Second Sunday of Advent

The Second Sunday of Advent

The Rev. Dayle Casey

The Chapel of Our Saviour

Colorado Springs, Colorado

December 8, 2002

2 Advent -- B

Isaiah 40:1-11

2 Peter 3:8-18

Mark 1:1-8

What are the essential building blocks of life, those things without which life is not possible?

There is air, of course. Without oxygen, life as we know it would simply suffocate and die. And there is food and water and shelter, fuel to nourish and replenish the body and clothing and housing to protect it.

Advent reminds us, however, that there are more. Advent reminds us that human beings are more than physical bodies. We are creatures who live in time as well as in matter and space. And because we live in time, hope and faith are as essential to us as are food and water and clothing and shelter. We live in anticipation, in expectation of things to come. We live waiting for things we cannot yet see, and, as the Scriptures know, it is faith that convinces us that the things we cannot see are real, and it is faith that gives us the assurance of the reality of the things we hope for.

"Where there's life, there's hope," the old saying goes. But John Claypool reports an event which suggests that the converse of that is an even more profound truth, that what is even more profoundly true is that where there's hope, there's life.

Father Claypool tells of an experiment performed at the Graduate School of Psychology at Duke University. Two rats of the same age and size and weight were placed in separate tanks of water. The two tanks were the same size and contained the same amount of water. The tanks were identical in every way, except that the first tank was sealed tight at the top, while the top of the second tank was left open to the air.

In the sealed tank, the first rat quickly sensed that there was a limited amount of oxygen and no escape, and therefore no future. And in less than four minutes, the creature gave up, quit swimming, sank to the bottom, and drowned.

In the other tank, however, that little creature seemed to sense that there was an unlimited amount of oxygen and that the possibilities were open-ended. And the second rat swam for an incredible 37 hours until, mercifully, the experiment was stopped.

The point, says Claypool, is not just that where there's life, there's hope. The deeper point, the spiritual point, is that where there is hope, there is life.

Nothing worries us so much as the future. In fact, the future is what all worry is about, and Claypool also tells of an important event in his own life that taught him something vitally important about the future.

It happened when he was a young Baptist pastor involved in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s in Louisville, Kentucky. He says that in the intensity of his youthful commitment, he very much wanted to be part of the solution, where he perceived that some of his own forebears had been part of the problem, and he used to get terribly discouraged. And one day an old rabbi in Louisville spoke to him about his discouragement. The rabbi, who had experienced incredible atrocities in his own life, encouraged Claypool to keep his spirits up. The rabbi was himself a survivor of Auschwitz and the Holocaust, and he said to Claypool, "Young man, remember that despair is always presumptuous, because despair is saying something about the future that you have no right to say, for the simple reason that you haven't been there yet."

And Claypool says that that was a defining moment in his life, a moment when he realized that hope was as real and essential to life as water and food, even though we can't see hope the way we can see water and food. It was the moment, Claypool says, when he realized that hope is, in fact, what makes it possible for human beings to live above "see" level. S-E-E.

One of the strongest needs of human life is to know where home is, and one of the greatest tragedies is that there are so many who do not know where home is. For centuries, Jews, many of them at least, have wandered the earth, longing for Zion. But fifty-four years ago, when the State of Israel was created following the Holocaust, the price for the State of Israel was the loss of home for thousands of non-Jews for whom Palestine was the only home they had ever known.

In that same half-century, the half century that frames the lifetimes of most of us here today, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, refugees from Asia and Africa, have made their way to Europe and Britain and the Americas, all of them fleeing one home to find another.

North American culture is not, in the Year of Our Lord 2002, what it was when you and I were children. Blacks have moved from the South to the North, and to the East and the West, in search of jobs and homes, and race is no longer, if it ever was, something only the South needs to deal with. Latinos have moved from Mexico and Central America to the United States in search of jobs and homes, and Spanish will soon be as essential as English for our children and grandchildren. Folks from Haiti and Africa and every country in Asia have migrated to California and New York and Florida and Canada, and even to Colorado Springs, all in search of jobs and homes, and life is changing, and home is not what it used to be, if it ever was.

It's as if the whole world today is on the road with the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, all leaving the lands of their dispossession in search of the Promised Land. It's as if the whole world is at one with those refugees from Rwanda six or seven years ago -- all God's people on the road, old and young alike, many of them sick, all of them hungry, all looking for a home, all carrying everything they own: beat up pots and pans, an old blanket or two, a plastic sheet that doubles as a tent, a bag of charcoal, scavenged bananas and vegetables and dried corn, maybe, if they are fortunate, a kerosene lantern and a thermos...

