Telling Time: A Sermon for 3 Advent
Since the beginning of Advent, our weekly Tree House chapel services have been focusing on time – namely, how the Church tells time. We have been exploring how the Church uses liturgical color, the stars, the smell of incense, and the Advent wreath to tell time. We are also exploring how we tell time with the sacred stories of Holy Scripture. These curious children are becoming more and more “tuned in” to the season of Advent.
Our weekly Adult Formation class that meets at 12:00 on Wednesdays has also been learning about how the Church tells time. We just finished an entire unit on how we use the Book of Common Prayer to tell time – namely through the calendar of the Church year and the cycle of Collects that we pray.
So, my hope is that all of us – regardless of our age – are becoming more attuned to the seasons of the Church year, and how we use that to tell time. As Christians, we believe that we are not on some sort of random, linear trajectory. While we indeed are moving forward in chronos – or chronological time - we believe that we are a part of God’s more circular, eternal time, which we call kairos.
Advent is perhaps the season when we are most conscious about telling time. Part of that is because we are coming off almost six months of Ordinary Time, where not much happens or changes in terms of our liturgy, music, and traditions. So, when Advent finally comes around, we are very cognizant of the many changes we see, hear, and smell. We even have a large wreath up front that acts as a very visual reminder that we are telling time by lighting a new candle each week.
And by now, you have all noticed that the 3rd week in Advent adds a bit of a wrinkle in our time-telling, as we light the rose-colored candle and adorn our church and clergy with rose-colored vestments. The 3rd Sunday in Advent is known as Gaudete Sunday – which is the Latin word for “joy.” The theme of joy aligns with the third component of the Four Last Things that we study in Advent – death, judgment, heaven, and hell.
The third Sunday in Advent invites us to pause – and even take a reprieve from - our focus on the rather dark, harrowing themes death and judgment. Yes, our days are shorter, darker, and colder. Yes, there will come a time when we will die. And yes, there will be a time when we will face our final reckoning when Christ comes again to judge the quick and the dead. All of these things are true, and we use the Season of Advent to better prepare ourselves for these temporal and existential realities.
But the season of Advent also reminds us that in the midst of these harrowing realities, we, as Christians, can face these realities with a solemn, hopeful joy that is grounded in our belief in the implications related to our proclamation every week during the Holy Eucharist that “Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.
Our scripture lessons today point to the solemn, hopeful, heavenly joy of GaudeteSunday. The prophet Isaiah uses the language of poetry to speak of Israel’s return from exile:
I will greatly rejoice in the LORD,
my whole being shall exult in my God;
for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation,
he has covered me with the robe of righteousness…
…For as the earth brings forth its shoots,
and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up,
so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise
to spring up before all the nations.
Regarding the use of this text for the 3rd Sunday in Advent, a commentator for The Living Church magazine says that:
“After God’s people had suffered the loss of their homeland and temple, they were finally allowed…to return home from their captivity in Babylon. Arriving, they saw devastation and waste on all sides... Their migration home, of course, brought moments of joy and hope, but the vision of a homeland laid waste by war and neglect shook them deeply, so much that they had little choice but to fall upon the faith they had long known, and wait for the Lord…God was faithful and just... God acts to provide for those who mourn, and not, of course, only for those in the sixth century B.C. in the land of Israel. In every age and every place, the Son of the Father says, “Blessed are those who mourn.” Their comfort is the action and grace of God in Christ…”
Just as the ancient Israelites were living in the time between exile and the coming of the Messiah to redeem and restore Israel, we too are living in that in-between time of the already and the not-yet. Yes, the messiah has come to inaugurate God’s kingdom here on earth. But we still wait in hope for the final consummation of God’s kairos time.
