On the Move

(Note:  Father C called me last week -- the priest preaching at the 7:45 service bailed, could I fill in?  Sure, I said.  I didn't know he was sticking me with an apocalypse!)

Advent 1
Sermon at St. Swithin's
Luke 21:25-31

Happy New Year!

No, I haven’t taken leave of my senses, nor have you been in a coma for a month.  This is the first Sunday in Advent, and as we light that first purple candle, we start a new Christian year – a time when we gather as a community, open up a new Gospel – Luke this year – and tell our story all over again, from the beginning.

Now, the Christian year does not start with the birth of Christ.  Let me digress for a moment:  I’m sure you know that Christmas is not Jesus’ birthday.

(There were shepherds in the fields, watching over their flocks by night, after all.  Even a sheep has enough good sense not to go outside in a winter night!).  On Christmas, we celebrate his birth, but not his birthday.

Why we celebrate on Dec. 25 is because the early church appropriated a pagan holiday, the birth of Sol Invictus, the invincible sun (S-U-N). 

December 21 or 22 was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, and by the 25th they were assured that the days were growing longer and spring was on its way.  Hence, the birth of Sol Invictus, and the early church just took this holiday for our own.
And yet, our year begins four Sundays before.  It’s an odd time to start a new year – it’s cold, dark, and growing darker. And our Gospel today is not a comforting Christmas story – it’s an apocalypse, where Jesus predicts his second coming. 

There is no baby Jesus in the stable, but signs and portents that great and dark things are afoot before the coming of Christ.  A time much like the time of his birth – and a time much like our own.

You see, we humans are always living on the verge of an apocalypse.  There are always wars and rumors of wars, fear, and foreboding.  In fact, it’s now refined to a science.
This year, we’re supposed to be afraid of the avian flu epidemic – a disease that has killed no one in the country and only about 100 people in Asia, generally people who live with poultry.  Before that, we had to be afraid of West Nile Virus, and before that, SARS.

If that’s not enough to be afraid of, we are being warned about the grave danger of obesity in this country – how we’re all getting fatter, and all the dangers to our health.  Yet at the same time, we’re living longer.

If your possess a long memory like I do, you remember that AIDS was supposed to be a sweeping epidemic in this country, altho’ even at its peak it killed just a fraction of the people who were lost to heart disease and cancer every year. 

And if you go back even further – Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb in 1971, said that “the battle to feed humanity is over – in the 1970s, the world will undergo famines, hundreds of millions of people, including Americans, are going to starve to death.”

Smog disasters in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles – and “I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
So if we were to take all predictions at face value, we’re in peril of both starvation and obesity -- at the same time!

(And we all remember how Y2K turned out.)

This is not to say that there aren’t legitimate apocalyptic concerns that we live with – AIDS is decimating Africa, for instance.  There is mass slaughter in Darfur, sectarian violence in the Middle East, nukes and the dangers of them from North Korea and Iran.  Being in the world, we are always close to darkness and disaster, and Advent is about acknowledging this darkness where we live.

I recently read an article by Wilfred McClay, an editor at Touchstone magazine.  He said that the best Christmas carols have an element of darkness about them.

[God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen]

He goes on to mention the images of bleak midwinter, snow, on snow, sad and lonely plains, “when half-spent was the night.”

He says:

The older lyrics are laced with just such evocations of darkness. They help us remember why it is symbolically right, even if historically wrong, to celebrate Christ’s birth in winter.
We are constantly reminded to “keep Christ in Christmas” and to remember “the reason for the season.” And of course we should. But, if I may be permitted to put it this way, we must also keep Satan in Christmas, and not skip too lightly over the lyrics that mention him.

For he and the forces he embodies are an integral part of the story. It utterly transforms the way we understand Christmas, and our world, when we also hold in our minds a keen awareness of the darkness into which Christ came, and still must come, for our sake.
Later in “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” the visiting angel tells the shepherds in the field that Christ has come “To free all those who trust in him/ From Satan’s power and might.” Being subject to that “power and might” is, as we are likely to put it these days, the default setting of our human existence. But the Christmas story plays havoc with all such defaults.

It reveals the putatively normal and settled features of our world to be something very different: the ruins and aftereffects of a great and ancient calamity, the tokens of a disordered order. It lifts the veil of illusion about who we are and what we were made to be. Which means that the “comfort and joy” of which the song speaks are not merely outbursts of seasonal jollity.

I remember one of my favorite parts of that great book by C.S. Lewis, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.”  In that book, the land of Narnia is under the thrall of an evil witch queen, who has shrouded the land in perpetual snowfall, where “it’s always winter, but never Christmas.”

The only hope of the people of Narnia – and “people” include a lot of talking animals and mythological creatures – is that their true king, Aslan the great lion, will return.

My favorite line is this: in the midst of that winter and oppression, one of the characters passes along the news:  “Aslan is on the move.”

We haven’t seen Aslan yet – we‘ve only met him in the stories they tell about him -- and we will not see him for awhile.  But it’s electric.  The winter is still there, the oppression and fear is still there, but just the words, “Aslan is on the move,” lets us know other things are afoot that we cannot see, plans are in place, pieces are being put together in the background, and the sunshine day of liberation is sure to come.

So welcome, Advent, welcome, Yule.  Welcome, year to come.  We huddle before our single candle in a dark time with the God is on the move -- and we will at last see the day of the coming of our invincible Sun – the Son of Man, the Son of God -- with power and great glory.

Amen!