Sermon "With Candles Blazing"
Rev. Dr. Steven A. Peay
Sunday, November 29, 1998
"With Candles Blazing"
"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. . ." Of course, it's been looking like Christmas since just after Halloween! I read a reflection by one of our Congregational ministers recently that said we should call this whole period "Hallowthankmas," but that's matter for a different sermon. As one old favorite goes, "But we need a little Christmas, right this very minute, candles in the window, carols at the spinet." Candles in the window provide an image so comforting, so homespun, so heartwarming that they've simply become a part of Christmastide. How unfortunate that we've forgotten the origin of the custom; a light placed in the window so Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus know that there's room for them in this place. So, how do we prepare for Christmas, with all of its light, joy, and music? How do we prepare to greet the Lord, with candles blazing?
There are many ways one can prepare for Christmas. One can think of it as largely a celebration of something that happened in the distant past. The story of Joseph, Mary, and the "Baby in the manger" can be told, carols sung, and on to the eggnog and the presents. The long-ago event is remembered, celebrated by gifts and parties and the day after. . . it's done. The music that had blared from countless speakers will be playing a different tune, decorations will droop, and the twinkling lights will go out.
One can also look at Christmas, and prepare for it, as a present event. It can become the occasion of meditation on the spiritual graces received in life. Reflection can be made on the heavens opened, new life received, hope regained. Joy to the world!
One can prepare and celebrate, as many do, by not celebrating at all. Those who so choose reject the past event as an exercise in sentimentality and ignore the present by saying, to their minds, that Christmas and the Incarnation it celebrates has had little measurable effect in people's lives. Sadly, too often, they're correct.
You know, one can do all these things, but I think the Scriptures are telling us that there is more here. Isaiah's vision is not of some 'never-never land' of which we all dream, to which we all aspire, and in which we will never live. The prophet calls us to a vision of our world that is not only different, but also possible. Isaiah's prophecy is of a world that gets a little closer each time someone is able to forgive one who has done wrong, or when generosity overcomes even the smallest selfishness. Swords and spears can take many forms, all of which can be beaten into instruments of peace. Isaiah's vision, written in a small strip of land that has probably known more violence than any others, calls us not only to hope, but to action.
Paul's writing to this group of relatively new Christians in Rome does the same thing. Having first told them of the mystery of salvation, Paul lays out the reality of how it is to be lived. He reminds these Roman Christians, and us as well, that we are no longer "children of darkness" existing in some dream-like state. Rather, we are to wake up and realize that, to echo T.S. Eliot in the "Four Quartets," past and future are met here in the present.
Salvation is, then, not something one waits for and receives in the "sweet bye-and-bye." No. Salvation is a this-worldly reality that calls us to "put-on" Christ himself, almost in the same manner in which we put on our clothes. In other words, to clothe ourselves in the image of Christ: thinking as he thought, believing as he believed, and acting as he acted. Paul's exhortation, "to live honorably as in the day" is, I think, rendered far better in the Revised English and the New Jerusalem Bibles as "decently." Let us live decently, as in the day. Why?
The answer is found in the Gospel when Jesus says, "But about that day and hour no one knows; neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." It's a verse of Scripture that, as we come closer and closer to the new millennium, I wish these would-be prophets and seers would read! I've seen supermarket tabloids, been handed the results of late-night radio talk shows, and shown book after book that purports to give all the "right" answers about the impending end. All I can do, historian that I am, is to think back to all the 'millenarian' movements that have graced the Christian landscape since the Lord's Ascension. What I see in those movements, especially in those which have helped shape the American religious geography, is a tendency to elitism and escapism. This is not what Matthew, or any other of the Scriptures, nor classical Christian faith calls us to do.
