Sermons
Rev. Angela Askew
Sermons
November 29, 2009
The Rev. Angela V. Askew
Advent opens this year with a picture of chaos. The gospel speaks of cosmic chaos, the sort of chaos we get in disaster movies where meteors come crashing towards America and Morgan Freeman keeps everybody calm… the sort of destruction and chaos we know from tsunamis and hurricanes and earthquakes and unquenchable forest fires. In the Bible there is a whole spectrum of chaos pictures, from the flood of Genesis to a storm on Lake Galilee when Jesus was asleep in a fishing boat…
The thing about chaos is that we cannot keep it bay. Tsunamis and earthquakes are uncontrollable, reminding us that just out of sight, round the corner, in the next storm, the next hurricane, the next earthquake, chaos is on the loose. Chaos on the loose makes us feel helpless, and we who are adult human beings don’t really do helpless very well. We experience chaos as a threat. So here we are, beginning Advent this year with a picture which evokes fear, helplessness and threat. Not a very promising beginning to a new church year, is it.
Now, what Jesus says is when you see this kind of chaos unleashed, and you are crouched down in fear and helplessness in the face of this sort of threat, don’t give in to it: STAND UP! Stand up and raise your heads, stand up and look up, for your redemption is drawing near. There is something outrageous about this, but then, there is something deeply outrageous about Advent altogether, every year, because Advent always alerts us to outrageous good news that has not happened yet. Every Sunday in the middle of the Great Thanksgiving, we say: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again – but the last bit has not happened yet; “will come again” lives in the future tense, God’s future with us. The words of our ancestors meet us in the prophet Jeremiah this morning: while we are crouched in fear and anxiety amid all the storms of life and the volcanic uprisings of terrorism and desert warfare with the threat of nuclear weapons as well as global warming on this very, very small planet, here is the good news: God is busy building the new Jerusalem, God himself promises that it will be a city of salvation and safety.
In God’s new city there will be no more homeless men moaning, no more bruised and tormented children crying, no more terrorized women looking for shelter. When God builds the city it will be for salvation and safety. There will be homes for all: no more taxing folks out of their houses, no more losing your apartment to the bank or the developer, when the new Jerusalem dawns everyone will live safely, unafraid, at peace, no more destructive threats, no more fear and anxiety.
That is outrageous, because everything Scripture holds out to us as pictures of hope and promise seems to be beyond our capacity to imagine. In our fear, in our tiredness, in our cynicism and anxiety when political and economic realities stumble and fall, you and I dream the small dreams of self-sufficiency, our hope is fixed on jobs that pay enough, health benefits, social security. And the word of the Lord comes and says God is building the new Jerusalem with freedom, safety and justice for all. It sounds just like some poetic fantasy. If God were a politician we wouldn’t vote for him.
Well, in Advent we look up and we look out because it is time for us to receive the power of God’s imagining that lies way beyond ours. We have four Sundays starting with this one, in which to listen one more time to the outrageous poets with the new Jerusalem, and four Sundays to contemplate the power of God moving in and living with us now under the same roof.
And while we are waiting and contemplating, we need to realize that God’s way of talking is so often written huge on a cosmic scale, both for the disasters that beset us and for the joys that await us, but our lives are always lived one day at a time, with thoughts, ideas and actions that are quite small, baby-sized in fact. To know even a little of the hope and glory of God’s new Jerusalem means actively making room for God’s life-giving power to come into our daily lives now, in quite small ways.
In the run up to Christmas, the world imposes on us a threatening sort of busy-ness and gives us the goal of acquisition. Buy, borrow, get, have, take, consume, hold on to. Making room means standing up to the pressures of the world’s economies and consumerism: stand up and look up, look beyond the Christmas bells and muzak. Advent is not about being busy, or buying stuff, it’s more about de-cluttering your daily life so that you find fifteen extra minutes once a day for contemplating God’s outrageous promises about the New Jerusalem. Advent is about one candle each week, not your apartment windows or front yard full of electrical reindeer flashing every night.
Advent is about sharing, forgiving, truth-telling, healing, growing in compassion, all of which clean up spaces in our interior lives and help us to find our true selves. Because in the end that is what gets lost when chaos threatens us. In fear and anxiety we lose track of the men and women we are called to be, we lose ourselves as God created, knows and loves us. There are no pills, injections, medications or surgical operations for this. Just the small, daily spaces of contemplation, watching your corner of Brooklyn, your neighborhood of working Manhattan, with the eyes of God’s outrageous imagination. Be alert, be on your guard, as the Gospel puts it, and do not be afraid, as the angels will say. Quit looking for signs of chaos and stop worrying about disorder. Look up! Look out! God The new Jerusalem … in Brooklyn Heights and Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, in Bushwick and Flatbush and Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach, and even out on Staten Island, the new Jerusalem. That’d be some Christmas! Amen.
All my preaching owes debts to those who have gone before me and to many who are currently publishing. This sermon reflects my notes on “Outrageous God, Season of Decrease,” by Professor Walter Brueggemann in C.L. Campbell, ed., Walter Brueggemann: The Threat of Life – Sermons on Pain, Power, and Weakness,(Minneapolis MN: Augsburg Fortress Press 1996) pp.64-69. A.V.A.
