Advent II

Advent 2A
December 5, 2010
The season of Advent is my favorite season of the church, and it is also the most counter cultural. While the world around us rushes to decorate, to cook, to shop with a frantic and frenetic energy, we are called to wait, to be still, to be silent, to listen. The other day I was listening to an Advent cd in my car—hymns like what we are singing in church today—hymns that give voice to our longing and our expectation; and I went into a department store and encountered a riot of Christmas decorations, a long line with grumpy shoppers, and the sounds of Jingle Bells playing too loudly and at a tempo that was 5 times faster than normal and which made it quite frazzled and frantic.
This Advent, if you find a space for silence and for waiting, for hope and for longing nowhere else, I promise that you will find it here.
For the rest of this season, I want us to consider one question: “For what do you long?” What is the deepest hunger of the deepest part of your heart?
Take a moment of silence now, breath, listen, and dwell with your longing. For what do you long this day?
This Advent we will dwell with our own longing and we will listen to our scriptures as they give voice to our deepest longing.
Today’s scriptures name two of our deepest longings. We as God’s people long for hope, and we long for harmony.
Hope is a gift from the God of steadfastness and encouragement, and it flows freely through our relationship with God and the scriptures. I’ll never forget the time that I was teaching an Inquirer’s class, and I quoted, almost off-handedly, a passage from a book to them that said the scriptures are “the love story between God and humanity. They tell us where we have been, who we are, and where we’re going.” When I looked up at the people I was teaching, I saw that they each looked like they’d been hit in the head with something, and I realized what a profound concept this is. The scriptures tell us what we already know: that we are people who spend a lot of our days wandering in the wilderness, longing for someone to love us and help us. And when we pay attention, we see that God is with us, loving us, helping us, and offering us the gift of God’s hope, which is the fruit of our trust in God.
The other longing that our scriptures name today is the longing for harmony. We see in Isaiah God’s ancient promise of harmony for all God’s creation and the vision of God in which we are invited to participate. Harmony means our willingness to encounter God’s welcome to each one of us, encountering God’s wide embrace which means that all belong in the heart of God. When we know this and believe it, then we act accordingly to others, and we take our place in the vision of God, even as we give others the invitation to join us there.
Another way that we find the fulfillment for our longing for harmony and participation in the vision of God is to remember that we human beings exist not for the fulfillment of ourselves but for the glory of God. When we are all working for the glory of God, then we are more likely to dwell within the vision of God’s peace.
Thomas Merton once said that life is a perpetual advent. This Advent season, may you not be afraid to dwell a bit with your longing, may you make peace with it, and “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.”