Jeremiah 33:14 - 16 (NRSVA) 14The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 15In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. 16In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: “The LORD is our righteousness.”
When my grandmother was approaching ninety, she began to tell us of conversations she had just had with her husband, who would have been my grandfather. I never knew him because he died in 1936 – thirty years exactly before my grandmother began to make her transition out of this life into the life to come.
In that process, she apparently felt on several occasions that she was in the presence, somehow, of her long deceased husband….and it was a comfort to her, for she was very matter of fact in her telling about her conversations with him.
My Scottish ancestors have a name for these moments, they call them “the time between the times;” the moments just as the sun is setting or rising – when the source of light is beyond the horizon but the glow from the sun still infuses the world around us in its glow. This is when the veil between here and there – between the now and the beyond becomes very thin. Again, in a Celtic tradition, thin places are places or times when God comes close…times between times – times beyond times – holy times.
Any parent will talk about the first time they held their newborn child and felt a sense of transcendence – there are really no words to adequately describe it, are there? This child who is part of you and part of your partner and part of the past that you both represent; most importantly, is also the future as well.
This morning young Peter Apley has been baptized into the family of this church as a child of the church. There is no magic involved, by his baptism he is not made more holy or more apt to be “saved” – God has already chosen to love him. God’s grace extended to him from the moment of his birth. What we do in the sacrament is not magic and yet it is magical it is more than we see and it is more than just symbolic…yet symbols are the way we come to understand these twilight moments – these times beyond time.
Jesus used the symbol or the imagery of the fig tree in bud to describe the advent of the Kingdom of God in the Gospel of Luke. When you see the buds, you know that the season has begun. Apparently, the fruit of the fig tree appears as a bud even before the leaves have appeared on the tree. They are fragile little buds, easily knocked off so that to anticipate the fruit too impatiently by touching or handling the buds can spoil the chances of maturity. There is a tendency to want to declare open the mysteries of the Kingdom of God; to prematurely declare its coming. It is the same compulsion one has to touch a bud on a plant...to force its bloom and in the process perhaps block its really being nourished from deep roots and developing its full potential. As we begin Advent we remind ourselves to “Wait for the Lord.”
There is a Buddhist temple in Nara Japan. The priests at Horyuji, as the temple is called, are entrusted with guardianship of a special little box. Generation after generation, they have been sworn to uphold the duty of protecting the box and seeing that it is never opened. The box is at least 1,300 years old. It was sealed in the year 685 which is about the same time that Muhammad received his first revelation and people in Scotland were still painting themselves blue and being contained behind Hadrian's wall. The English language had not evolved and shell mound builders flourished in southern Illinois. The box is wrapped inside seven layers of cloth and five wooden cases. On the cover is the most recent protective note, dated 1691, which says that anyone who opens the box will be exiled and is signed by the mother of the Shogun of Japan.
What is inside the box?
When will the venerable priests be allowed to open the box? It is not for any human being to determine...what has been determined is the certainty that the priests of Horyuji will continue to wait...and guard the contents.
Wait for the Lord…No human agent will decide.
God in God's own time brought about the realization of the promise in Christ...God chose the means and the ways in which it would come to pass. There is mystery in Advent...there is a spiritual force at work in the world bringing it round, positioning it to flower, to realize the potential of justice, wisdom and understanding...the vision of the wolf and the lamb and the leopard and the goat lying down together.
It is not we who will accomplish this mystery and force the bud into flower...although we certainly have the ability to trivialize and make predictable a wonderful vision and certainly, that will not accomplish it.
The mystery unfolds for humanity through Jesus Christ born again and again into our own midst...really born in the spirit in us and in our interactions with one another. The mystery is that in Jesus, God comes close – becomes one with us.
In Luke 21, one of the Gospel readings for Advent, Jesus says, “When these signs begin to happen, stand erect and raise your heads, because your redemption is at hand.” Dianne Bergant, a Catholic Sister and Christian Educator/Theologian asks, “Of which signs is he speaking? Is he really talking about the end of the world?” He clearly tells us. “Your redemption is at hand.” The days that Jeremiah said were coming are about to dawn, and we are called to read the signs of their dawning. The prophet described them as days of peace and fulfillment, of justice and security—a very encouraging picture….not to be feared, not the fantasy of the current movie 2012 – but a very different kind of coming.
Writing in the U.S. Catholic magazine called, America, Dianne Bergant noted “One of the most exacting challenges from the Second Vatican Council was its summons to read the “signs of the times.” It was a call to reflect deeply on the events unfolding before our eyes and to respond to them out of mature faith….
How will the vision of the coming one be accomplished? How do the promises become more than words? Not through our passive, hunker down, heads bowed – grit your teeth until it is all over. And not by some kind of manipulative waiting either, tapping the watch, prodding the pressure cooker until it blows. Those who want to usher in a new age by encouraging a war between Jews and Palestinians, for example are misreading the parable of the fig tree. The buds only become fruit in God’s time – the new Jerusalem will not come about by funding weapons or settlements or walls.
No, in communities such as this...in the all too human gatherings of people called the church, this is where the coming one comes close through the collaboration of people of faith with one another and with the Spirit of Christ and in their interaction with the world as we experience it.
Are the hungry being feed? the naked clothed?...are the poor realizing good news in their lives? Here at First Presbyterian Church, does our neighbor know us as a community in which love and regard for each other is paramount? Does our community know us as a community of people who are engaged not only with each other, but with the ‘signs of the times’ which are the events of our moment in this community?
In birth and then baptism, we witness one of the most obvious examples of the miraculous love of God – breaking into our lives – and our worship gathering becomes a thin place where God comes close. On this first Sunday of Advent, what better Sunday to witness this transcendent presence? On this Advent Sunday we also re-engage together in the active, creative process of waiting for the Lord – lifting our heads to engage with God who has come to reign and is yet coming – incarnate, yet waiting to become incarnate in us, in our community of faith. It is therefore, also exciting to take time this morning, as we will be doing, to install a new pastor for this gathered people – a fellow disciple who will be part of leadership as we engage with our Lord together in a new decade about to begin.
Look for a bud on the bare limbs of the tree...where you see the people of faith reaching out in wisdom and understanding, to young people, families who are not connected to a family of faith – where you see welcoming gatherings where supportive individuals covenant together, not only to reflect on the sings of the times, but also to engage with one another – there the bud is breaking open to bear fruit. Where no child is unwelcome, where the homeless and the refugee, and those whom the culture does not celebrate feel at home, there is where signs of growth are recognized as Kingdom's potential coming into flower.
What we have on this first Sunday of Advent, surrounded in this sanctuary with the symbols of the season, is a promise that transcends time and place. A promise embodied in a new child in our midst – and in every child. A promise embodied in new leadership and in every member of this congregation. A promise, a beginning of something that not only will enlarge and gradually unfold into the glory of Christmas…but also into a place, a community, a church family where God comes close. Amen.
