Third Sunday of Advent

"Dust everywhere. Everywhere, everywhere dust." That is the way the Rev'd Dan Matthews began his sermon at Trinity Church, Wall Street, on the Sunday following September 11. "Everything covered in dust. It was unbelievable. We couldn't imagine how the whole southern part of Manhattan could be covered in dust.... But the dust did not fall just in the southern tip of Manhattan. The dust fell all over the world on September 11. Not one inch of this earth is without dust; everybody is covered with the dust of the World Trade Center."

And with darkness, too, for the dust obscures the light of the sun. Dust and darkness in Manhattan and Washington, dust and darkness in Afghanistan, dust and darkness in Jerusalem and Gaza and the West Bank. Dust and darkness everywhere.

Frederick Buechner says that there is a hunger in the darkness of the world, a hunger for redemption, a hunger for something that will make our lives bright and different. 1

One dark Christmas Eve, in the shadow of the end of World War II, Buechner was in Rome. He went to St. Peter's for the midnight mass. The enormous church was filled, he said, but "we did not look like a particularly religious crowd."

"We were milling around, thousands of us elbowing each other out of the way to get as near as possible to the papal altar with its huge canopy of gilded bronze and to the aisle that was roped off for the Pope to come down. Some had brought food to sustain them through the long wait, and every once in a while singing would break out like brush fire -- 'Adeste fideles' and 'Heilige Nacht' I remember especially because everybody seemed to know the Latin words to one and the German words to the other -- and the singing would billow up into the great Michelangelo dome and then fade away until somebody somewhere started it up again. Whatever sense anybody might have had of its being a holy time and a holy place was swallowed up by the sheer spectacle of it -- the countless voices and candles, and the marble faces of saints and apostles, and the hiss and shuffle of feet on the acres of mosaic.

"Then finally, after several hours of waiting, there was suddenly a hush, and way off in the flickering distance I could see that the Swiss Guard had entered with the golden throne on their shoulders, and the crowds pressed in toward the aisle, and in a burst of cheering the procession began to work its slow way forward.

"What I remember most clearly, of course, is the Pope himself, Pius XII as he was then. In all that Renaissance splendor with the Swiss Guard in their scarlet and gold, the Pope himself was vested in plainest white with only a white skullcap on the back of his head. I can still see his face as he was carried by on his throne -- that lean, ascetic face, gray-skinned, with the high-bridged beak of a nose, his glasses glittering in the candlelight. And as he passed by me he was leaning slightly forward and peering into the crowd with extraordinary intensity.

"Through the thick lenses of his glasses his eyes were larger than life, and he peered into my face and into all the faces around me and behind me with a look so keen and so charged that I could not escape the feeling that he must be looking for someone in particular. He was not a potentate nodding and smiling to acknowledge the enthusiasm of the multitudes. He was a man whose face seemed gray with waiting, whose eyes seemed huge and exhausted with searching for someone, for some one, who he thought might be there that night or any night, anywhere, but whom he had never found, and yet he kept looking. Face after face he searched for the face that he knew he would know -- was it this one? was it this one? or this one? -- and then he passed on out of my sight. It was a powerful moment for me, a moment that many other things have crystallized about since, and I felt that I knew whom he was looking for. I felt that anyone else who was really watching must also have known."

Centuries earlier, John the Baptist is searching as well. Once upon a time, he thought he had seen him, thought he had seen the one who would satisfy the hunger of the dark and the thirst of the world's dust. He had baptized him, and he had seen the Spirit descend on him like a dove. But now, as he holds his vigil in the bowels of Herod's dungeon, he's not so sure. Living now in that lightless Advent world of prison, living as Pius XII would later live and as we are living, living between what is and what is hoped for, John asks the question of Advent hope: "Are you the One who is to come? Or should we look for another?" In the dark and dusty void of his captivity, John looks for a Deliverer.

So he sends out his own disciples to find out if, indeed, Jesus is the one he had hoped for, for himself and for the people of God. For even though John is a prophet, chosen by God, he is not spared this agonizing doubt. He is not spared this hunger for the saving truth. Like the rest of us, John, too, needs a Savior. Is it Jesus he is to hope for? Or is he to wait and look for another?

