Homily for Sunday, November 27
Isaiah 64:1-9
Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
Mark 13:24-37
First Sunday in Advent (Year B)
In the name of the God of Creation, who loves us all, Amen.
Good morning, and welcome to the Cathedral of St. Philip on this First Sunday in Advent, a season in which we are asked to be watchful, and to wait. In the pre-dawn darkness on Thanksgiving morning I stood, with thousands of other runners, waiting for the start of the Atlanta half-marathon. The morning was cold, and windy, though thankfully not as cold as last year, and I found myself thinking about waiting in other far less trivial contexts.
I recalled waiting at Piedmont hospital on Wednesday for the nurses and technicians to bathe my former parishioner Bob, who suffered a stroke while playing golf last Saturday. As I waited in the hall, I spoke with his older sister, his closest living relative, who has her own health challenges. “Why did God allow this to happen to Bobby,” she asked? “Nobody has done more for God’s church or been a more faithful servant,” she said, as tears streamed down her face. “I want to know why this had to happen to someone so committed to the church—someone so loving and compassionate. Why? Why didn’t God allow this to happen to me instead,” she cried, “why can’t God just make him well again, right now?” And she was right about her brother, of course. A more humble, wise, compassionate man I have not known. He taught me much about being faithful, and a glorious sanctuary rose from the woods of Pickens County in large part because of this faithfulness. And, with her questions echoing in the hall, we waited, and we held hands, and her tears fell on us both.
I thought about my counselee who earlier in the week had been given an uncertain diagnosis…more tests were needed. The women in her family have a history of breast cancer. And in the silence, we waited. Finally, she said “A friend of mine told me I must fight this….that this is The Beast trying to weaken my faith. I don’t really believe that is the case, Bill,” she said. “I believe we are human, and we get sick, and that is not because we have not had enough faith or because God would have us get sick to test us. Cancer is not about a lack of faith. But I do believe that how we respond to sickness can be the occasion for deepening our faith, or losing it. What do you think”? And we talked a while, and we listened for the truth that sat in the center between us, and we waited. And together we will wait for the test results to come back.
I thought about these things, and more, and the starters’ gun went off and there we all went, towards downtown, with the sun rising over this wonderful, complex, beautiful and broken city. We are a culture and a people who do not like to wait. I struggle with this, as do many of us. We want what we want, and we often want it now. And this impatience knows no limits. We so often want our lives, even our spiritual, religious questions, to find their answers in the theological, spiritual equivalent of the drive-in window at a fast-food restaurant. Such easy answers, however, are not ultimately fulfilling, and their recipes leave out the most important ingredient—deep, abiding relationship with God and others, and this often requires waiting.
The most profound and perplexing question for Jews in the Old Testament was why God gave God’s nation over to the Assyrians, and then the Babylonians. Waiting was their lot, as well. How long must they wait for God to act? How long must they wait while they were mocked by their neighbors? In the Psalm appointed for the day, the Psalmist begs Yahweh to come and save his people. Only to lament that God had given them “bowls of tears to drink.” I can identify with Isaiah’s elegant and elegiac poetry in today’s reading, as he longingly recalls the days gone by, when Yahweh wielded his glorious arm of power Moses led the exodus from Egypt that vanquished Pharaoh. In his time, however, Isaiah could only wait, and ask “where are your zeal and your might? We all shrivel up like a leaf…You hide our face from us.” In this passage Isaiah is no longer the young man who saw God, clear as day, sitting on a throne. No, instead Isaiah is an old man, now returned with his people from exile to find his city in ruin, his temple in ruin, and the lives of his people in ruin. Both Isaiah and the Psalmist implore God to prove God’s love, God’s faithfulness, God’s presence by some clear, compelling, all-encompassing act of power. “Hear us, shine forth, awaken your might, come and save us, restore us, return to us, look down from heaven and see us, revive us O Lord.” Isaiah is even more direct. “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you! He pleads with Yahweh to come down like fire to tinder that causes water to boil, to perform “awesome things we did not expect.”
I am like this too, sometimes, maybe even most of the time. I would like to see God face-to-face, here, and now, with utter clarity. I’d like maybe even some thunder and lightning, the voice speaking in tones clear and unambiguous. Our responses to the losses of our lives include a disconnect between what we experience in relation to God and what we pray for from God, so that in the silence we get frustrated, anxious, and want more control than we can have. There have been many losses of late, especially in the form of a series of natural disasters unprecedented in our time. Praying to God for mighty acts of deliverance, is, as theologian Dan Clendenen has said, entirely human. And yet God is not some Cosmic Concierge.
