“Keeping Watch”
Nov. 30, 2008
First Sunday of Advent
Rev. Samuel Schaal

Isaiah 64:1-9
Psalm 80:1-7. 17-19
Mark 13:24-37

Our Biblical texts today express the closing out of one world and the opening up of another. Isaiah’s verses are a prayer by an exiled and powerless people, expressing both a sense of deep desperation about a situation out of control as well as bold and confident trust in God. The Psalm is a lament that speaks from the same sort of desperate situation. Even the Gospel text invokes cosmic cataclysms about the Second Coming.

These texts are given to us on this first Sunday of Advent. Advent is a time of waiting for the first coming, for the birth of the holy infant. Christian faith teaches that we live between the first and the second comings of Christ, so we live in an in-between age, an age full of the old age and the beginnings of the new.

Advent comes as the earth sinks into the depths of winter and darkness. So it is a season of hope—hope born in unlikely places. As our scripture lessons this morning particularly point to, it is a season of a transition to a new world order. And transitions do not come easily.

John Shea, the Catholic theologian and storyteller, says of the Gospel passage today:

“This cosmic imagery expresses and conveys the impact and importance of the revelation of Jesus. When a way of thinking, feeling and acting has held sway for a long period of time, it can be imagined as heaven and earth, an unshakeable cosmic backdrop…When a new way of thinking, feeling, and acting arrives and threatens the established order of things, the best way to express it is cosmic collapse. The sun and moon are snuffed out; stars fall…”

Indeed, Advent is more than a time of waiting for the joy of Christmas. Advent is a time of reordering systems of thinking, feeling and acting. It is a time of sober reflection on the state of things.

Our world is in a constant state of composing and decomposing. Our very human bodies are examples of this. In our private lives, change is always the constant and in our circles we experience literal death and birth, birth and death, over and over. And in the body of our society right now in the economic challenges, perhaps we’re seeing not merely a recession, but a restructuring of our attitudes toward human welfare and the proper use of wealth. As far as the Christian community goes, I would hope that we begin to see how money and wealth is one source of spiritual strength that it should be used to further the household of God, that we should use our resources in ways that enhance human life, in ways that further God’s will for us and all.

In my own life in this Advent season, in this in-between season of dark and light, I am in-between in big ways—in-between saying goodbye to you as I prepare to begin another ministry in another city.

I can’t say it really feels like Isaiah’s description of the heavens being torn open or even Jesus’s description of the end times when the “Son of Man” comes again. It isn’t quite that dramatic. But it is full of the pain of endings and the joy of beginnings.

In the same commentary on today’s Gospel lesson, John Shea says, speaking of the destruction that Jesus speaks of in the lesson’s opening lines, “From the point of view of those who followed Jesus, this destruction is favorable. It makes way for the advent of summer, not the full-blown summer of high heat, but the first bud, difficult to detect but bursting with promise.”

So in Advent is a bud, difficult to detect, but bursting with promise.

When I read Shea’s image of a bud, it brought to mind a recent incident that I want to share that lead to me being called to another church. The story may sound a bit too maudlin or sentimental, but it is for me meaningful. And it is to some degree a personal story and I share it in the category of the ancient art of Christian testimony, where we speak honestly of how we have experienced God in our lives.

Earlier this year in April I took a couple of days to go to a retreat center in the suburbs of Kansas City, to a place I fondly remembered from a college trip there back in the 1970s. I was needing a place for just a few days of quiet and prayer, for I felt like I had “hit a wall” spiritually. I had enjoyed my time in this church immensely. I had learned much from working with Steve and being a part of the ministerial team here. We, you and I, had what felt like a good ministry. And yet I was aware that it was time to contemplate moving on, that the ministry was reaching a good and natural closing. Good things can eventually come to a close.

But I couldn’t find a place that really called to me, a place where I could use more of the gifts that I have, a place where I could be all that God created me to be, honestly and openly.

