A Homily for the Second Sunday in Advent

A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on December 10, the Second Sunday in Advent.

At Lesson & Carols last Sunday, our final reading painted a picture of Mary, drawn up short by the impossible-made-possible annunciation of Angel Gabriel–“Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you!” We are thrust suddenly, disorientingly, into that groundless, in-between space where human freedom–Mary’s “yes,” her “Let it be with me according to your word,”--dances with God’s grace. The God who opened the Red Sea, led Israel with a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, who sustained them in the wilderness with what now? manna, and springs of water from the rock at Massah and Meribah, this living, life-giving, and liberating God now yearns to fall into Mary’s womb and be born of human flesh. Make no mistake, this Advent is no mere fondly nostalgic remembrance of  the mighty courage of that Palestinian teenager 2000 years ago. 

This Advent–2000 years later and separated by an ocean and a continent–offers the very same opportunity: that stopped, surprised, drawn up short in perplexity, we might, each one of us, utter that selfsame “yes,” giving birth to that spotless rose of love in the manger of the heart. “What good,” asks the inimitable Meister Eckhart 800 years ago, “that Christ was born years ago, if he is not born now in your heart?” Mary’s openness, receptivity, allowing, and yielding to the work of grace in her, is to be our openness, receptivity, allowing, and yielding in this time when something is waiting to be born in us, in this time of gentled, softened, endarkenment that lets us see past the 1000 watt billboards and dizzying, distracting blue blue light of our mobile phones to the True Light. The light of God in us and with us, the love of God poured into our hearts by the holy spirit that has been given to us. The light waiting to be unbusheled in each and every heart to shine unhindered, untrammeled for others in sacrificial love. The True Light yearning to express itself through these very lips, limbs, and ligaments.

And now, this week, we have the figure of the forerunner, the friend of the bridegroom, John the Baptist. Like Mary, he is the very embodiment of other-centeredness, of someone whose whole being is directed towards the one who is to come. Like Mary, John the Baptist is an open-space, a surrendered place, for what is not yet–the open place where mercy and truth meet, where righteousness and peace kiss, and Truth springs up in the person of Jesus Christ–the Godman, the one in whom the fullness of the Godhead is pleased to dwell bodily for us, for the salvation of the world.

No mistake that Eastern Orthodox iconostases feature Mary, and John the Baptist gesturing (one of the left and one on the right) to Christ Pantocrator on the deisis in the upper center of the altar screen, as its focal point, its pulsing heart. In a very real way, this Advent is an invitation—no less momentous than Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary, or John’s camel hair, wild honey and locust voice in the wilderness beckoning—to be swept up into the current of love and adoration that they each embody. This Advent is an invitation to let love draw us to the very ground of our being, our deepest center, where unmerited and underserved, utterly unearned and gifted to us as sheer grace, God has made God’s home. Or do we not know that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit?

In Advent, we wait and watch, we make space, we “sit still where God can see us,” as Rowan Williams so likes to describe prayer, so that the one who is speaking and breathing peace, who is mercy and truth meeting, who is the kiss of righteousness and peace and living water welling up to irrigate a parched and thirsty soul might body forth–not as idea, concept, intellectual bromide, or fusty, nostalgic museum piece–but as this very trembling, sinful flesh touched by prodigally free grace. “Keep your distance, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” we say with Peter. “I’m a schlep, a schmo, a person of unclean lips, and even dirtier hands!” we cry with Isaiah. But the one who became sin for us to free us from sin, who became death to free us from death, the one swaddled in the feed trough amidst the muck and straw, the man of sorrows acquainted with grief, just chuckles to Himself and brushes our faults and foibles aside and whispers, “Fear not little one… I’m not going to let a little human weakness get in the way of the Kindom. Get up (or just sit still where I can see you) let us be on our way! I am coming to your house for dinner… right now!”

I had an interesting encounter a few weeks ago in a pre-op room up at the U. While the lovely and extremely nervous tech was taking my vitals, putting in the IV, and asking me whether I was pregnant or had a pacemaker, we exchanged awkward small talk about the weather, and the meaning of our various tattoos. I still had twenty minutes until my procedure, so she pulled the curtain and before she left she asked, clearly terrified by the vast gulf of unstructured time yawning before me, “Do you want me to get your phone for you, so you’re not bored?” “No, thanks!” “Would you like me to turn off the lights, so you can sleep?” “No thanks!” “You’re just going to lie there in your hospital gown, alone with your thoughts?” “Well not alone, and there’s not much going on up there, but, yes!” Yes. Yes. Yes.

Presented with an open space, a time of waiting, we mechanically relate to the pregnant void, in one of two ways: we either grab our phones (distract ourselves), or konk out and go to sleep. But the promise of Advent, and its gentle discipline, is to pattern in ourselves some different way of seeing and being. To open with Mary (“Let it be with me according to your word,”) and the Forerunner (“He must increase and I must decrease,”), and simply feel our way, ease our way, release our way into the thronging silence and the leaping stillness–palpably known in, with, and under the beeping of the heart monitor, and nurses’ chatter. 

Advent is a time when we get to let go of all our usual ways of distracting ourselves from distraction with distraction and come home to the one who has made his home in us and dwell t/here, abide t/here. We let what inevitably dissolves away dissolve away (the grass withers, the flower fades), and we discover–even stretched out on a hospital gurney in an ill-tied hospital gown affording one and all a glimpse of our decidedly unholy hindparts–S/He Who Is, the one who doesn’t come and go, the one who is the same yesterday, and today, and tomorrow: the steady and steadying comforter who has paid the penalty and welcomes us home, here, now, who feeds this little flock like a shepherd with his very body and blood. Talk about a place of springs!

But we’re usually so busy feeding ourselves, or feeding others with ourselves, that we never actually stop, and let ourselves be fed. But Christians, whatever else, are first a fed people who then feed others from the banquet table of unspeakable intimacy with the divine. We neglect to lift our eyes to the hills and discover there where it is our help (and the help we might offer others) actually comes from. We discover–lifting our eyes from the mobile phone screen, and the Christimas shopping list, lifting our eyes from the 24 hour newscycle and the 24 hour advertising cycle–the Lord, our shepherd, who walks with us, sustains us, upholds us in times of trouble, who is our comfort and our strength, our refuge. 

It’s only there–having stopped, having tarried long enough to glimpse Him, having listened past and through the worries and the plans that crowd the “cocktail party of the mind”—that the whispered, “Fear not, Beloved…” background hum that holds it all is heard and received. It’s only from that groundless ground that we are finally of some use in the building up of the Kindom. So, “We sit still where God can see us,” as Rowan Williams often says. We ponder his word in our hearts with Mary. We make, with John, an open space in ourselves for Christ Jesus to increase, so that we go from this place–rooted and grounded in the indissoluble fact of our belovedness, freed from slavery to fear of death–to do the kindom building work God has given us this day to do: tending the sick, feeding the hungry, comforting the afflicted, visting the lonely. Droplets in the torrent of love and mercy and justice that rolsl down. Yes, Lord, thy kingdom, not my kingdom, come. Let it be with me according to your word. May I decrease that you might increase and we might each of us this day know ourselves with you in Paradise and serve this broken world with your peace breathed from our lips.

Amen