Advent Lessons and Carols - My Senior Homilies

At my seminary - and most others, I'd imagine - graduating students get the chance to preach in front of their faculty and peers.  Most students in my program preach on an assigned rotation at a Holy Eucharist service planned by the Chapel Ministry team (on which I serve!).  It was my blessed privilege as a Chapel Minister to choose when I wanted to preach, and I chose Advent Lessons and Carols.

As you'll read Advent is my favorite season of the church year, and has been for many years, so I was incredibly excited to get the chance to preach the Lessons and Carols service, even though I had to get permission from the Dean to add a sermon to the service: The Book of Occasional Services 2003 says "A sermon is not traditionally a part of this service."

To tell the truth, I was actually more nervous about this than I have been about anything in a long, long time.  Some of that nervousness came from the fact that in our Chapel Ministry planning meeting on Monday afternoon, we decided that instead of preaching a single sermon (we couldn't decide where to put it...) I would preach three smaller homilies.  I had just over 48 hours to write this, and I was so please with what I was able to put together!

But, honestly, part of my anxiety was definitely of the sinful variety.  I was worried about the performance of these sermons in front of my friends and my peers and my teachers.  I've preached twice during Morning Prayer this year and both times received very positive feedback; the first sermon, overwhelmingly so.  I felt pressure to live up to a very high standard - and I'm not entirely sure why it seems to be so high.  I was grateful for the chapel service on Monday, a service of fellowship, when we were invited into groups of three to share our experiences of break and our worries for the coming weeks, and to receive prayer from each other.  It was great to be able to confess that and be prayed over at the start of this week!

After all my anxiety, the service was wonderful.  The choir sang beautifully and I was so pleased with the set-up of the chapel, beautifully lit, primarily by candlelight, which you'll see was fairly important to any success I had during the evening!  I felt so supported by my fellow chapel ministers and the community as a whole; and it was so wonderful of my wife to get off work early to come to the service, and she even got to sit next to me the whole time!  I love her :-)

Well, without any more introduction:

The First Homily

Why Advent?

Why don’t we just start the church year with Christmas?

Advent is my favorite season of the church year.

I love the Advent wreath, the Advent Collects,

I love to sit in candlelight and wait.

For as long as I’ve known to observe it,

I’ve felt that the season of Advent is about time.

Yes, it’s about intention and preparation,

remembering and waiting,

penitence and hope.

I think one of the deeply buried reasons Advent begins the church year

Is because it is the church’s attempt to heal something ruined in the fall.

We all know that there’s the curse on Adam’s work and on the ground,

On Eve’s childbearing,

And on the serpent’s very incarnate existence.

But the mark that the fall leaves upon the passage of time gets buried under the others.

We forget that the very fabric of time is torn by sin, marked by sweat and toil and dust and tears.

Time.

Running out of Time.  Time is up.  Wasting time.  I don’t have enough time.  I need more time. 

Why is our language about time so negative?

Time –especially for students during finals –

Is a limit, a constraint, an enemy,

Literally a deadline we’re terrified of arriving at,

But can’t wait to cross.

Advent is about time,

And we acknowledge that every year as we

read, learn, mark, and inwardly digest

and carol our way through the timeline of our salvation,

The whole history of our redemption,

Reading about the longing in the past and

About waiting for a future hope.

But if we leave it there, the time we spend meditating on Advent stays an academic exercise.

Advent is about time,

But not just about timelines.

Observing Advent in our own spirit,

Joyfully embracing a penitential season of hope streaked with longing so strong it hurts,

Means we have to learn to be present to the past,

Present to the future,

And that our present can’t any longer be the center of our time.

Advent asks us to reorder our spiritual life and long for God with the saints of the past,

And wait in hope for the future they waited for as well.

Christmas will properly be observed as the Feast of the Incarnation,

When we mark the time when the Word became flesh,

God with us,

Emmanuel talking and eating and crying real tears,

Becoming everything we are so we might become everything God is.

Advent is when we stop marking time’s swift passage

And wait     for Christmas.

Marking the memory of our brokenness, the longing for healing, and waiting in hope,

Learning to wait with active preparation and intention.

Now if that’s all a bit fuzzy and abstract, let me address everyone’s finals anxiety for a moment.

Every year I get enormously anxious about my exams when I’m staring at them head on.

But then I remember the dozens of times I have made it through this journey before,

And realize that the end is drawing nigh,

And when I arrive there I will have succeeded, even if not as gloriously as I’d like to.

Really, I’ve already succeeded.

The memory of the past and

The realization of the reality of the future,

Is what spurs me forward,

To intentionally inhabit my time.

Advent is about bending time,

Asking the Holy Trinity, one God, to make all of it present to us,

So that we can intentionally inhabit our time

And actively wait

For what was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be:

God’s loving purposes from the first days of our disobedience

And God’s desire to bring us all into the divine life of Jesus Christ:

The love that is stronger than death.  Amen.

The Second Homily

Why Ruth?

Advent is about time,

A grand, sweeping historical meta-narrative

Asking us to be spiritually present to all of it at once,

Remembering, Longing, hoping.

As we are present to the memories of our past,

We need to be faithful witnesses to the whole of that past.

If we set the history of our redemption up too high as a monolithic narrative,

We can forget the difficult stories and the strange individuals it contains.

