An Advent Message.
What Are We Waiting for?
A Sermon preached at Columbine Unitarian Universalist Church 
on December 10, 2000 by Rev. Nadine Swahnberg.

    Can you read the handwriting on the wall?  Yes, I mean the future. Your own future.  Can you discern that, for example, Jimmy, age 5, is going to be both a student and an athlete?  One of my precious possessions today is a letter from my aunt Norma, the one who today has ALS, saying that her son Jimmy, then age 5, already has both the academic ability to be "a worker" and the playground ability to be "a super athlete."  "Dare I hope it?"   she writes.  Years later, Jimmy is 40---and at her side every day as she prepares for death.  She was right in discerning his dual talents. She fell far short in discerning his devotion. 

    Advent---which is Latin for "a coming or arrival" is a time when the Christian churches re-enact the wait for a Savior in preparation for Christmas.  I have always liked Advent and I am not going to stop liking it now that I have become Unitarian Universalist and am no longer exactly waiting for a Savior. The essence of this time of year, with its early snows, its evergreen smell and lighted homes, has to do with waiting, with hope, with excited longing. The children embody this so well!

    Christmas has been almost entirely overrun by the forces of materialism and consumerism, but honestly, they haven't done much to ruin Advent. It still seems to me to stand for a time of waiting and longing in human life, a time when...if we are very lucky...we prophesy. We try to discern the future.  We may pray or decorate, bake or sew, do whatever else we do to prepare.  The mood is not a mood of fulfillment, but a mood of preparation.  Can this mood of preparation be important for us today, for us who may doubt what it was that happened---if anything--at Christmas? For us who may have de-mythologized all the myths?  Who no longer believe in special stars or singing angels? 

    There are many prophetic oracles in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Some of them refer to a specific coming of a Messiah, a Kingly figure who--it was thought --could reunite the Kingdom of Israel that , after the time of David and Solomon, had been split into two smaller kingdoms after 922 BCE.   It makes sense to me that the people of Israel were hoping for a new King, more or less on the order of a new David.  Like many of us, they anticipated a future based on some kind of a past memory that had grown more glamorous with the years.

This poetry comes from one of the neatest prophetic oracles in the scriptures, Joel 2:

And it shall come to pass afterward,
that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams,
and your young men shall see visions.
Even upon the menservants and the maidservants
in those days, I will pour out my spirit."

    These prophecies are very much associated with divine judgment.  They also call up a sense of universal inspiration.  In our day, when there are many kinds of evil afoot that could lead to the demise of life on earth, we can alert ourselves to such sweeping words. 

    If you are not a believer in a God, I invite you to take these words at their most metaphorical.  The signs of the times are grim.  We see warfare and potential for warfare almost everywhere. The weapons trade in particular endangers all of us by being out of control; and in the hands of the unscrupulous it could mean terrorists and rogue states can get almost any weaponry they fancy. If that doesn't occur,  pollution, radiation and gene mutations may do us in. To prophesy, at a time like this, simply means to keep on being in touch with the potentiality for global mishap.  To prophesy doesn't mean to see a certain future coming at us, but to see what could happen if we do not avert it. To prophesy can also mean to discern hope. 

    In Second Isaiah, the prophet understands that God is warning the people about the dangers of a mere formal religiosity that does not come with a conversion of the heart to righteousness. He opposes the kind of fast that is not accompanied by a change of heart.

Is not this the fast that I choose:
To loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the thongs of the yoke
to let the oppressed go free
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not hide yourself from your own flesh?
Then shall your light break forth like dawn
and your healing shall spring up speedily,
your righteousness shall go before you,
the the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.  (Isaiah 58: 6-8)

    This vision, that of a stringent demand for undoing oppression, for radical righteousness emanating from God--- is the glory of Israel. However much it has been trodden underfoot in the ages that have past, this characterization of God endures.  Whether you think that God exists or that God is a metaphor or an idea,  let your ears hear  what this God thinks is important. Of all the many theologies that fill the Hebrew Scriptures,---and they are many and inconsistent---the message of the righteousness of God linked to the coming (Advent)  of the Kingdom or the Messiah is a key, essential and moving idea.

