The Pregnant Present

Isaiah 2:1-5; Matthew 24:36-44

December 2, 2007, First Sunday of Advent

“Name Withheld” sent the following in to the Sun Magazine for its November 2007 issue:

“At the age of thirteen I walked through JFK International Airport holding tightly to my mother’s hand; my younger sister walked on her other side, clutching her favorite stuffed animal. Our mother wore a print dress that showed off her figure, beaded necklaces around her neck, and a knit cap that covered her red hair. Though her clothes hadn’t changed since her flower-child days, the lines on her face betrayed the intervening years of hard living.

My sister and I were headed to California to live with our grandparents. Everyone had agreed it was for the best. I was even looking forward to life in my grandparents’ tidy house, where dinner was always on the table at six and making the rent was never an issue. At the same time, I clung to the hope that our mother would come with us to California; that, in the end, she wouldn’t be able to let us go.

But when the three of us came to the security check, my mother stopped in her tracks.

“I can’t go through,” she said.

I knew what the problem was. “Don’t worry; they’re only looking for metal.”

She refused to budge. I wasn’t going to let airport security ruin the chance that she might come with us. “I’ll take it through,” I told her.

We went into a stall in the women’s bathroom, and my mother passed me a small bag filled with white powder. I tucked it into the waistband of my jeans and smoothed out my shirt to conceal the bump. My mother looked anxious. “We can’t,” she said. She was afraid that a belt buckle or something would set off the metal detector, and they’d have to search us. “You don’t know what they’d do to us if they found it.” She took back the packet of powder.

“Why don’t you just throw it away?” I pleaded. I had never made a request like this before, probably because I knew the choice she would make.

Our mother cried as she was separated from us at security, holding tight to the purse that contained her stash. When my sister and I passed through the metal detector, it didn’t make a sound.”

We all are caught between the powers and the ways of darkness, and living in the light of God’s truth. The author of Matthew talks about watching and waiting which is the buzz word for the season of Advent. But I want to be clear about what we are watching or waiting for. Sarah Dylan Breuer on her lectionary blog, Saralaughed.net describes what we are waiting for in her comments about today’s lectionary passages.

This is not the second coming of Christ. We call that one "Easter." It's not the third coming we're looking for either. Wherever two or three have gathered in Jesus' name since Easter, Jesus has come among them, so we must be on about the ummpteen kajillionth coming. The coming, or "advent," we look forward to in this season is, in a sense, as mundane and as special as all of those other "advents" have been. It's all of those other "advents," all comings of Christ from the Incarnation up to this Sunday morning, that informs us about what the final Advent, the coming of Christ we look forward to during this liturgical season, really means.

We watch and wait for the God in Christ that we expect to see in our daily lives, and in doing so we patiently wait for the ultimate coming of Christ.

Andrew Greeley, the Catholic writer, talks about this waiting as being about choices and not slipping into the ordinary. We keep from slipping into the ordinary by the choices we make. We recognize that we don’t have to follow the world, we don’t have to follow tradition, and we don’t have to follow the person going over the cliff. Unless people take time to reflect on their choices they will not begin to see that there are different paths, they will continue to walk the same path, which Advent reminds us is a path of darkness.

Hugh Kenner, a critic, once wrote: “Whoever can give their people better stories than the ones they live by is like the priest in whose hands common bread and wine become capable of feeding the very soul.” When we can see new story lines it is a form of waiting, of seeing possibilities, of having hope. I will admit that the passage from Isaiah is very poignant for our day and age as it seems we have lived constantly with war. War perhaps has become a familiar path that we are locked into, but it takes hope and seeing the possibilities to realize that the implements of war can be transformed into farming implements, in a real sense and in a metaphorical sense. We can change our attitudes about how we deal with our neighbors and transform our minds from thinking about them as enemies to thinking of them as human persons who need to be taken care of just like we need to be taken care of. We can let go of our “might makes right” mentality and create hope with an ethic of “right makes might.”

This all comes to play in this season of Advent in that we often feel powerless to stop the rush to Christmas. We feel powerless to stop old habits, to truly be Christ’s disciples. We are not powerless. We have choices we can make. This is a season where we are being shouted at from all corners of our life to want, want, want. Yet we already have, and the choice is to think about what we need, or what would really make us happy. The present is pregnant with possibilities that can make us truly happy, and possibilities that will drown us in fatigue, powerlessness, and despair. The mother in our opening story could make the choice to give up the bag of heroin. But because of her choice she continued to walk the path of darkness in despair.

As you begin your Advent journey slow down and think about the opportunities you have. Carefully consider your choices. Let God and you be the guardians of your life instead of the world.

Amen

© 2007 Rev. Dr. Thomas T. Peters