Sunday Service – Holiday Pageant: “Be Not Afraid”
4thU RE Program Holiday Pageant
Archive for December, 2010
Sunday Service – “Great Expectations”
December 12, 2010 Service
Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt
“Great Expectations”
For our Christian sisters and brothers, this is the third Sunday of Advent, the start of the Christian liturgical year, the period that marks the waiting time until the birth of Jesus. We pay only a tiny bit more attention to Advent than we do to Lent, another period of waiting and preparation for the arrival of Easter, the holiest day of that same liturgical year.
Our liberal religious tradition tends to neglect Advent, on the premise that we are not waiting for anyone, holy or not, and especially not a baby born in a barn. Of course, we are too realistic and too cool for that, and we know that this mythic story bears close resemblance to other mythic stories, complete with virgin births and sun gods. We have no expectations about shepherds or stars in the east, only warm and fuzzy feelings about peace on earth, accompanied by a desire to cut back on the commercialization that has infected all of the holiday season.
But I just spent a whole week preaching about Advent, about waiting, about trust in the things we can’t see, about light and darkness and love and joy; I spent a week with believers, who took seriously the admonition of Paul in one of the scriptures assigned for this season: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
I was this year’s Advent Missioner at the Memorial Church at Harvard University, and in addition to last Sunday’s service, I preached Morning Prayers every day at 8:45 am. You can get a lot of praying done in 15 minutes, especially if you include the Psalm appointed for the day, an anthem from the choir, a scripture reading followed by my five minute sermon, a hymn and my benediction. It is very formal, and very, very beautiful–much lovelier than I supposed. So I have spent the whole week thinking of waiting for Jesus, singing hymns I have not heard for 35 or 40 years–Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence–, and learning a little more about our religious roots in the Christian tradition. Never before had I heard of starting worship with the Psalms–though since it is the prayerbook of Hebrew and Christian scripture, it makes lots of sense to start there. Even more fascinating to me is the practice of reading the psalm of the day responsively, with the worship leader reading one verse and the congregation reading the next. The obvious benefit, of course, is helping people pray their way through the Psalms, to learn them and to incorporate their wisdom into a people’s consciousness. But I didn’t realize that this New England practice is where we UUs get the practice of responsive readings. Most of the time, we are not using Psalms; more like Mary Oliver and James Luther Adams. It allows a different opportunity for the people to participate in worship. It was invigorating to lead worship in a tradition that is more than 300 years old–Harvard people have been gathering for Morning Prayer since 1636.
Still, I was struck by the attunement of this congregation to Advent and its meaning. And I wondered, what might it mean to us, other than the commemoration of a quaint custom out of our Christian tradition.
Rational beings as we are, we get caught up in the details of the story, instead of remembering that stories aren’t always meant to be accurate; they are meant to be true. There is something about these stories that are meant to point us toward something else that can help us live this busy, messy complex life we live. I suspect that it was just as hard for those early followers of Jesus as it is for us, as believers and seekers and doubters on Central Park West. The world in which we find ourselves does little to assist us in knowing or believing in hope, or in the God that offers hope. Truthfully, our world at the present moment often makes these things nearly impossible.
We want so much to believe that there is more to what we are seeing in this world. We want to believe that life will be better; we want to believe that love is as powerful as we have been told it is; we want to believe that the Spirit of God abides with us both in the victories and in the challenges of our lives.
But what a bitter and cynical culture we live in. What a brutal 24-hour news cycle; what a world, in which people become rich and famous by being unkind. How can these stories about the birth of hope mean anything to us?
I heard the story the other day from a young woman who, for a very long time, had lost hope and had lost her way. She had fallen victim to the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction, and it swamped her for a long time. But after years of suffering, she had begun to make her way again in the world. She had begun to find peace, had begun to reassemble her life, when she lost her job. She was upset of course, but stayed close to the friends and family that had helped her to recover, began to collect unemployment insurance, started looking for work. But it didn’t take long for her to realize that what she thought would be a brief disruption in her life was instead a slow and demoralizing cascade. What was more alarming was the realization that the only job offers she was getting were those positions in restaurants and bars that would put her in harm’s way and increase the chance that she would lose her hard-fought sobriety. The only bright spot in her life was her volunteer work with children in a local community arts and music center.
Last week, her unemployment benefits ran out, and months behind in her rent, she encountered her landlord, a previously patient and friendly man who literally screamed at her until she cried. Defeated, she took her resume and began to walk from bar to bar, restaurant to restaurant, filling out applications, terrified that she would get hired. One morning she finally got down on her knees, and asked God to help her. She needed to bear witness to God about her struggle to stay sober, she needed to admit she had run out of ideas. Quite simply, she said, she didn’t know what else to do.
She felt foolish, she told me. She didn’t believe God was some kind of slot machine, dispensing work and a satisfying life. It was just that she had tried everything else that she knew, and that in the end, no one really understood her pain except God, so she gave it to God–her pain, her frustration, her fear and her shame. And then she printed out more resumes and resumed her search. She was headed to another bar to fill out an application when her cell phone rang: on the other end of the line was her volunteer job, asking if she would consider working for them part time. It was not a full time job; it was not a perfect job; but it was a job that would keep her away from the circumstances that brought her so close to ruin, a job that would keep her close to joy. “I had always heard that God would help me if I asked,” she said. “But I didn’t really believe it.”
No matter what we are waiting for, waiting is hard work. It is just as hard to live in joy and peace, and sometimes impossible to abound in hope. And many of us doubt that there is anything or anyone larger than our circle of friends who cares about our hopes or our doubts. For some of us, Advent has been an especially long season. Some of us are struggling right now, waiting for something–waiting for the pain to end; waiting for our lives to start, waiting for one last chance, waiting for even the smallest glimmer of change. But what is harder to believe, harder even than hope, is the idea that we are the recipients of an unshakable, unquenchable love. Our expectations are so small, in comparison to the promises of the holy, available to us in every season, but especially this season.
How do we grow into belief? Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we can’t. Sometimes, all we have is hope: The hope we might be free from our pain, that we might be less lost than we were yesterday, hope that we might find ourselves believers–both in a power greater than ourselves, and in a love greater than we have ever known. But I believe there is more waiting for us when we adjust our expectations. When we start thinking big instead of thinking small. When we start believing in more than the things we can see and the facts we can prove. When we start imagining that this Great Love that embraces the world is not just for young girls visited by angels, or for shepherds that see a star. This Great Love is also meant for us. Amen.