Our remarkably human, American experience—our utterly human desire to learn and to fix—is precisely often our worst enemy, because we fall prey to the delusion that every problem must have a solution, and every question must be given an immediate answer. Sometimes we must wait. But, we ask, what are we waiting for? Indeed, sometimes we are given questions to which we cannot be given answers. We must wait, and live them out—over the course of a lifetime—and perhaps beyond. And so we wait and we pray, in patience, knowing that God does not always act with thunder, but rather with a whisper—not always with flashes of lightning that split open the heavens, but with faint light, in the shadows. Even the closest of his disciples longed to call down fire from heaven and to lay bare their swords, while Jesus compared his coming kingdom to tiny mustard seeds and the fermentation of yeast. Sometimes God appears to us in just such small ways—God does indeed intervene, and sometimes in the form of relationships when we least expect.
A colleague of mine once told me the story of just such a relationship. While doing a seminary internship in downtown Atlanta in the '70s, he spent some time in a homeless shelter sponsored by his church. It seems that while there he befriended a homeless man named Monroe, who was always ready to help around the shelter. Monroe had a good heart, and a generous spirit. My friend could tell that Monroe was sick, and from time to time he would simply disappear, only to return days later, rested and ready to get back to work as chief volunteer. It seems that Monroe suffered from both epilepsy and mental illness, and he would occasionally experience seizures at church. The good folk at Grady knew him, and loved him, and took good care of him. They did not charge him for his medication. But Monroe was deathly afraid of the police, so much so that if he felt a seizure coming on, he told the folks at the shelter never to call the police.
One afternoon over coffee, my friend the chaplain asked about this, and then he waited, and listened for the answer. It seems that in the late '50s Monroe was living in rural Arkansas, up near the confluence of the White and Black rivers. He and his wife were newly married, and he had a good job in a lumber mill. Feeling sick one day, he came home early and found his wife with another man. They fought, and in his blind rage, he shot the man and killed him. He was sentenced to life in prison where he spent the next 12 years. Based on good behavior, he became a trustee. “One afternoon,” he told my friend, “I was on work detail out in the country, and I realized no one was looking. I just walked away…and I didn’t stop until I got to Atlanta. I was in line for parole, but I couldn’t wait.” Every time he had a seizure, he said, he was afraid the police would get there first, identify him, and send him back to the Arkansas prison. His life was a mixture of waiting for his next seizure, waiting in fear of the police, and waiting for God to intervene—all the while, he gave his life in service.
“I have turned my life over to God,” he told my chaplain colleague, “and I am sorry for what I did. I loved that woman with all my heart—but if I could I would put that gun down and walk away, and never look back. I need to come clean,” he said. “I am tired of waiting in fear.” My friend and Monroe discussed several options, agonizing over each one. They finally settled on the idea of writing a letter to the prison physician who was a man of compassion, whom Monroe trusted. “He took care of me,” Monroe said tearfully, “and he will tell me the right thing to do.” So they sat down, and while Monroe dictated, my friend wrote the letter, put it in an envelope with the return address of the church. And they waited.
Several weeks passed, and one cold, gray Advent December afternoon, a letter arrived at the church addressed to Monroe. The return address was the prison hospital. My friend went down to the shelter, found Monroe, and together they went back to the church office where, with trembling hands, my friend opened the letter. He waited, and with tears in his eyes, read it out loud. Lyric in its redemptive brevity, it read: Dear Monroe, Stay where you are. Sincerely, Doc. And together they waited, in silence, tears streaming down both of their faces. After a while, Monroe got up, and said “I’d best get back down to the shelter. I’ve got work to do.”
Waiting, listening, leaning towards the soft light of a stable lantern…this is the stuff of Advent. We are called to be watchful, and to wait even, my friends in Christ, when we are sad, or anxious, or angry, or scared, or having been given a bowlful of tears to drink in a season that often allows of us only joy. Persons should be rightly suspicious when they are called only to joy. Jesus never told anyone they had to go somewhere else to begin the journey of transformation. Watch, and wait, for the church in its wisdom knows that if we are to recognize Emmanuel, God with us, we must attune our ears during Advent to silence, our eyes to darkness, our souls to the presence of Christ in forms often right where we are. In the midst of the often frenetic busyness of this season, in the midst of our culture of denial and quick fixes, find time to wait, watch, stay where you are—and listen for the presence of God. Stay where you are, and there you will find God, waiting for you. Amen.
Comments? Contact Bill Harkins at: Bharkins@stphilipscathedral.org