Advent

The Rev. Susan J. Latimer

Isaiah 40: 1-11; Psalm 85; 2 Peter 3: 8-15a; Mark 1:1-8

Here we are in Advent again. Waiting for something we waited for last year, and the year before, and the year before. Waiting for something we will be waiting for next year, and the year after, and the year after.

That description would make Advent seem a time of frustration. And yet Advent is my favorite season, for this very puzzle and this strange joy. What are we waiting for? Why are we still waiting? How LONG will we be waiting?

One of the great themes of Advent is TIME. What IS time? We know what it means to us in a general way, a linear way – time past has already expired; time future is yet to come. We remember our lives that are past; we wonder about what will happen to us in the future. We look at our watches and see what time it is RIGHT NOW. Except if you have a second hand, you may notice that the time it is RIGHT NOW is not the time it was one second ago. And where did that time go? Does it still exist? Are you the same person right now, sitting in your pew, that you were when you came in the church door? Think about it.

Time is confusing, and not just to us. The greatest theologians have puzzled over the concept of time. Did time begin when God began to create? If so, then what does it mean to say that God is eternal? Did time always exist with God, or with creation? Or does God exist outside time? These questions may seem too confusing to even contemplate. These questions may make you feel as though the top of your head is about to explode. And yet part of what we are about in Advent is wrestling with these questions.

The great St. Augustine wrote this about time. “If no one asks me [about time], I know; but if any person should require me to tell him, I cannot.” As St. Augustine acknowledged, time is a great mystery.

Today’s epistle from 2 Peter emphasizes the mystery of time. We are told that “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness.”

What is that promise that people were longing for? Why did the author of Peter’s epistle try to explain that time for God is not like time for us? And why does Peter emphasize the point that the Lord is not slow about his promise as some think of slowness? Could it be because the writer understood that people wonder why the world is as it is, and ask why God has not yet done something about that? Perhaps people in Peter’s time looked around at their world, as we do now, and saw the suffering, and the longing for an end to suffering – they saw death and a longing for a solution to the problem of death – and they cried “How long, Lord? How long?”

Today, unlike the people of Peter’s time, we live in a time of instant gratification. We hurt, so we take a pill and expect it to work pretty quickly. We are hungry so we put food in the microwave and we want it hot in three minutes, or we want a more elaborate meal in Rachel Ray’s thirty minutes. God does not operate that way. If a thousand years are like a day to God, then our lives – long as they seem to us -- are to God like a short zap in the microwave.

But still we yearn, because we are human, for problems to be solved and injustices to be addressed. And can we be faulted if we look at the news from the American economy, the news from the Mumbai massacre, the news from genocide in Darfur, the tragic news from all corners of the globe, and we ask How long Lord? We look around at our environment which is being terribly damaged and our world where people in many places die of very treatable diseases, and many in this country have no health care, and we cry, How long, Oh Lord, how long?

My favorite poems are a collection by the Anglican T.S. Eliot – the Four Quartets. I wonder if Eliot meant these poems for Advent readings, or if the number four is merely coincidental. You could read one of Eliot’s poems on each of the Sundays in Advent and do far worse. If you do so, and are unfamiliar with Eliot, I warn you. The Four Quartets are not easy reading. I have been studying them for years and I still don’t understand everything Eliot wrote. That, I think, is a good thing. Because every time I read Eliot, I see something new and different.

One thing I am sure of: Eliot’s Four Quartets are, among other things, a meditation on Advent time. If you had read the first quartet last Sunday, titled Burnt Norton, you would have read this”
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

So forget the idea that time past is gone, never to return, and has no connection to us. Or that the time to come can also have no connection to what is happening right now. We are a part of time past, present and future, for Eliot continues “all time is eternally present.”

Eliot begins his second great poem, “East Coker”, with the following line. “In my beginning is my end.” The last line of East Coker is “In my end is my beginning.” Let me read that again. First, “In my beginning is my end.” Last, “In my end is my beginning.”

By the end of the Four Quartets, a poem called “Little Gidding”, Eliot will say:
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.

And then:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

For T.S. Eliot the time of our lives is connected to our earlier times and the time we are heading toward, however that may turn out. And it is connected to the time of other lives that came before us, as we recall when we celebrate All Saints Day, and is connected to the time that will come, as we hope for in Advent. And his conclusion is one that, if you have ever received an e-mail from our rector Susan Latimer, you might have noticed as a signature at the end.

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well

Those last words were first written by the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, who could herself be the subject of another sermon.

Well, I fear the English teacher in me has taken over this sermon. But one of the joys of being an Episcopalian is that we can be as open about the spiritual sustenance we receive from great literature as from the Bible.

And here is another joy of being Episcopalian. We have all encountered from time to time the sort of apocalyptic talk that is familiar in some corners of Protestantism – talk of the last days, of believers being raptured up to heaven and everyone else subject to a time of tribulation ruled by the antichrist until Jesus makes a final triumphant return. In that scenario, Jesus will return with violence, and unbelievers will be cast into a fiery chasm either for eternal torment or absolute extinction, depending upon who you listen to. It is the apocalypse of the Left Behind novels.

But that is not how we understand apocalypse in our Anglican tradition. We are, right now, in the midst of our apocalypse. Advent is our apocalyptic season. It is the time when we cry “Come, Lord Jesus,” and yet we know he has already been here, and is now here. It is the time we yearn for the promise of salvation, yet salvation has already been achieved. It is the season when we wait for the birth of Jesus, who has already been born, and lived, and preached, and healed, and performed miracles, and has died and has risen. It is the season when we confront the tribulations of this life, and know that we have already been saved from them.

As T.S. Eliot knew, Advent is an end and it is a beginning. The calendar year is ending, the church year begins. All time exists right now, in this moment of waiting for the redemption that our faith tells us has been achieved, is now, and still is yet to come. Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.