First Sunday of Advent

December 2, 2007

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

The Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew. (Matthew 24:36-44)

Jesus said to the disciples, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore, you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

It’s the First Sunday in Advent, the beginning of a new church-year cycle. And thanks to all those who decorated the sanctuary so beautifully yesterday.

What is the shape of the Christian liturgical calendar? We live through it year after year. But do we ever stop and think about it in anything more than a superficial way? We’re very aware that Thanksgiving has passed, and now the pressure is on. We throw ourselves into the frenzied ritual of shopping in a way that, to me, looks bleak and soulless.

I was with my family in Alexandria over Thanksgiving and was surprised to find out the day after Thanksgiving stores were opening at 5:00 a.m., and people were going out in freezing temperatures to wait and be the first in line, the first through the doors, to get their hands on that stuff that’s on sale.

You know, they say that addiction is mindless repetition, doing something over and over in a way that the beneficial meaning of the act is gone; a habit without heart and without soul. Well, Christmas buying pretty much looks that way to me, like an addiction of our whole society. But before I get up on my high horse and begin to denounce materialistic consumerism, I wanted to note that there are no high horses around on which to climb. We’re all part of this repetitive story.

I admire people who make alternative choices around the holidays. I know people who make contributions to charities in lieu of gifts. I know people who scale back, either in number or in cost, the gifts that they allow themselves to give. I know people who make their own gifts from scratch. I think all these ways are great; they make gift giving more meaningful, more mindful, and less financially stressful. All these are good things that people do. But let’s note that these things are not easy to do. They require going against the flow, sometimes even within our own families.

Christmas and commercialism go hand-in-glove. They are inextricably bound together. And it’s been that way ever since Coca Cola, Coca Cola, invented our favorite Christmas icon—Santa Claus. The real meaning of Santa Claus has nothing to do with the joy of giving or good will. He has everything to do with market share.

To best see the addictive nature of Christmas commercialism, think only of the commercials. They come every year. They’re on now, aren’t they? Some of them literally come every year, and must have almost hypnotic power over us because they’re the same ones they never change. They’re almost like those familiar Christmas ornaments that we pull out whose very familiarity makes us feel the world is okay.

I don’t know if they still play this one, but when I was a kid, year, after year, this Christmas commercial would come on with the clinking glasses and would say, “Ring in the Holidays with André Cold Duck.” I wondered, “What in the world is ‘cold duck’?” It sure doesn’t sound very good. But year after year that commercial would play. Or whenever we hear this jingle, “la, la-la, la—la, la-la, la—la, la-la, la,” we know that it’s Zales time—it’s time to go buy your diamonds at Zales. Right?

But it’s not just the year-after-year commercials that show us the addictive nature of Christmas commerce. I’ll never forget the time a commercial dared to suggest that a fitting Christmas gift for one’s spouse might be a brand-new car. I was stunned. No, no, no, no, no. A Christmas gift is a sweater, or a hat, or gloves, or a board game, but not a car. But it must have worked because all the automakers do it now. This is our culture. It’s who we are, like it or not.

Mother Teresa once famously commented, “The poor in America are the poorest people in the world.” Now, think about this. I read an article not too long ago about someone who had lost their job around this time of year and was quoted as saying, “My family won’t be able to afford Christmas this year.” How devastating! It’s hard enough to be poor and jobless, but to also feel excluded from Christmas as a result? How impoverished is a culture that views one of its main religious holidays as something we either can or cannot afford?

I began by saying that addiction is mindless repetition. I think we, as a culture, are addicted to a commercialized Christmas, even though it’s not possible for us to not be part of it. But we can at least become a bit more mindful in the midst of it.

You know, the question with regard to any addictive behavior can’t only be, “How do we stop it?” We have to go deeper and ask, “What does the soul really want?” “What is the deeper thing we’re looking for and that we’re trying unsuccessfully to get from our mindless activity?”