It is the responsibility of Christians to live in this world, but in a manner that is reflective of the next. What Jesus is telling his followers in Matthew's Gospel, and us as well, is that we are to be always ready -- like the Coast Guard's motto: "Semper Peratus" (always prepared). Advent is a season of preparation, but more than one that simply prepares us to celebrate the past. It is a season that reminds us to be always ready for a God whose coming is already, but not yet. A God whose method of operation is always surprising -- after all, who would think of a Messiah, the Ruler of the Universe being born to a carpenter and his wife in a stable in a tiny country, in an even tinier town? Only God has that kind of imagination and that kind of openness that can reach around all the barriers we put in front of him.
I like what one commentator has written:
Most of us do not look for the "coming" with the literal expectations of the first Christians. We tend to believe that the "coming" always is, that indeed we live in the presence of Christ who in every moment freshly invades our present, redeems our past, and give us hope for the future, however discouraging the immediate prognosis. In the round of the church year, we annually celebrate and reaffirm this unceasing quality of Christ's comingness in the Advent-Christmas sequence of events. [Davie Napier in Proclamation 2: Advent & Christmas, 1980, p. 13]
The so-called 'eschatological tension' between the already and the not yet is really lived-out in the Christian experience. Christ has come, yes, but he also is coming to us every moment, and will come in the future. Historically, Christ has come, but he also takes flesh anew every time his church gathers and his people live in imitation of his self-giving love. He will be coming as long as there are people who confess, "Jesus is Lord." Advent, then, celebrates, proclaims, and reminds us of the presence of the God of all tenses; he who is at once past, present and future.
Rainer Maria Rilke captures the living out of the tension in a letter he wrote to a young poet in the fall or winter of 1903. Rilke wrote:
Why do you not think of Christ as the coming one, imminent from all eternity?. . . what keeps you from projecting his birth into times that are in process of becoming, and living your life like a painful and beautiful day in the history of a great gestation? For do you not see that everything that happens keeps on being a beginning, and could it not be His beginning, since beginning is in itself always so beautiful? . . . Be patient and without resentment and think that the least we can do is to make his becoming not more difficult for him than the earth makes it for the spring when it wants to come. [Letters to Young Poets, 1962, pp. 49ff.]
Our preparedness, our openness helps to bring the presence, the 'becoming' of the Lord to our world. I often think of Gandhi's words in this context, "Christianity hasn't failed; it's simply never been tried." We who sing, "O Come Emmanuel," and "Come Down, O Love Divine" need to be awakened to what we say, to Whom we so blithely invoke. What we sing, what we pray, what we say we hope and long for begins to be brought to reality because we have cooperated with God in the renewal of his world.
The Puritans gave a great deal of thought to this question and how it related to the Lord's coming. Some even saw the building of the "Holy Commonwealth" in New England as the means by which the Lord's return might be speeded up. No group grappled more with the tension of the "already but not yet" than the Puritans. Some would try to say they were fatalists, but I don't think they've read much of what these people wrote. I like how Perry Miller and Thomas Johnson describe the struggle in their classic work, The Puritans:
The Puritans were not blind or insensitive. They saw and loved the perch and the pickerel, the dove and the white oak and the rows of Indian corn; but even from a world as beautiful and lovely as this they yet hoped to be translated, "to be made partakers of the Inheritance of the Saints in Light." [Perry Miller & Thomas Johnson, The Puritans (1963),p. 290]
However, I think that William Gurnall perhaps said it best of all, and that's why he's our 'thought to worship by,' when he wrote: "Christ hath told us he will come, but not when, that we might never put off our clothes, or put out the candle." In other words, we should always be clothed in the Lord's righteousness, living decently, as children of the light. We grapple with the issues of the here and now, but with a difference; that's why God became man.
The little, oft-quoted, proverb, applies, "It is better
to light a single candle than to curse the darkness." My
brothers and sisters in the covenant of grace, our lives are the
candles to be lit. What you see on the Advent wreath symbolizes
not only one Sunday closer to Christmas, but also the way we
wait, the way we live, with candles blazing, to greet the Lord
who is coming, and who is already here. Amen.