And on that Christmas night in Rome, the Pope surely knew that the face he was looking for would not be hidden forever. He knew that "the one he was looking for so hard was at that very moment crouched in some doorway against the night, or leading home some raging Roman drunk, or waiting for the mass to be over so he could come in with his pail and his mop to start cleaning up that holy mess. The old Pope surely knew that the one he was looking for was all around him there in St. Peter's.

"The face that he was looking for was visible, however dimly, in the faces of all of us who had come there that night mostly, perhaps, because it was the biggest show in Rome just then and did not cost a cent but also because we were looking for the same one he was looking for, even though, as Isaiah said, there were few of us with wit enough to call upon his name. The one we were looking for was there then as he is here now because he haunts the world, and as the years have gone by since that Christmas Eve, I think he has come to haunt us more and more until there is scarcely a place any longer where, recognized or unrecognized, his ghost has not been seen. It may well be a post-Christian age that we are living in, but I cannot think of an age that in its own way has looked with more wistfulness and fervor toward the ghost at least of Christ."

And when we look, what do we see in this post-Christian age? And what are we to look for? The blind being given sight? The lame being made to walk? Lepers being cleansed? The deaf hearing? The dead being raised to life? Good news being brought to the poor? What are we to look for when we look for Christ in our post-Christian age?

"Maybe it will shake us to pieces," says Buechner, "maybe it has come too late, but at least I believe that there are many in the world who have learned what I for one simply did not know years ago in Rome: that wherever you look beneath another's face to his deepest needs to be known and healed, you have seen the Christ in him; that wherever you have looked to the deepest needs beneath your own face -- among them the need to know and to heal -- you have seen the Christ in yourself. And if this is what we have seen, then we have seen much, and if this is what the old Pope found as he was carried through the shadow and shimmer of his church, then he found much.

"Except that I have the feeling that he was looking for more, that in the teeming mystery of that place he was looking not just for the Christ in men but for the Christ himself, the one who promised that the son of man would come again in a cloud with power and great glory. 'There will be signs in sun and moon and stars,' he said, 'and upon the earth distress of nations in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting with fear and foreboding' and then, at just such a time, we are tempted to say, as our own time, 'look up and raise your heads,' he said, 'because your redemption is drawing near.' And the words of Jesus are mild compared with the words of a later generation."

Years later, another John would speak of "the Son of Man with face and hair as white as snow and eyes of fire, the two-edged sword issuing from his mouth. [He would speak of] the last great battle [of the dark world] with the armies of heaven arrayed in white linen, and the beast thrown into the lake of fire so that the judgment can take place, and the thousand years of peace. [He would speak of] the heavenly city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven like a bride adorned for her husband, and the great voice saying, 'Behold....' [And John's vision] ends, of course, with the words, 'Come, Lord Jesus,' come again, come back and inaugurate these mighty works...."

But maybe the word we need to hear this Third Sunday of Advent is the same word Jesus sent back to John in prison: When you look, what do you hear and see? Where do you see the blind given sight and the lame being made to walk and the sick and the outcasts being healed and cleansed and the dead being raised to life? And where do you hear good news being proclaimed to the poor? Maybe that is, after all, where the One we are all looking for is, in our day as well as in the days of John and Pius XII.

"Certainly a Christian must speak to the world in the language of the world," says Buechner. "He must make the noblest causes of the world his causes and fight for justice and peace with the world's weapons -- with Xerox machines [and faxes and computers] and demonstrations and social action. He must reach out in something like love to what he can see of Christ in every man. But I think he must [also] be willing to be fantastic, because at its heart religious faith is fantastic. Because Christ himself was fantastic with his hair every which way and smelling of fish and looking probably a lot more like Groucho Marx than like Billy Budd as he stood there with his ugly death already thick as flies about him and [saying for us] to raise our heads, raise our heads for Christ's sake, because our redemption is near.

