Good morning class, and welcome to Advent 101. I am your instructor, Susan Quinn Bryan, and if you check your schedule and you aren’t signed up for this class, now is the time to leave.

    Before we begin, I’d like us to explore a few questions together.

1.  How do you now observe Advent and Christmas?

2.  How did you come to observe it that way?

            3.  To borrow a phrase from Dr. Phil:

How is that working for you?

    Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year. It is a time of preparation both for the coming of the Christ. Not only a time of remembering the advent of the infant, Jesus, but a time of preparation for the second coming of Christ.

    In order to understand the time of preparation, we need to take a look at the holiday it leads up to: Christmas.

    First, historically, Christmas is a minor feast day. The folks on Madison Avenue would be shocked to know that, but it is true. The Christian high holy day is Easter. Not Christmas.

    Christmas was actually a rather late addition to the liturgical year. And it seems that it was added as a correction in what could have been described as ‘culture wars’ long ago. Or, a clash of world views. For the sake of time, we are going to have to do a simplified version of these differences.

    You see, the early church had inherited the Jewish world view, which was at odds with the Greco-Roman world view which dominated the area in which the church took root.

    There were many differences, of course, but for our purposes today the main one had to do with an understanding of the differences between what is spiritual and what is material.

    In the Greco-Roman world view, those two things were at odds.  Things spiritual were valued, and things material were not. Human beings had spirits or souls, but they were trapped in earthly, fleshly bodies.  Human spirits longed for a release from this life and this earth, which held human beings captive. What one might do to or with the material, including human beings, would have no consequence on things spiritual. So it was okay to use, abuse, pollute, destroy, enslave, exploit things “material.”

    So what was spiritual was separate from what was material. Period.

    On the other hand, the Jewish mindset was different. The earth and all that was in it was created by God and it was good.    Human beings were not only created by God, but were created in the very image of God, and given life by God’s own Spirit, God’s own breath. Earthy, earthly, flesh, matter – all connected to Spirit. All good. Not okay to abuse pollute, destroy, enslave, exploit. A new concept is born: stewardship. Care for the material world. What is matter actually matters!

    It comes as no surprise to any one in this room that human beings have developed celebrations of light during the months of winter when the days grew short and they were surrounded by darkness.  How those celebrations were observed; what kinds of activities, would reflect the world views of the revelers. One would hope.

    No one knows for sure when the church noticed, however, that Christians were celebrating in ways that did not fit with the world view they claimed to embrace.

    And so the idea of celebrating the birth of Christ came into being. The west selected Dec 25 as the date, which had much more to do with the midwinter festivals that with any actual date of birth. What was important, you see, was the incarnation. The idea that flesh matters.  I always smile when people disdain Christmas for being so material and want it to be more spiritual.

    Christianity is the most material of all religions. The incarnation is at its heart a doctrine that teaches that God comes in flesh. It doesn’t get more material than that. Christianity goes beyond Judaism to claim that in the birth of Jesus Christ, that the spiritual and the divine are connected, intricately, inseparable.

    It is a radical concept, and it is this – not the resurrection – that is the stumbling block for many.

    Christmas is the celebration of the incarnation. The un-divide between sacred and profane. Spiritual and material.

    At its birth, Christmas was meant to be a correction to celebrations that did not honor the material world in which we live, and did not promote good stewardship of matter – bodies, for one thing, but all the gifts of the earth. It was meant to correct those activities that abuse, pollute, destroy, enslave, or exploit.

    Christmas was a time to remember who we are and whose we are and remember that we are not only created in the image of God, but that God became flesh so that we might also see what being fully human is meant to look like. In other words, we, too, are Beloved children of God. And at our best, when we are fully conscious, we will be more Christ like. Wake up, in other words.

    Aahh, but culture is a sleeping pill. And that Greco Roman world view continues to creep in. . . .  time passed and celebrations got out of hand and Advent was instituted to help steer the faithful back into faithfulness.

    Advent, a time of preparation not only for the coming of the Christ child, but – as a reminder – for the second coming of Christ.

    Advent. The beginning of the liturgical year. This odd, little understood penitential season is one of my favorite seasons. Margaret Hepplewhite, too, has a friend who says that Advent is his favorite season. Her response: “Why? I think because Advent is a time exquisite balance between the sadness of the mess we live in, and the bliss of the world we would like to live in. Advent is when we acknowledge that bliss not the blotting out of pain with port and plum pudding, but a process, a pilgrimage, a pregnancy, and – amidst the chaos of the world’s governing – a cry for the coming of the reign of God. “

    Advent is a time of remembering and preparing for the coming of the Christ child, but it is also a time of preparing for the second coming of Christ, a concept we Presbyterians find ourselves a little embarrassed about, most of the time.

