Advent 2, Year B - Sunday, December 4, 2011
Isaiah 40:1-11
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And here we are, you and I; lucky enough to be here; lucky enough to hear that good news.
What is the good news? God was, is and will always be with us.
Jesus came and lived amongst us.
Jesus lives in you and in me.
Jesus will manifest himself to all, for us to live together forever.
In Advent, we yearn, we long, we anticipate and we prepare for Jesus arriving among us.
We yearn for the Beloved who was with humanity about 20 centuries ago.
We long for the Beloved who is being formed in our hearts today -- if we consent to it.
And we anticipate the manifestation of the Beloved to all of creation, in the time beyond time, in the time beyond evil.
Are we willing to participate in that good news? Are we willing to prepare ourselves and the world for that Kingdom? “Your Kingdom come. You will be done.”
Really? How? How are we preparing for the celebration of Christ; not only on December 25 but every day of our life? How are we preparing to celebrate the Beloved for all eternity?
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John the Baptist, the forerunner of the Beloved, gives us a clue: repent, and be forgiven. To repent comes in two movements of the heart.
First, look at yourself with a keen, honest, unbiased eye. Don’t judge yourself. Just look at yourself and see what is. Do you see anything that turns you away from God? Do you find anything that keeps you procrastinating from God’s embrace? Do you recognize that pile of excuses reaching to the rafters? Look at yourself and ponder. What keeps me away from your Love, Lord?
Then, when you have faced what is in the way, turn around, consent to God’s loving gaze into your heart and ask for forgiveness. Throw yourself into the embrace of God’s forgiveness. And trust that you will receive the help you need to keep walking in the right direction, whether you know that direction or not.
Just in case you missed it, there was no intermediary step between your introspection and your turning to God. There is no need to turn into an athlete of virtue, willfully trying to fix everything that is wrong with you and the world, before you deem that you deserve forgiveness.
Remember -- Good News! -- Jesus already came to us and redeemed you and me from sin; He didn’t wait for you to get rid of sin first.
Make no mistake, you will need to amend your ways and empty yourself to be filled by God, but you won’t be able to do that until you earnestly ask God to play on your team. Turn to God; receive the forgiveness freely offered; trust God to help you achieve God’s dream for you which you cannot do alone.
And know, that as long as you turn to God one more time than you turned away, you’re in the right direction. This repenting business is likely to be more than a once off occurrence. No cheap grace here.
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How else do we prepare to celebrate the Beloved today, every day and for all eternity? Well, we stop, we breathe and we remember whose we are.
We live in God’s creation and that involves time and space as we experience them. But does God experience time? And if so, what is it like to God?
We live in a sequential time. We imagine that time moving in one direction along a straight line. And we pretend controlling that time by measuring it. Some call that human experience of time Chronos.
When we live with God, we can have glimpses of God’s time, sometime referred to as Kairos. It is a time that flows in curvaceous directions and at various speeds. It is a time that is felt in quality more than quantity. It is a time of “already” and “not yet” occurring simultaneously.
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Advent is a time of the liturgical year that lends itself to considering God’s time. In Advent, we wait for the arrival of Christ at what we consider three different points of our timeline:
- First, we await the commemoration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth in first-century Palestine as the historical marker of our liberation from sin and death,
- Second, we await the return of Christ at the end of time. And we should look again at what that phrase might mean; “the end of time”,
- And Third, we await the birthing of the Christ within. We are each individually amidst the pangs of Christ being born, nurtured and fully formed in our own heart.
What it takes to be there is to complete what Native Americans have called the longest journey a human can travel. And that is the journey an insight makes from the mind to the heart.
So this Advent, stop, breathe and remember whose you are. You too are the Beloved of God and the Kingdom is within you if you let your heart open the doors your mind can’t grasp.
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I said we should look for a moment at the phrase “the end of time.” I admit I don’t know what it means. But I want to share with you that I suspect it has more to do with a renewed sense of time, a time more akin to God’s time and a time freed from the clutch of evil. I see the end of time as the end of all evil brought about by God through his Beloved and all his beloved.
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So, in Advent, Christians prepare themselves to be with the Beloved more intentionally. They prepare themselves for Christmastide and beyond. They prepare themselves in joyful and truthful turning to God. They prepare themselves in slowing down to remember whose they are and what kingdom they are citizens of. They prepare themselves to remain more often and more fully aware of the abiding presence of the loving God in themselves, in each other, and in all creation.
If this sounds good, let’s consider being Christians again this Advent. We will prepare ourselves to live in the Kingdom of God at Christmas and forever more. We will put ourselves in God’s hands as instruments for a renewed creation in the midst of what is and what is to come. The timeline can seem fuzzy and that’s OK. You’re in God’s hands, you’re in God’s time.
Have a blessed Advent.
Come Lord Jesus, Come!
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