An Upside Down Advent

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fourth Sunday of Advent by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

In his book, Carnival and Other Christian Festivals,  Max Harris paints what at first might seem to be a rather blasphemous, and unseemly picture of what our siblings in the faith got up to 1000 years ago.

Throughout medieval and early modern Europe, Christmas was a time for festive reversals of status. As early as the ninth century, a mock patriarch was elected in Constantinople, burlesquing the Eucharist and rode through the streets on an ass. As late as Innocents’ Day 1685, in the Franciscan church of Antibes, lay brothers and servants ‘put on vestments inside out, held books upside down… wore spectacles with rounds of orange peels instead of glasses… blew ashes from the censers on each other’s face and hands, and instead of the proper liturgy chanted confused and inarticulate gibberish.’ Cross-dressing, masking as animals, wafting foul-smelling incense, and electing burlesque bishops, popes, and patriarchs mocked conventional human pretensions. 

What if, I wonder, these ninth century revelers–engaged in all manner of goofiness and impropriety–were actually in their carnivalesque reversals being more true to the upside-down world of the he Gospel than all subsequent enactments that proceed with staid primness and german watch-maker propriety? Can their embrace of upside-downness teach us something about Advent? Might it help us to see just how nuts this God of ours is in the story of the meeting of these two marginalized country cousins–one young, poor and unwed, the other far beyond the age of conception? Might a deeper appreciation of how love kicks in the womb of these two unlikely candidates for God coming into the world, help us see that our so-called ordinary lives are themselves the very place where love kicks?

The Visitation–the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth–is perhaps some of the most subversive material in the Gospel. And yet, we often turn it into a kind of 1st century Palestine version of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. We tame the wildness of God. We make familiar the strangeness of how and through whom God acts. Church–this topsy-tursy liminal space of meeting between God and human beings where love kicks and pokes and prods us back to this one wild and precious life–reduced to getting through on time. I sometimes think if Episcopalians were around at the Mary’s singing of the Magnificat the only comment would be–”Nice, but a little long.”

We want quick and easy. God works slowly and messily. We want Cedars of Lebanon. God shows up as mustard seeds, leaven in the bread, unwed teen mothers and washed up women folk. We want things orderly and predictable. God operates through the unexpected–a King who kneels at his subjects’ feet. A King who feeds instead of feasts. A  Messiah on a broken down, weak-kneed donkey, whose trumpet fanfare is an off-key chorus of untrained low-lifes waving windfall sticks in the air, whose turn on the red carpet is an ass trotting over cloaks hurriedly tossed to the ground. Life in God’s a roller-coaster carnival we’ve turned into a grimly predictable turn on Disney’s “It's a Small World” ride.

Advent is a time of watching and waiting. Yes. But it’s also an entry into willingness to embrace the unexpected, the strange, the shoved aside and to discover there the effervescent, uncontainable love of God in/with/for/ahead/behind/above/below us. Advent is the time to “dwell in possibility” St. Emily Dickenson counsels. To prepare an open place at the Inn of Getting and Spending, at Hotel Busyness and No Vacancy for there to be a recognition that “God has come to the help of God’s servant Israel”–to this very “little clan of Judah” right here and right now. Advent is a time to unshackle ourselves from the known, the tried, the true and enter into the gentle willingness of letting-be where astonishment at the wondrous ordinary leaps in the womb. 

“Why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” exclaims an astonished Elizabeth. How is it that Elizabeth and Mary–too old and too young and women to boot–become the chosen vehicles of how boundary-crossing love prodigally poured out for all comes into the world? Why has this happened to me, Tyler? To you? To each and every one of us? Why has this happened? Words fail. Explanations fall short in the face of the mystery, and all that is left is the soul magnifying the Lord, our spirit rejoicing in the sheer givenness, the unfettered giftedness of Love Unbound in the unlikeliest of people and places. Even here, Lord? Yes, even here. Even this person? Yes, even this person. Even me? Yes, even you.

We make space, prepare the way–open, receive, allow, trade willful efforting for the easy letting be of willingness–for that daily, no, moment-by-moment visitation of God waiting to come to birth in us. All that bawdy, blasphemous, riotous reversal of the carnival–stink-bomb incense and upside down prayer books–perhaps best captures how topsy-turvy the love of God really is. Not because we’re good enough, holy enough, smart enough, rich enough, powerful enough, successful enough, straight enough, white enough, male enough, spiritually-cultivated enough does the dawn from on high break upon us to guide our feet into the way of peace. Indeed, it is the recognition of the total, unmertited, unearned, and undeserved nature of the gift of grace that reveals to us that being proud in the thoughts of our hearts, powerful on our little thrones, rich with our own accomplishments is precisely what hinders us from experiencing this lively, unexpected, daily visitation that comes as out-of-the blue as a kick of love to wake us from the slumber of “God over there and back then”  “I’m not enough,” “If only,” and “This isn’t it.”

Mary–Theotokos, “God-bearer”--is the icon of the life of Christian discipleship. Remember those carnival-busker words of Meister Eckhart that woke us from our slumber a couple weeks ago? What good is it if Mary is full of grace if I also am not full of grace? What good if Jesus is born in the manger but not also in me? Mary’s “Yes!”--her consent to the strange, surprising, do not be afraid thing God is doing in and through her–is really all we have to know, all we have to be. Annunciations literally litter our lives–ordinary/wondrous Gabriels in the face of stranger, Magnificats erupting unbidden in the sudden mind-stopping visitation of the backyard apple tree coated in the snow we cursed now resplendent under the flickering streetlamp that shines annoyingly through the bedroom window. Even what we don’t like and grumble about the very tent of meeting.

Time and again–even, perhaps especially, when we’re at the end of our rope, the situation appears unworkable, the waters of the Red Sea rising up to our necks and there appears to be no way–God makes a way. Unexpected. Improbable. Perhaps not one we would have thought of, or bargained for, or much wanted, but a simple, grace-soaked, way nonetheless.  He has come to help of his servant Israel! Provision in the wilderness. Grace on the edges. No one too young or too old. Each one precious, lifted up, mercy-drenched, the promise kept. Abundance where all we see is barrenness. 

Those burlesquing bishops with orange peels in their spectacles and upside-down altar books had it right. They goofed their faith in the strange new thing God is doing even here, even now, even to you and I, even in the midst of this little clan of Judah we call the Cathedral. The new song singing itself magnificently through us when we drop the stale old stories of self, other, God, and open to our ordinary life as it is. God’s still kicking. Can you feel it? Let it be with me, with you, with us, according to God’s word. Let us magnify the Lord!