    And still I embrace and keep Advent. I find it to be a needed correction to the excesses of our consumer culture gone mad this time of year.

    I think we need Advent. And I think these ancient texts hold a message of hope for us.

    “To begin,” according to Bill Wylie-Kellerman, “in Advent we pray for the end. Isaiah’s prayer has the smell of exile all over it. A sanctuary ruined, a dream too long deferred, and a people trying to remember who in hell they are. Is God absent or are they absent-minded? Who has abandoned whom? Overwhelmed by the culture, they confess becoming like those whom God has never ruled.”

    Who among us would say that our world is as we would want it to be, or as we believe God would have it to be? Who among us would say that the church is all it could be? Or that we, ourselves, are fully who we were created to be?

    Who among us would say that our holiday celebrations bring us closer to God, make us more conscious, more aware? Or even bring us joy?

    Who among us would claim that those same celebrations honor the earth and the people of the earth – in other words, that they encourage good stewardship of creation? (Let me point out the obvious to you at this point: all those “tshatshkes” in the shops, all those plastic toys that will end up in the trash in a matter of weeks, all that gift wrap and ribbon – all that STUFF—IS OUR PLANET.  And I don’t care how we think we might dispose of it, someone has to say this: there is no such place as ‘away!’)

    Who among us, if we were truly honest, would not say that we, too, often feel in exile? Feel as if our dreams have been too long deferred? Have asked ourselves over and over: “How long, O God, how long?”

    Advent is a time of owning the darkness. Claiming the exile. Being conscious. A time of waiting. Watching. SEEING. Longing. It may sound sad, but sometimes sadness is what is real.

    So for Isaiah, this prayer of confession is (as all confessions are) an act of faith.

    It is a wake-up call. Isaiah is calling the people from their amnesia to consciousness. He is calling them to remember who they are and whose they are. He is reminding them that they are children who belong not to the culture but to God. There is hope in that memory. There is hope when we choose to remember. To be conscious. To be awake.

    Such prayer is the prophet’s work, or at least half of it.

    Bonhoeffer writes that to intercede is to feel another’s need so deeply that you simply pray their prayer.

    Isaiah knew the need of the people so deeply that it was in his heart and bones. He prayed in the first person plural. And at the center of this prayer is the longing of Advent: a plea for the tearing of the heavens, a break in history, an intervention that shakes the foundations of the world; a prayer for the big disruption. Business as usual has become intolerable. In prayer the fault line is imagined and foreseen. Such is an act of hope. Come, O Come Emmanuel!!

    When we turn to Mark, we find the themes repeated. For sadly, when Mark was written, things weren’t going well for that little bunch that followed The Way of Jesus. Here, too, God is experienced as absent.

    To remember, to be faithful is understood as being awake and keeping watch. And the coming at a time unknown is also connected to the collapse of a social world: “not one stone left upon another.”

    Even Paul’s prayer, in its thanksgiving for the Corinthian congregation, invokes the end, the very coming of the One who is the end and the beginning.

    There are those who would want us to be afraid of this second coming, or this completion, this time of fullness, of remembering who we are and whose we are. There are those with best selling novels and bumper stickers who would have us believe that this is something we should worry about it, this coming again of Christ, however it may look.

    But I don’t believe that.  And I don’t want you to believe it, either. The fulfillment of the promises is not a scary thing. It is Christ, after all, for whom we wait and long.

    Christ, who ate with tax collectors and prostitutes. Christ who healed and taught and forgave and ate and drank and let us see the power of love and compassion to change our world.

    It is Christ who comes – however that might look – whenever that might be – it is the One we know and the One that knows us.

    We baptize a baby this morning. What a wonderful, hopeful act of wakefulness to practice this first Sunday in Advent. For we are an Advent people. We live in hope in the midst of exile and longing. We live in the between times, the already but not yet time of fulfillment.

    Each of you was given a sprig of baby’s breath to remember that you are the Godparents of this child. You make some promises today. Not to the child, and not to the parents. You make some promises to God that you will raise this child in the faith. You are called to help him remember.

    The baby’s breath is also to remind you of your own baptisms. To help you remember this Advent who you are and whose you are.

    To help you stay conscious during this season. To help you remember that you are God’s own beloved child. To remember that God loves you perfectly. That there is nothing you can do to make God love you more or less than God loved you when God first claimed you.

    You matter- body and soul- to God.

    So this morning we remember that we are called to stay conscious of the fact that we are part of the body of Christ, who is the beginning and the end.

    Praise be to God.