So at this retreat center they have a little hotel and one afternoon I’m sitting in the chair at the desk in my room, turned around to look out the window and beyond the window, outside, is a rosebud. It is early April and things in the Kansas City area are just starting to bud out in the transition to spring. There was something about this one single little bud on an otherwise barren bush, holding forth in the still-chilly weather of the day. I began to see that this bud expressed my yearnings to blossom. And I started to pray, to express this yearning, to lift up this yearning to God. It’s maybe a bit embarrassing to tell you this, but I was praying out loud. (People who live alone do things like this, you know.) And all of a sudden out came this prayer, or perhaps more of a poem, in one take, as it were:

Mother-Father God, Eternal Spirit—

express through me.

That I in all my years may yet be

as a bud on a tree,

full of promise

to flower with Thee.

It will not go down as one of the great poems of all times, I realize. But it was an honest yearning of the heart toward the infinite, that I might realize my fuller potential.

So the prayer was said and I went about my business. In November, I am called to the St. Louis church. Now, I was scheduled to return to this same retreat center that I had been at in April for a conference in November, featuring a couple of Christian theologians, Bishop John Shelby Spong and New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman. So I went back in early November and in checking into the hotel was surprised to see that I had been given the same room as in my April trip, which was odd. The next day, the St. Louis church faxed me the contract that we had verbally agreed upon. I was seated at the desk in my hotel room, reading over the contract, and then it hit me.

I was sitting in the same room and even in the same chair that I sat in seven months later, signing a contract for a new ministry. I was witnessing the answer to that prayer back in April, in the exact same spot, some 600 miles from home.

Now, I am not given to neat little “miracle” stories on how God answers prayer, for my own understanding of God is very naturalistic. I don’t think God works outside of the natural laws of nature and physics. And yet I can’t deny the coincidence. And a coincidence, you know, is a co-incidence—a co-incidence of human and divine actions.

So maybe it was a weird accident or maybe it was God speaking to me, and I prefer the latter interpretation, but this put my mind and heart at ease that I was doing the right thing. This right thing is not without lots of sadness and saying goodbye is not an easy thing to do. As I get busier with everything I have to do, I’ve had my moments of doubt that I’m doing the right thing, but that experience of prayer reminds me that I’m probably doing what I need to be doing.

I suspect that there would be more little coincidences like this in your life as well, and in mine, if we would but be open to them; if we would but be awake to them; if we would but keep watch for them.

So often we feel God’s absence in our lives, when perhaps God’s presence is brimming. I think that God is always present, but in our lack of awareness, we perceive mere absence. To affirm the presence of God in the face of the apparent absence of God is to keep watch, is to keep our minds and hearts on the promise our Biblical tradition so clearly teaches.

John Shea goes on to speak of this mindfulness in his comments. He is talking about having a consciousness of God, what he calls a “watcher consciousness,” of being grounded in the awareness of God as we go about the various and necessary tasks of our lives.

Shea quotes Eckhart Tolle, a contemporary spiritual teacher, who talks about a “dimension of consciousness that is unconditioned.” When consciousness rests in this dimension, Tolle says, “You’d be surprised at the alertness that is there when you allow what is. It is the alertness out of which action arises, should it be necessary.” An alertness to God’s presence out of which action, proper action, arises.

In the old Biblical story of the birth of the baby, we see the culmination of this watchfulness of God’s work in the world. In the hopes of the Second Coming we see a poetic way of expressing how God will eventually rectify all creation to the Good. For in Paul’s immortal words, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to (God’s) purpose” (Romans 8:28).

God is present as our earth continues its journey into bitter cold and darkness. In that darkness God will birth the new age, of a light beyond all light and a love beyond all love, that which we call the Christ, the expression of God’s very nature to humanity itself.

In our very human journey together in these ever-darkening days, let us keep watch of God’s expression among us. Whatever you are facing in your life, whatever we are facing in our church community, whatever all of us are facing in the struggles before us in our global community, keep watch.

Amen.