December 6, 2020 | The Second Sunday of Advent | Worship

This week, with papers due and projects to present and new state and county guidelines to read up on and make sense of, I will admit right up front, it has been a hard week for carving out any space that closely resembles “peace.” I think I thought that since this year December is canceled, life would be less hectic, there would be more time to pause and pray, a natural lull would settle over the land offering more introspection, more time for the Holy Spirit to flit about the house, pinging off the walls and furniture and probably the cats before bouncing off of me as I sit, tranquil, a product of the best parts of social distancing during a pandemic. I mean, if there ever was a time to try out the monastic lifestyle, it would be now, right?

But that’s not how it is, not for me anyway. Instead there are kids to keep fed (how do they eat so much????) and there’s the ever-growing pile of laundry, of dishes, of BILLS. There’s the constant track of worry in the back of my mind asking if I’m doing too much, was yesterday’s outing into *gasp* public too risky? Are we currently asymptomatic? Are my family members okay? Is my congregation okay? Are we doing enough to keep a sense of community? Have we done too much, grown too comfortable with maneuvering public spaces during this time?

And yet, groceries have to be bought. And as I pass everyone else in the store with their masks on and we do that weird little 6’ distance but we’re both reaching for the same coffee creamer at the same time dance—you know the one—and Christmas music blares on the store PA system, I laugh to myself at the concept of “Tidings of Comfort and Joy” right now. Can we get more comfort and joy and less, I dunno, doom and gloom?

But that’s where we are, physically in the world, and metaphorically in this liturgical season of Advent. We’re in these spaces of waiting, and probably waiting on big “social distancing dots” at the checkout, at that. It isn’t super comfortable, and yet, we know that if we do this, there is hope and promise at the end. Or at least a glob of hand sanitizer and the ripping off of the mask once you get into your own airspace in the car.

Today we have lit Advent candles of peace, and with all of this swirling around us in the world, it is a candle that we desperately need, and yet it can feel so deeply unattainable at the same time. How do we grasp at peace through grief? How do we find our true center when we’ve been off-balance for 10 months?

I mean, I’m asking for myself, too. These are anxious times. And then we are given three readings today that are prophetic and yeah, here it is again, apocalyptic, and even though our Isaiah text starts with “Comfort, O Comfort my people,” God’s people are not yet there, they are still exiled as these words are being said. They have had everything stripped of them that was getting in the way of their relationship with God. They are away from home, from the promised land. These words are looking forward, but they are not yet the reality—however they are words meant to instill hope and patience in a people displaced.

In true Advent fashion, we are then catapulted way forward by the other readings. We aren’t quite to the birth narratives yet, so we’re still in the wilds of the early Sundays of Advent, which is fitting as we read about this wild man who lives off of locusts and honey wearing camel hair and showing up in the wilderness to proclaim that someone much more powerful is on the way. In Mark, there is no birth narrative, no nativity scene set up with cows and sheep and angels. We start here, with John the Baptist, setting the stage for what is to come, and quite literally acting out the words from Isaiah 40 as a voice in the wilderness, preparing the way of the Lord.

Advent is a time of waiting, but it is also a time of straddling, a time of standing with one foot firmly planted in the past and another just as firmly in the future. Time travel is possible here in this season! We are asked to be present with our spiritual ancestors and to prepare the way for the coming of a savior of all, we are tasked with tenderly holding onto the age-old promises, histories, prophecies, missteps, and struggles in one hand and extending the other hand forward for however long it takes. ANd it could be a while. The epistle reading today makes that pretty clear. It also makes clear that this wait is, in part, because God isn’t interested in only caring for a select few, this great salvation is for everyone, however long it takes for us all to stop being terrible and start acting like we are all of our great Creator. This is not on our timetable, as we are always reminded throughout Advent, and in second peter we hear it again, “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.”

But what does all of this waiting and locust eating and development of patience have to do with peace?

I mean, if we wanna get technical, the lectionary reading themes and the candles in our Advent wreaths don’t necessarily have to have anything in common because they are completely separate, but I think we can bring it all home, so stick with me for a moment or two longer.

There is a great steadiness in this stretching we have to do this season as we manage the past and the future all in one container of Advent. It keeps us tied to our richer traditions, to things that dig deeper than just the past few hundred years, that dip deeper in the well than our current bucket-on-a-rope of pandemic, systemic racism, capitalism and greed, and everything else that we’re working with right now. It also looks ahead, there are good things coming. There are promises. We cannot predict the day (so please, put down your end-of-times countdowns!) so the anxiety of figuring this out is not ours to carry. Our burden is a light one because we are given this buoyant hope to move us forward, and the wisdom and experience of those who came before us to keep us from floating away. There in that tension of the two, there is the peace of being held without being held down. Of being part of something bigger, of promises that will be kept.

I offer to you, on this second Sunday of Advent, this peace. This peace that is so firmly rooted in a lineage of God’s goodness pulling people through their world-ending-as-we-know-it events, and bringing us into this present moment. This peace that knows that God will do it again, that humanity is cared for, that God is once again moving us closer, to a better, and stronger relationship with the divine. We don’t need this new stay at home order to be a sustained yoga retreat in order to access the peace that we are promised—even though it would be awesome if we could work that kind of spiritual practice in. But it doesn’t have to be big, flashy or fancy. We just need a few moments to revel in the wonder of the past and future happening at the same time that we are given in Advent. Breathe in and marvel at the goodness of God through the ages, even through all the exiles and tough lessons we’ve had to learn, and when we breathe out, send that breath to the future that God has promised, a future of justice and of peace. And as you continue breathing, become aware of your body here in the present, but not the present two minutes from now when you have to get up and sort laundry. Just in this one, this moment where all time is God’s time and you can be both in the past and in the future. Settle into this exact moment in the middle of all of God’s non-linear, I’ll get there when I get there time, and know the deep peace of promise.

Blessings to you, beloved people of God.