O come, O come, Emmanuel. Amen.
“Advent begins in the dark,” so says the Episcopal priest and author Fleming Rutledge. At least in the northern hemisphere, Advent, which is the liturgical new year, begins as the days are colder and darker. This is our plight as followers of Jesus, to be living between the two Advents of Jesus Christ – between his first and his second comings. We have seen his Resurrection light but we wait for that light to vanquish all the darkness of our lives and our world. Many describe this as living in the “already but not yet” and that can be both an exciting and challenging place to be.
The Church, in her wisdom, has given us the gift of Advent to begin the rhythm of the Church Year. Advent is not, primarily, a season that intended to help us count down the remaining shopping days until Christmas. In fact, Advent’s focus is not on helping us to prepare for Christmas, even though that is how the season is generally understood and used. Yes, Advent prepares us for the coming of the Messiah, but it is a coming we are waiting for, not one that happened 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem. Advent is not a season of preparing us to remember something in the past, it is preparing us to receive something in the future.
What Advent anticipates is what the quintessential hymn of the season proclaims – “Lo! He comes with clouds descending, once for our salvation slain… Christ the Lord returns to reign.” There are very few ditches that I’m willing to die in, but one is that “Lo! He comes” is the greatest hymn of all time. It’s one of those hymns where the tune and the text are perfectly married and it not only sums up what Advent is about, but it captures the whole of our faith.
But it has become fashionable in too many churches to dismiss the notion that Jesus will come again. Far too many Christians have bought into John Lennon’s lyrics, “Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try.” That’s an incredibly depressing and hopeless sentiment – to look around the world and think that this is the best it will ever be. We heard the prophet Isaiah speak about swords being beaten into ploughshares, but between warfare and gun violence, we see little evidence that we’re on the path to see that happen. We remain captive to addiction, disease, depression, ignorance, jealousy, and poverty, and liberation from those is things is the promise of the Gospel. I don’t know about you all, but I really do long for that day when the lion and the lamb lie down together. I really do expect that all things shall be made well.
As St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” Indeed, we are to be pitied if our hopes are only found in this world. Yes, I know that there are so many wonderful stories of generosity, kindness, and creativity. We ought not to ignore those things and all turn into pessimists. However, our hope is not for moments of grace, but rather a deluge. Salvation is not a trickle of justice, but, as the prophet Amos says, we should expect that justice will roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Being grounded in the power and reality of the Resurrection, our hopes should be bold, audacious, and extravagant.
And so the notion of the Second Coming isn’t some fringe belief that “those Christians” hope for, it’s something that we confess in the Creed every week and anticipate every time we celebrate the Eucharist. In the darkness of this “in between time,” Advent helps us to train our eyes on the hopes, longings, and dreams that we have for God to be God with us and God for us in all things. Advent is when we anticipate that the light of the Resurrection will come to illuminate all situations, all hearts, and all minds.
There are four Sundays in Advent and one of the major themes of this season is light. It’s why we light the Advent wreath and hear so much light imagery in the readings. Each of the sermons this Advent will focus on a different aspect of this light that has dawned in Jesus and which we expectantly wait for an even fuller brightness.
For this Sunday, the aspect of light before us is how light guides us. We heard from the prophet Isaiah “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!” and in Romans that we are to “live honorably as in the day.” We live in a confusing and distracting world – and we do need a guiding light. As one of the Psalms puts it, “Your word is a lantern to my feet and a light upon my path.” In the time when those words were written, it would be easy to find and follow a light on a path because a light would easily stand out. But we live in an electrified world, a world that is sometimes blindingly bright. Remember a few weeks ago when the Northern Lights were visible – if you really wanted to see them, you had to get out of town, away from all of the light pollution. We have so many lights around us that we might easily overlook a single lantern trying to guide us.
Our task as followers of Jesus is to focus on the true light and act as mirrors to reflect that light into the world. Focus comes before reflection. If we focus on the wrong light source, we might be amplifying the wrong thing. Sadly, the Church has a long and sad history of adding to the division, discrimination, and violence of the world. Instead of standing in relief to the ways of the world, we’ve gone down the wrong path and followed the wrong light sources. Advent, like Lent, has an element of repentance to it and the word “repent,” Biblically speaking, means “to turn back.” To repent is to recognize that we have gotten onto the wrong path and turn back to God. This is what we heard about in Romans, “Let us lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”
The struggle we face is that of discernment. Among so many lights that seek our attention as consumers and voters, which is the true light that we are to follow? Perhaps you’ve read the novel All the Light We Cannot See by Anothony Doerr. The story unfolds in World War II Europe and focuses on two characters, Marie-Laure and Werner.
