Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Advent 1 Year B: 2005
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
“I said to my soul, be still, and let the darkness come upon you which shall be the darkness of God.”
As you can see from the changes in the church this morning, today is the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of a new church year. We don’t begin our new church year with party hats and noisemakers or with glasses raised high in a toast. Rather we begin with a lament—a lament raised by a people in a real world where things aren’t going as well as they had hoped.
We begin our readings with words from the prophet Isaiah addressed to God: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence, as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil…There is no one who calls on your name or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us.”
Passages like this from Isaiah that cry out for a more immediate and palpable presence of God are usually thought to come from the time of the exile of the Jewish people—a forced separation from God. But this passage is not from the time of the exile. It is from the time of the restoration, a time after their return when the Jewish people had hoped they would have a fresh start and comes after the people’s restoration from exile, a time when they had hoped they would have a fresh start and would be a better people.
But that’s not how it turned out for them. Life in the restoration did not feel at all the same as it had before. And they did not have an easy time walking in the way of their God.
And so in a sense here we stand looking through their eyes at the beginning of a new year, already disappointed at the fresh start we’ve just made, already having broken all our new year’s resolutions. “O that God would tear open the heavens and come down” because our world and we as a part of it have made such a mess of things!
And so it’s not surprising to hear Jesus in our Gospel for telling his disciples that God is on the way, that the Son of Man will be coming in power and glory to a world where things have gone from bad to worse. God is coming to a world that is dark, where the sun and moon have gone out, and where the stars have fallen from the sky. It’s not surprising that the job we are given is to keep awake, to watch and to wait in that darkness.
I will never forget one of our elementary school outings as a child. An entire grade went to visit the caves in Alabama. It was all very exciting, walking down into underground rooms, learning the difference between a stalactite and a stalagmite, hearing dripping water and feeling the damp, underground cold. And, of course, just so that for once in our well-lit, suburban lives we could experience complete and utter darkness, the tour guides turned out all the lights for about 10 seconds. Most us tried to remain calm, but the truth was, we were completely terrified.
I felt this same terror initially in the wilds of Maine during our first fierce winter storm there. We were awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of silence, the sound of no furnace coming on as the temperature dropped and we lost our electricity. Once awake, we found ourselves in a pitch black house where every piece of furniture or stair was your enemy.
Darkness can be terrifying—whether it’s physical darkness or darkness as a metaphor for a world where we and others can no longer see things clearly or whether it’s our own inner darkness, times when we we’ve gotten not only confused but off the path. And so as we sit sometimes in darkness, we pray as our Collect says, that we and others may be able to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, that we may be protected from what the darkness stands for. And we are right to do this.
But there’s also another kind of darkness that I would invite you to explore during this Advent. For you and I will miss something rich and rewarding if the only way we view the darkness in this season is as a symbol of ignorance, cold-heartedness or our own incapacity for seeing the light and pursuing it.
“I said to my soul be still and let the darkness come upon you which shall be the darkness of God.” This is T.S. Eliot’s way of trying to describe another way of experiencing the darkness. Here’s someone else’s. These are words I wish I had written, the words of another woman priest in an Anglo-Catholic parish:
“There is another side to the power of God, equally dark, but warm and tender, resilient and supportive. It is the darkness of muscle and cell, of seed and earth. It is the darkness in which it is safe to cry. It is the darkness in which the lover finds the beloved and surrenders to the mystery of love, in which the only terror is in having no words comprehensive enough to express the intense longing and desire of the heart, and so communication must be by touch and taste and smell. God is the darkness of a warm summer night and hope punched through the shell of heaven in constellations and stars. In Advent Christians are invited to rest in God’s darkness (to wait in God’s darkness) with the gentle and steady pounding of a heartbeat in their ears to mark the days.”
You may notice something a little different about the Advent wreath this year. We’ve changed the colors of the candles and cut off the wreath all evidence of red berries. We’ve also taken away the white candle that some congregations place in the middle of the Advent wreath to be lit on Christmas Day to represent the presence of Christ.
Our doing these things is not about our not loving Jesus. It is about keeping a holy Advent, one that is more about the mystery and darkness of God, a season within which we watch and wait as if not knowing when the time will come that the holy one will be born in our midst again. It’s about living with a sense of God’s mystery and of our own attentiveness to that mystery as a way we participate in that holy birth and that coming.
And so I invite you to the observance of a Holy Advent, one that is not about the robust life of red berries or the certainty of white candles rising up before us. Instead, it is about watching and waiting in the darkness with a lamentation or two coming from our lips. It is about a willingness to be surprised and confounded by where and how and when the holy child will appear.
Works Consulted and Cited
A sermon for 1st Sunday of Advent in Year B by The Rev. Anne Kelsey