Tamar, disguised as a prostitute to seduce her father in law to continue Jesus’ lineage.

Rahab the professional prostitute, letting spies hide on her roof.

Ruth,     the foreigner,

The woman who chooses displacement and refugee status,

Choosing Naomi over her own people and her own God and her own land.

Bathsheba, whose husband was murdered,

And whose son succeeded his murderer father as king.

Mary, who conceived by the Holy Spirit.

These are the women Matthew lifts up in Jesus’ genealogy,

Women it is important to remember,

To name,

And to wait with.

Their stories keep redemption history attached to the messiness of all our lives,

Giving us characters making difficult choices we can relate with,

Ways to explore the whole narrative as we try to be present to the longing of the past,

Try to imagine the future they hoped for,

The future we hope for.

But Why Ruth?

Choosing her mother in law over her own people and God and land.

Where you go, I will go;
   where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people,
   and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die—
   there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me,
   and more as well,
if even death parts me from you!’

None of get to choose the hour of our death.

If we’re honest, probably none of us choose death at all.

Time offers each of us a death line,

One we’re terrified of reaching but can’t wait to put behind us.

But love –

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever will be-

Love is more   powerful than death,

Before and in and long after the glorious day of Jesus’ resurrection.

Ruth didn’t choose the hour of her death.

None of us can.

But she chose how she would wait for it,

Who her life and even her death would be loyal to.

And that choice is open to all of us.

A different age in the church knew a truth we have forgotten:

Our lives are preparation for our death.

We cannot know,

And don’t even try to guess the time of our death,

But we can prepare for how we will meet it.

Ruth’s fierce loyalty to her mother-in-law,

Even though Naomi has been emptied of all her life held dear.

Ruth’s stronger-than-death love for Naomi

Kindles a spark of hope amidst the dust of bitterness in Naomi’s life.

That spark flares out to kindle a flame of desire between Ruth and Boaz,

And the flame bursts forth in fiery glory when a boy is born,

Obed, The grandfather of David,

Ancestor of Jesus.

The empty ones, in the Book of Ruth, have been filled,

And in Matthew’s genealogy lifted high.

Advent is about time,

Remembering the stories like Ruth’s

So that we long to live with love that is stronger than death,

So we can prepare to greet death with the hope that it is quicker and easier than falling asleep,

Not the enemy of our souls but the next great adventure,

The entrance into God’s future,

The reign of love stronger than death.

The Third Homily

Advent is a time for candles.

In college a professor challenged us to live the rhythms of the church year instead of the academic year.

The example my housemates and I embraced from that chapel service

Was to live by candlelight during Advent, finals be hanged.

We embraced the darkness of this season,

Long nights and short days,

Inviting each other into conversation and fellowship,

Nightly prioritizing our spiritual lives over our assignments,

Learning how to inhabit our time intentionally.

And there was this girl

And we planned these Advent services together for our friends …

And you can all guess how that turned out :-D

There’s something about candles,[*] 

the way they burn,

Their powerful yet limited ability to keep away the darkness.

Something about the way the Holy Spirit is fire and wind,

Flickering through our vision,

Dancing with our breath but never really in our control.

Candles carry all sorts of liturgical echoes:

Fire and wind,

The light of Christ at the altar,

The light of revelation around the Scripture,

And the prayers we say for the departed and with the saints,

The whole host of heaven dancing on a wick,

Our prayer and our praise rising before God as incense.

But there’s also something about candles and time,

About the way they burn for a certain period and no longer,

The way they are slowly and completely consumed by the very flame that gives them life.

For a candle, no light given away is wasted,

No spilled wax is a loss,

No time dancing with a breath of air is spent in worry about running out of time.

A candle has a set purpose and a set time to burn,

And every fiery moment is silent witness to that truth.

When I think about the history of our redemption,

All the begats between Adam and Jesus,

And the time between Crucifixion and The Second Coming,

The time of our very present,

It is easy to ask “How Long O Lord?

Where are you?

Haven’t you waited long enough?”

And if I’m really honest with myself,

I’m afraid I find myself accusing God of wasting time.

I can’t handle the tension between God’s absence and God’s presence in the world,

The reality of resurrection life in the church, the incarnate body of Christ in the world,

And the extreme suffering present in this room, surrounding this campus, scattered through this city, filling this world.

Quit wasting time Jesus!

Come back!

But God is not the one whose relationship to time is broken,

Who feels time is always running out, a limit and a curse.

Theologian Jane Williams points out that the thirty years of Jesus’ life before his ministry

Are the final proof – as if the begats weren’t enough –

That God does not share our concern about wasting time.

God really did come to live as one of us, to be with us.

God does not waste time.

God fills time.

The season of Advent is the church’s attempt to heal our relationship to time.

Inviting us to slow down,

To prepare ourselves for Christ’s coming by remembering our brokenness, longing for healing, and waiting in hope for a new future.

Then, when the fullness of time comes,

We may find not only that Christmas has arrived,

But that God filled even the humble time of our preparation,

Dipping us in wax so that we might burn brightly with the coming of the light of Christ,

The Love stronger than death that was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever.  ALLELUIA! 

Amen.

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 [*]I got an ENORMOUS round of laughter here that I wasn’t expecting AT ALL.  The way the sections connect I totally should have known this was coming, but I was truly blindsided!