Marie-Laure is blind and her father builds a model of the town for her to feel through with her hands, and even without sight, she learns the paths around the city. This allows her to function as a part of the resistance quite easily – no one is going to suspect a blind girl of smuggling messages under the noses of the Nazis. But she does just that. She carries messages wrapped around loaves of bread to her uncle, who has a radio in their attic that he can broadcast messages from.
Werner is an orphan with an innate knack for electrical engineering. The Nazi war machine needs his skills and so he is saved from the front lines and becomes a radio technician. His task is to discover members of the resistance who are illegally broadcasting messages.
Marie-Laure and Werner’s paths converge when he tracks radio messages coming from her house. Part of what inspired Werner’s interest in radios was the broadcasts he listened to as a young boy, broadcasts from that very house by Marie-Laure’s uncle. When these worlds collide, Werner is faced with a crisis about which path to follow. I won’t spoil the ending if you want to read it for yourself, but this is exactly what the guiding light of Jesus is does for us – it presents us with a crisis, a word that simply means “a decision point.”
The title of the book is clever and compelling – all the light we cannot see. The plot is driven by radio waves, forms of light that we cannot see, and yet are all around us. We have to be properly tuned to their wavelength to pick upon them. And then there’s the aspect that Marie-Laure is blind and yet sees more clearly than Werner who is blinded by Naziism. The author said, “The title is intended as a suggestion that we spend too much time focused only on a small slice of the spectrum of possibility.”
How true that is – we only see a slice of the spectrum of possibility. We only see things from our perspective; we only tune into our standard frequency. We see things as they are and often reduce our hopes to seem plausible based on the current evidence instead of daring to dream of a world that is radiant with God’s splendor. We get trapped thinking in terms of what is instead of what could be.
The challenge is, of course, none of us think that we are on the wrong path. Werner, until he saw a more brilliant and beautiful light in Marie-Laure, thought his side of the conflict was illuminated and the rest of the world was in darkness. We confuse our perspective for “the” perspective. Which is why, all the more, we need God’s light to guide us.
There are many attributes of God’s guiding light in Scripture, but to focus on just one, we have as Isaiah puts it, that we will not learn war anymore. We are guided to lay down our arms and see one another as precious and beloved siblings, not enemies. I remember back in Salisbury, there was a parishioner who left the church. I reached out to him multiple times to talk about the situation, but every letter and phone call went ignored. In my final letter to him, I wrote “One day, in Christ, we will be reconciled to one another, and we will both see things in a clearer and truer light. My hope is that since it will be true in the future, we might go ahead and enjoy that reconciliation now as well.”
He didn’t respond to that letter either, but that doesn’t change the truth of it. Because we are human beings, we are all partially blind, we are all self-interested, we are all broken. And sometimes our brokenness rubs up against another person’s and we have conflict. This is to be expected. Conflict is not a bad thing; it’s a human thing. The Church though is a place where we deal with conflict differently than the world. We don’t pick up weapons to fight one another, rather we put on the armor of light – of graciousness, of listening, of compassion.
Something I tell people in the Church is that we will, without question, have conflict. We will misunderstand and misinterpret one another. We will not speak as clearly as we intend and we will not hear as clearly as we ought. We will sometimes be offended and hurt. What happens in the Church though is that we are guided by the light of Christ towards reconciliation. The love that God has for us is given to us to reflect to one another. Yes, we will frustrate and disappoint one another. This ought not to be a surprise.
But in the Church, if we are willing to stick with one another and walk the path of reconciliation, we will be led to a place more beautiful than we can imagine. We will be restored to one another and our relationships will not be warlike. That reconciliation is so much more beautiful than the scars and pains of the conflict. In a sense, that’s a working definition of Resurrection – a beauty and peace that is more glorious than the pains that came before. Friends, we are a people of the Resurrection and Jesus guides us towards the light that we cannot yet fully see.
One pastor often tells newcomers to the church to decide beforehand whether or not they will stay before they are disappointed. That’s good advice not just for newcomers, but for us all. Will we bring the ways of war into our relationships – the ways of deception, of violence, the ways of division? Or will we instead walk the path of not learning war anymore. Can we commit to laying down our arms, our need to be right, our need to have everything go our way? Often, if we wait until there is hurt or conflict to commit to walking in the way of peace, it will be too late. Our emotions will get the better of us, and we will not be able to see the light of the path towards reconciliation. And this is true not only in the Church, but in our families, our neighborhoods, our politics. Are we committed to staying and walking in the light of the Lord together?
In the Song of Zechariah, recorded in Luke’s Gospel, the father of John the Baptist says that the Messiah’s role will be to “Give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.” It is the light that emanates from Jesus, the light of the world, that allows us to see a wider spectrum of possibility, to have brighter hopes, to be guided in the way of love. Gracious God, open our eyes to all the light that we cannot yet see. Amen.
