First Sunday of Advent

Advent 2, Year B | Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37 | November 27th, 2011

 

The prayer tacked to the small bulletin board over my home desk is from the New Zealand Prayer Book. It begins, “Lord, it is night. The night is for stillness. Let us be still in the presence of God…The night is dark. Let our fears of the darkness of the world and of our own lives rest in you.” Mark’s gospel describes a time when the sun is darkened, the moon gives no light, and the stars fall from the heavens. Can you imagine the deep darkness of such a night? Particularly in Mark’s world where there were no electric lights to be switched on, just candles or oil lamps to light up the night, the dark of night without moon or stars would be a profound darkness. The dark night hours can be filled with the terror of wild dreams or with the quiet stillness that rejuvenates our bodies and prepares us for the new day. That New Zealand prayer I often return to at night suggests that we allow our fears of the darkness to simply rest with God as we remember that the night “heralds the dawn.” When I am most disturbed, when my body aches or my mind is spinning out of control, it helps to remember that the night is a time of preparation, a time of waiting for the light that is to come.

 

And so it is with the seasons of our liturgical year. Before the glorious dawn of our major Christian festivals of Easter and Christmas, we have a season of preparation, a time for drawing back, a time for being out of step with the frenzied world around us, a time to listen and watch and pray for the coming of Christ in our lives. The season of preparation for Easter is called Lent. The season of preparation for Christmas is called Advent.

 

Today we enter the season of Advent. My offering to you today is a meditation by Susan Bock for this First Sunday of Advent (Liturgy for the Whole Church, New York: CPI, 2008, 18-19)

 

Susan begins her meditation with a question, “How Long Does Night Take?” Listen to her answer.

 

“Advent is the night of the Christian year. As a Jew begins the day at sunset, so Christians begin the church year in the darkening quiet of ever-deeper winter, hushing our frenzy, readying for Christ.

 

“When my friend Justin was very young, and I was tucking him into bed, he asked me, ‘Susan, how long does night take?’

 

“What an amazing question, and one I had forgotten to ask for a very long time! At the start of the night of our year, we might well ask it now: How long does night take?

If you’re sick and in pain, one night takes about a hundred years.

If you’re alone, and waiting for love, one night takes forever.

If you’re a child, and night seems a waste of perfectly good playtime, the night

stretches on to eternity.

If you’re a reluctant Messiah, sweating blood in a garden while the whole city

parties, the night is terrifyingly long.

 

“Night is all about waiting, and waiting is about helplessness. Waiting for dawn or light or hope or love or relief, we are helpless to turn back the darkness or hurry the new day. All we can do is nothing. All we can do is wait. But that very helplessness makes every time of waiting, if we will let it be so, a time of waiting for God. Every wait can become holy, artful, and lovely, a waiting for God.

 

“We have no choice: Advent makes us wait. But Advent asks us how we are waiting. With anger, resentment, sleepiness, boredom, and despair? Or with desire, because waiting is all about that, too? Desire. If we let ourselves feel our desire and bravely name it, then waiting can become the birthplace of hope, and faith, and, especially, love.

 

“Advent is the church’s night watch, our season of waiting. The helpessness and desire in waiting make every wait, in the end, a wait for God. The good news of Advent is that if we wait, while we wait, in the waiting, God comes. The waiting itself is the thing, the very place we can meet God anew.

 

“I’m terrible at waiting! I hate to be put on hold on the phone, or held back by a slow driver, or made to wait in the grocery line. And our instant, hurry-up world doesn’t teach me patience.

 

“But waiting is ‘mysteriously necessary to all that is becoming,’ (Gertude Mueller Nelson, To Dance with God, Mahway, NJ: Paulist Press, 1986, 62) and especially to the becoming of souls. So every time of waiting is soul-work, and a wait for God.

 

“I once heard of a ninety-five-year-old woman who fell in the snow on her way to church and couldn’t get up. She could have become angry, frightened, and cold. She could have given up, fallen asleep. She could have died! Instead, she made snow angels. She filled up her waiting with energy and action, beauty and warmth, and it kept her alive.

 

“[In the 13th Chapter of the Gospel of Mark], near his end, approaching Jerusalem, Jesus gives us a clue to such brave and holy, artful waiting. The people are full of Passover joy in the hope a messiah will come, but he, sensing danger, is waiting with dread. Trudging along he sees a fig tree, heavy with buds, and his eyes are drawn upward where he notices, suddenly, spring. Remembering the promise of spring, unstoppable after winter’s death, he says: ‘When everything around you is dark with violence and fear, stand up, raise your heads; your redemption is near.’ (Mark 13:24-37)

 

“Stand up. Raise your heads. Look to heaven. Hold to spring when winter draws down your gaze and your heart. In this very darkness, especially here, God is near.

 

“Every time of waiting is a wait for God: a wait for peace in the Middle East, the results of a (medical) test, the conception of a child, or that child’s maturing; a wait for love, or an end to grief, or pain, or life itself, or the rapture of the Lord. If we will keep company with our waiting, keeping it warm and alive with desire and hope, keeping it awake, like a mother attentive to her baby’s breath, feeding it with faith, if we will look up and not lose heart, then while we wait, in the waiting, because of the waiting, God will come.

 

“How long does night take? When waiting is holy and artful, filled up with God, [night takes] just long enough.”

 

“The night heralds the dawn,” my New Zealand prayer promises. Then the prayer continues in the hope that resonates with our hope in this night season of Advent: “Let us look expectantly to a new day, new joys, new possibilities. In [the name of Christ] we pray. Amen.”

 

The Rev. Libby Wade

Grace Episcopal Church, Paducah, KY