The prophet says that in that day there will be a highway called the Way of Holiness. Maybe. "Maybe holiness will come again. Do we dare hope for this in the darkness [and dust] of our world, [as John hoped for it in the darkness and dust of his prison and] as Pius XII hoped for it in the darkness [and dust] of that Christmas Eve shortly after the holocaust of the Second World War?

"Maybe holiness will come again. Maybe not as the Son of Man with eyes of fire and a two-edged sword in his mouth, but as a child who has maybe already been born into our world and beneath whose face the face of Christ is at this moment starting to burn through like the moon through clouds. Or if even that is too supernatural for us [in our sophisticated day], maybe it will come in majesty from some other world because we have begun to take seriously the fantastic thought that maybe we are not alone in the universe.

"Who knows what will happen? Except that in a world without God, in a way we do know. In a world without God we know at least that the thing that will happen will be a human thing [and not a divine thing], a thing no better and no worse than the most that humanity itself can be. But in a world with God, we can never know what will happen because the thing that happens then is God's thing, and that is to say a new and unimaginable and holy thing that humanity can guess at only in [our] wildest dreams. In a world with God, [from the dust of the World Trade Center and Washington and Afghanistan and Gaza and the West Bank] we come together in a church to celebrate, among other things, a mystery, and to learn from, among other things, our ancient and discredited dreams." Just as John, in prison, was learning from his ancient and discredited dreams, and Pius XII, in the darkness of the Great War of the twentieth century, was learning from his.

"It is madness to hope in our grim and sober times. It is madness," says Buechner, "to peer beyond the possibilities of history for the impossibilities of God. And there was madness among other things in the face of the old Pope that gaudy night with Hitler's Jews on his conscience maybe, and whatever he died of already on its way to killing him. There was anxiety in his face, if I read it right, and weariness, and longing, longing. And to this extent his face was like your face and my face.... [But if his face had reflected only our common anxiety and guilt and weariness], I would have had no cause to remember it so long. But there was also madness in that old man's face, I think. Like a monkey, his eyes were too big, too alive, too human for his face. And it is the madness that has haunted me through the years. Madness because I suspect that he hoped that Christ himself had come back that night as more than just the deepest humanness of every man's humanity, [madness because he hoped] that [God's] Impossibility itself stood there [somewhere that night], resplendent in that impossible place.

"He was not there, he had not come back, and as far as I know he has not come back yet. It is fantastic, of course, to think that he might, but that should not bother the likes of us. It is fantastic enough just that preachers should stand up in their black gowns making fools of themselves when they could be home reading the papers where only their children need know they are fools. It is fantastic that people should listen to them. It is fantastic that in a world like ours there should be something in us still that says at least maybe, maybe, to the fantastic possibility of God at all."

Dust and darkness. Dust and darkness everywhere. And like John the Baptist and Pius XII, we stand in the dust and darkness of our day and ask the question of Advent hope: Are you, Jesus, the One who is to come? Or are we to look for another? Like John and the old Pope, we live in that lightless world between what is and what is hoped for. Like them, we live in dust and darkness and are not spared that same agonizing doubt, that same agonizing Advent question. In the darkness of our captivity we, too, hunger for the saving truth and look for our Deliverer.

So on this Third Sunday of Advent, in the Year of Our Lord 2001, in an early year of a new millennium and in the ancient name of Christ, and again in the words of Frederick Buechner, "I commend this madness and this fantastic hope that the future belongs to God no less than the past, that in some way we cannot imagine holiness will return to our world. I know of no time when the world has been riper for its return, [no time] when the dark has been hungrier." Not the time of John the Baptist. Not the time of John the Evangelist. Not the time of Pope Pius.

"Thy kingdom come.... [And on this day in church, on the Third Sunday of Advent in the Year of Our Lord 2001], we do shew forth the Lord's death till he come, and maybe the very madness of our hoping will give him the crazy, golden wings he needs to come on.

"I pray that he will come again and that you will make that your prayer. We need him, God knows.

"'He who testifies to these things says, "Surely, I am coming soon." Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.'"

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1 In The Hungering Dark (1969) Passages quoted from Buechner are found on pages 113-125 passim.