On this text from Isaiah, Episcopal priest Craig Uffman points out that we Christians:
“…live between times — between the dawn of the world’s redemption and its fulfillment. We rejoice now not because we are deaf to the cold, harsh word of the world, but because we are filled with the grace of God’s counter-Word. We rejoice because we’ve been blessed with eyes to see beyond the dark shadows of a world that’s forgotten its Creator. We rejoice not because of what is, but because of what is becoming. Our joy is not conditioned upon the vagaries of this world. It bubbles up in us as our act of faith in God’s promise. In God we trust.”
The stories of how our spiritual ancestors lived in “between the dawn of the world’s redemption and its fulfillment” is most consciously told during the season of Advent. During this holy season, we are invited to join our ancestors in the steadfast, faithful, hopeful waiting that is one of the foundational elements of our religious life. And though we are not ancient Israelites waiting to be released from Babylonian captivity or oppressive Roman rule, we are still living in the need and hopeful anticipation of both temporal and existential release and redemption.
Waiting for existential, eternal redemption can seem understandably opaque – after all, who knows when Christ will come again? But the Advent discipline of waiting in hope can easily be appropriated to our this-worldly, temporal context. 2020 has been a year of living in exile for most all of us. Many of us have not seen our family members who live out of town or in nursing homes. Many of us have not worshipped in our beloved, sacred church buildings. Many of us have been in and out of quarantine due to exposure to someone with the virus. Many of us are home-schooling our children for the first time in our lives. Many of us have had to learn algebra or geometry or world history or biology through a computer screen. Many of us have had to close or reduce the scope of our businesses. Many of us haven’t eaten out at our favorite restaurants. The list goes on for the many ways that the covid-19 pandemic has imposed upon us either a voluntary or mandatory exile. Like our spiritual ancestors, this new way of living has disoriented us. We have had to find new ways of praying, worshipping, and connecting with God and our fellow sojourners. And we have had to find new ways to live our lives.
And when we watch or read the news – regardless of the network - we are oftentimes being made to feel less hopeful, not more. That is because bad news and conflict generate many more clicks and therefore much more advertising revenue than good or even pragmatic news. So, our waiting can and has felt hopeless this year.
This past Friday, we were given the very hopeful, good news that the covid-19 vaccination has been approved by the FDA and will soon be put into circulation. For me, this was a very welcome bit of tangible hope in the midst of several months of intangible, not-knowing. What exactly is this virus? How did it get out? How do we treat it? Who and what do we believe when we seek reliable information about it? When will it end? To me, the news of an FDA-approved vaccine that is ready for distribution is very tangible, hopeful news, however you choose to answer the questions I just asked.
Yet, in spite of this very tangible, hopeful news that our covid-19 exile will come to an end in the foreseeable future, we find ourselves in the midst of the deadliest phase of the virus. I recently saw a statistic posted last Wednesday that listed the deadliest days in U.S. history:
1. The Galveston Hurricane (1900)
2. The Battle of Antietam (1862)
3. September 11, 2001
4. Last Thursday
5. Last Wednesday
6. Last Tuesday
7. Last Friday
8. Pearl Harbor (1941)
Indeed, even with a light shining at the end of the tunnel, we are in the thick of the covid-19 exile. Many of our Christmas celebrations this year will be muted due to the virus. Many of us will stay home rather than visiting with extended family. Many of us will, perhaps for the first time ever, spend Christmas Eve celebrating the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ on a computer screen. In a cruel sort of irony, this Advent just might be the most authentic Advent of our lifetimes. We are most certainly in the darkness of exile, but with light peeking through. But we must be careful to remember that the messiah we are waiting for is not a vaccine, a presidential candidate, or anything or anybody else other than the One whose second coming in glory we await, Jesus Christ. So, while we will celebrate the release from the exile of the covid-19 pandemic, we will still be called to faithfully await the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. But as people of faith, like those who have gone before us, our waiting is not in vain. And we are called to wait hopefully and joyfully. And the Third Sunday of Advent helps remind us that we are called to be a joyful people. The apostle Paul was indeed an Advent apostle, and his words to the Church is Thessalonica were Advent words of hopeful, joyful waiting:
“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil.
May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.”