouds descending.
Alleluia!