Isn’t it ritual that we want? And are we not experiencing the quite natural effects of a loss of ritual that gives meaning to our lives? Ritual is what we lack. Ritual has gotten a bad rap in our culture in the last hundred years. Rituals have been maligned as pre-modern and irrational. Ritual has been thought of as mindless repetition. But ritual is not mindless repetition. Addiction is mindless repetition. Ritual is mindful repetition. It is the symbolic action that connects us more and more deeply to one another, to God, and to ourselves. Ritual enacts and embodies meaningful stories that help us make sense of human life, what it means to be alive in this world. Rituals give us food for thought and food for the soul. They’re simple and memorable experiences laced with deep meaning.

Garrison Keillor quipped last week during his program that people of Scandinavian descent eat lutefisk, as we all know. But what he said about lutefisk was interesting. He said, “Lutefisk for them is the taste of poverty. It is the sorrow of our ancestors.” It’s not the lutefisk itself, or why would we eat it? Why would anybody eat it? It’s kind of like green-bean casserole, you know. You eat it at Thanksgiving; you don’t eat it at other times. These are memory foods; they’re part of a ritual remembrance. They connect us to loved ones and to our ancestors.

One of the central reasons we do church and that we do church in a certain way is to have ritual. To do rituals in a certain way, and even to insist on doing rituals in a certain way, does not mean people who do different rituals, or do the same rituals differently, are wrong. We do them to express who we are, not to express our superiority to others.

The days are gone when pretty much everyone we knew was pretty much like us. The story is told about the first time my great grandmother—who was Catholic, from St. Paul—ever set foot inside a Lutheran church; it was at her daughter’s wedding. And she was frightened because she had no idea what those people did in there!

Or there was my nephew who was ten years old when he was invited to a schoolmate’s house for dinner, and his friend’s family was Jewish. They sat around the dinner table and they were about to have a blessing. They had the courtesy to ask Zack what his own background was, before they began. And he scratched his head, and he said, “Well, what are you when you’re from Arizona?” It’s a very pluralistic world, isn’t it? I mean, kids, Jewish kids and kids from Arizona, all mixing it up together.

It’s our ritual this time of year to begin the season of Advent: Advent leads to Christmas; Christmas leads to Epiphany; Epiphany leads to Lent; and Lent to Easter; and Easter to Pentecost. And then we do it all over again. Mindless repetition? No. In fact, it may just be what we all need more deeply in the midst of a culture without soulful corporate ritual.

In Advent, we ritualize our hope for peace with justice in the world. How timely it is that we read this text from Isaiah that says, “The word of the Lord shall come forth from Jerusalem . . . and nations will beat their swords into plowshares.” Today, we lay that vision from Isaiah next to the reality of bloody conflict over Jerusalem itself and the meetings in Annapolis to talk about peace. We have all seen Middle East peace talks before many times, and perhaps we are tempted now to become cynical, apathetic, and jaded, to think to ourselves that war is simply inevitable.

But what about hope? What about this scripture that Jerusalem itself will be the place where peace begins, and that wars among nations will all cease? Is that unrealistic? Is it too otherworldly? Are we condemned to an endless cycle of strife and bloodshed between people trying to secure power and safety for themselves? Is this the inevitable story of human life? You know, we could perhaps live with that story a little bit better in a day when swords were just swords. But what about a world where swords are nuclear? It’s easier to believe war is inevitable when it is largely elsewhere.

What are we doing when in Advent we ritually express our hope for a better, more peaceful, more humane world? Might we as well be sitting around thinking happy thoughts? Are we hopelessly naïve? Are we out of touch?

What we are doing is to give expression to our longing for a more peaceful and most just world. We never stop praying, we never stop hoping, year after year after year. We don’t do it because it works exactly, although we trust it has effect. We don’t do it to insulate ourselves from the real world, either. We do it in order to express who we are. And we do so together, and we do so publicly.

Advent is a ritual observance of hope. That hope is symbolized for us in the birth of a child. Advent is here amidst the distraction of the hyper-commercialization of Christmas and a world at war. And the absurd juxtaposition of these realities has perhaps never been more poignant. Advent is a ritualized Christian hope; the expectation of God’s loving help. As such, it is our way, corporately, ritually, not to ignore, or to escape, or to pretend, but to engage--in hope, to again and again and again and again say “yes” to life in this world for all beings and to a future of hope, and not despair. Call us crazy. But we will not stop with this vision, that swords be beaten into plowshares.

Amen.