    Do we not focus with hope on the coming of righteousness even when times are grim?  How many of us haven't grown tired of the mess in Florida, and tired of the minutiae over which the lawyers have been quarreling?

    Tweedledee and Tweedledum, our dear self-styled presidents-elect, are not going to save us from these messes of litigation. Like the kings of divided Israel and Judah in the eras after the United Monarchy, they are too similar, they are too powerless, and they cannot do what we all need to do to get involved in the future.  We can empathize with those Israelites who wanted a single, powerful, inspirational leader!

    The messianic prophecies endure, for me, and they endure both with the interpretation which Christianity makes of them--that these prophecies were somehow fulfilled in Jesus---and in the versions of contemporary Jews. Some Jews today hold the Messiah is not a person but the Jewish people themselves.  These ideas  give me strength and inspiration.  In the face of knowing what has happened to both Jesus and to the Jews, it hardly seems necessary to me, to choose which is more messianic! I am not shocked by the claims.  Both of these, Jesus and the Jews,  have, it seems to me, paid the ultimate price. They can weather the comparison to this holiest of concepts, the idea of a messiah.  

    If Messiahship was originally a triumphant and simple political victory, Jesus and the Jews have given this concept another, more tragic, cast.  A Messiah is often, maybe is necessarily, one who brings righteousness out of ultimate sacrifice and horror. It would not be a concept that could move us to the depths if it said simply "Do good, God likes good people and despises frauds." Fine. The Messianic idea goes on to say it is going to unite kingship, saviorship and suffering.

Hearken to me, you who know righteousness,
the people in whose  heart is my law
Fear not the reproach of men,
and be not dismayed at their revilings.
For the moth will eat them uplike a garment,
And the worm will eat them like wool;
but my deliverance will be forever,
and my salvation to all generations."    (Isaiah 51:7-8)

    Is someone at your place of work usurping authority, twisting the truth, cooking the books?  What are you expected to do to hold your job?  Almost all jobs have some corrupting aspect to them, and someplace where we could, if we were not so puny, stand up and be counted.   If you take on the powers that be, you do so knowing there is a genuine risk. You may suffer.

    If jobs are not threatening enough, we have parenting to make our hair stand on end at night.  We must bring up our children in an era when we cannot keep them in our sight all day, and when they are out of it, they may become the victims of druglords and guns, of rageful drivers, of sex maniacs, and all manner of moral dangers. Can we stand up, both TO and FOR, our children?  If wedo this, we will face some risks, dangers, maybe even suffering.

    Do you know that when people come to see me as minister or counselor, they almost always pour out their story with an urgency and a trust that in some way is irrationally hopeful?  They've never met me before in their life, and they choose to tell me things they maybe never told their husband or wife, things about Dad that they never told to Mom, things they have felt that they never told ANYONE.  Isn't this the hope that springs eternal? --But one learns very early in a counseling career not to disabuse people of this hopefulness. It is this very hopeful longing that puts people in touch with the wise part of themselves, their Internal Messiah, as it were!

    Do you think it is an ancient, dead worldview that says we are hoping for a Savior?  I beg to differ.  In our heart of hearts, a part of us waits for truth and righteousness.  A part of us waits even as we waited as children for a parent to come a tuck us into bed, to tell us that the room has been checked and found free of bogeymen and monsters, that tomorrow will definitely come and the sun will be up once more, and most of all that "over my dead body" will any harm come to that child.  The God we can conceive of--not the most primitive God we can conceive of but the highest kind of God that we can imagine, one the prophets tried to tell us about--is also one who reassures, who promises, and who makes serious moral demands.

    I challenge you to note the still small childlike voice within you that cries out for a better world. It is only a step from there to the elaborate prophecies of a Messiah, or of a Messianic people, who can in some way bring us back to holiness, even at the risk of suffering on our behalf.   In our waiting, in our hoping, in our suffering, and in our rejoicing this Season, may this messianic idea, cherished by ancient Israel inspire us to find the best in ourselves. It is the idea of a God who can be imagined as one who promises a vast restitution of all that has been destroyed, but who requires of us justice, holiness and righteousness, light our paths. 

Columbine Unitarian Universalist Church
6724 South Webster Street
Littleton, Colorado 80128
303-972-1716

Sunday Services At 10:00 AM