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Our children here at St. Andrew’s participate in Godly Play, which is not a Sunday School curriculum, really. It is a liturgy. It is not a simple series of lessons taught to the children week by week. Like us, here in the sanctuary, the children are invited into an encounter with the Word, that is, an encounter with Jesus, an encounter with God.
To do this, the children need to be ready. And so the storyteller helps them get ready. There is a way for them to sit quietly in a circle, and pay close attention to the story that is being told. Because children are human beings, ‘being ready’ can sometimes be a challenge. A friend of mine in Seattle, a priest who is also a Godly Play storyteller, likes to say that when the children are not ready here in church—when they are ‘acting out,’ being restless, making noise, causing commotion—adults get irritated not because the children are misbehaving, but because the adults—all the rest of us—are not allowed to misbehave, even though we want to just as much as the children do. It’s not fair! Think about it, and you’ll see this is probably true: sometimes church is boring, or we are singing or praying in a way I don’t like, or I forgot breakfast, or I need to use the restroom, or I’m simply not ready on a particular Sunday, so I want to fidget. But I can’t. Or at least I think I can’t. I certainly feel pressure not to bust out crying, or get up and explore the room, or do all the other things that children have license to do. Adults are supposed to be ready.
But are we?
There are so many things for which we must be ready, but are we ever really ready for them? Are you ready for your kids to grow up, to learn to drive, to go off to college, to date or get married, to tell you who they really are, to have children of their own? Are you ready to listen when your doctor says, “I’m sorry, there’s something I have to tell you”? Are you ready to say goodbye to an aging parent, or cope with a difficult co-worker, or endure heavy traffic, or turn another year, or another decade, older? Are you getting ready to face the social and political changes that are happening these days? And if you are, what does ‘getting ready’ look like?
Sometimes, in Godly Play, if the children are having trouble getting ready, the storyteller can set aside the planned story and invite them to make the whole session that day about getting ready. And in Advent, which begins today, the storyteller tells the children that the whole point of Advent is that we need all this time to get ready for the mystery of Christmas. So, today, let us talk about what we need to do, and not do, to get ready.
But first, let’s talk about what, during Advent, we are getting ready for. This may sound like a downer, but are not getting ready to “welcome the baby Jesus” or celebrate the “birthday” of Jesus. Or if we are, these are complicated concepts, and they need to be interpreted. We know that the actual baby Jesus was born two millennia ago. We don’t really know what time of the year he was born, and he may not have actually been born in Bethlehem… If we search for the historical baby Jesus, we may lose track of Jesus Christ himself. We may miss the whole point of who, or what, we are getting ready for.
There is a graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary who can help us with this. His name was Phillips Brooks. Born in 1835, he studied at VTS in the late 1850s. There is a marble bust of him standing in the entryway of the VTS library. I can’t verify this story beyond a doubt, but I have been told that one Christmas, he was on the VTS campus and looked down the hill. He saw the town of Alexandria shining below, all the Old Town gas lamps glittering on a crisp, wintry night. Inspired by this view, Brooks wrote a poem called O Little Town of Bethlehem, which of course is one of our most beloved Christmas carols. (Another version of this story has Phillips Brooks on a pilgrimage in the actual town of Bethlehem, looking down on the city itself.)
I like the Alexandria version. Anyway, here is part of what Phillips Brooks writes about the baby Jesus, and what we are trying to get ready to do this time of year:
How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven.
No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin,
where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in.
O holy child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray;
cast out our sin, and enter in; be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell.
O come to us, abide with us, our Lord, Emmanuel!
So, we are not getting ready for the birth of a baby, or planning a toddler’s birthday party. We are getting ready for, in no particular order—
—Someone to enter this world of sin
—Someone who is “dear” to us, and who responds to meek souls
—Someone who descends and is born in us today
—Someone who casts out our sin
—Someone who will abide with us
How can we get ready for this Someone?
St. Paul gives us some pointers. He uses (in our English translation of his letter) some big churchy-sounding words: we should avoid “reveling” and “drunkenness,” and “debauchery” and sexual “licentiousness.” Okay. That sounds grouchy, but...reasonable. But we should also set to one side our love of “quarreling” and “jealousy.” That might be harder.
And then, Jesus himself piles on. “The Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour,” he says, forebodingly. We know that the first people who heard his words expected without question that the Last Things, the Day of Judgment, would come to pass in their lifetimes. We know too, of course, that they were mistaken about that. Yet there is a sense of urgency here that we should listen to. Getting ready for the holy child of Bethlehem to be born in us today is important, and should rightly startle us. And we know in our bones that the biggest, most challenging things that happen to us—the things for which we have to work hardest to get ready for—happen all of a sudden, out of nowhere.
For Jesus and his followers, all those years ago, the challenging event for which they needed to get ready was the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70. This event shattered the social and political landscape not only for the first Christians, but for the whole Jewish people, and really everyone in that region. Only two strains of Judaism survived that catastrophe and are still with us today: rabbinic Judaism, and Christianity.
But this is more than just an interesting history lesson. This is how we also feel, time and again: startled, surprised, shocked, shattered: life comes at us, and there are so many things beyond our control. This morning we hear this truth acknowledged and proclaimed: we must get ready for things we can’t predict, upsetting things, disruptive things. And—we must get ready for God to enter into all this, to come and abide with us, to cast out our sin, to be born in us, today.
And this is Good News. We must get ready for God to enter into our lives much like we might prepare our homes for a special guest: we clean up, put things in order, throw out junk and clutter, dust the furniture, do the laundry, wash the dishes, prepare the meal, set the table, put on music, take a breath, and wait for the knock at the door.
But what does getting ready for God’s arrival look like in our spiritual community here? It looks something like this: to prepare for God to be born in us today, we…
—Mend relationships that are broken, if we can
—Deepen our capacity for prayer, even if that simply means getting better at sitting quietly
—Notice and respond to the needs of our neighbor, whoever she might be
—Notice who we tend not to notice: the neglected person, the lonely person, in our lives
—Gather here at this table of thanksgiving to be strengthened for our daily life and work
For just as we can’t predict when bad things will happen, neither can we always know when God will disrupt our lives—in a good way, even if it’s not always easy—and cast out our sins of ignorance, our sins of omission, our sins of disregard for, and mistreatment of, one another.
Are you ready?
***
Preached on the First Sunday of Advent (Year A), St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Burke, Virginia, December 1, 2019.
Isaiah 2:1-5
Psalm 122
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44
Image: The Godly Play story for the First Sunday of Advent.