...and their baptismal certificates.

It was the baptismal certificates that caught my attention at the time. Why were all those desperate people hanging on to those? Wandering in a foreign land, being shunted from one place that doesn't want them to another place that doesn't want them, living on the edge of death, why were their baptismal records, pieces of paper apparently as valuable to them as their pots and pans and blankets, stuffed in their pockets or grasped in their hands?

It's an old, old story, this picture of refugees getting off their donkeys or out of the backs of their trucks or off the boats, and now off airplanes, all carrying whatever they can carry, looking for a home.

It's a story that reaches back at least to biblical times. Mary and Joseph and Jesus, you'll remember, were themselves refugees who fled the terror of Herod in Palestine to walk the wilderness road through Sinai to Egypt. Six hundred years earlier, the people of Israel had been driven from home in Judea to exile in Babylon. There they lived for centuries in a foreign land, with little more than their circumcision certificates to remind them of home. They lived in a culture they could not understand. Forced to abandon the ways of prayer and sacrifice that God had taught them, and longing for home, they wondered if God had not abandoned them after all, until...

...until the prophet brought them this word of hope from God: "Comfort my people. Speak strength to them. Speak kindly, and proclaim to Jerusalem that her time of bondage and fear is over. Let every valley be raised and every mountain and hill brought low, for the Lord is preparing a way home for his people, and God himself will lead them."

But the prophet was skeptical. He asked, "What shall I proclaim to this ragged group? All they have left are some pots and pans, a couple of old blankets, a few vegetables and bananas, and their circumcision certificates. They can't last long. All mankind is grass, Lord. We last no longer than a flower in the field, which quickly withers and fades, and these people here are surely on their last leg."

"Ah, yes," says the Lord, "but there is more ahead. The word of God endures forever. Like a shepherd, the Lord will tend his flock, and with his arm he will keep them together and bring them home."

Is it really any different for us, for us here, today, in the United States? Is it really any different for us with our baptismal certificates in the Broadmoor? It's as possible to live in desperation, to live in anxiety and worry about the future and to wither and die without hope in the midst of the affluence and glitter of the West as it is in the midst of poverty on the road to Rwanda or in the midst of terror on the roads of Palestine. It's just as possible to die of hopelessness on the road to Vegas or LA as it is on the road to Babylon or Baghdad.

Unlike the Joads, of course, unlike the children in Sinai and Afghanistan and Haiti, we've got shoes to wear. And the rags we clutch are silk, which offers the appearance of greater substance. We've got bigger barns. We've got our stocks and bonds and mortgages and IRAs, and we've got our computers and cell phones that make it possible for us to negotiate the world without ever having to live in the presence of another real person, and we've got garages and attics all stuffed full with last year's things in order to make way, once again, for Christmas. And our shiny cars can cover the miles a lot faster than bare feet, and we've got hospitals that fend off death, for a time. We've got the university certificates of our youthful hopes of fame or fortune or power, and we've got the more recent documents of our disappointments and failures, all the clutter we carry through life, hoping that with them we can still secure from the goddess Success a name and a place for ourselves.

But I wonder. I wonder if we're not, after all, all of us very much like those on the road back to Rwanda, very much like those on the roads of Sinai, very much like those on the road to and from Babylon, very much like those the author of the Letter to the Hebrews spoke about -- people looking for the Promised Land, strangers and exiles on the earth, refugees and wanderers hoping for a better country, and that a country prepared for us by God.

I wonder if it's not possible to find as much desperation on the road to success as it is on the road to anywhere else, for the question raised by all the high-priced gear we load onto our backs in the United States is precisely the same as the question raised by the pots and pans and blankets carried on the road from Oklahoma to California. After a while you ask yourself, "Is this it? Is there anything more to life, or is this it? Is this life, or is there ever anything different?"

Advent promises that there is more, that there is another country and another life, and that it is different. And it's in that country that we'll find our true home.

"Comfort my people," says the Lord. "Strengthen them. Tell them that the way is being prepared for me to lead them home. The promise is right there, stuffed into their pockets, on their baptismal certificates."

Hope is essential to life. Hope, in fact, is the reason we're on the road at all. Without hope, we venture nothing. Without hope, we live in desperation and wither and die.

The baptismal certificates of those wanderers on the road to Rwanda were as important to them as their pots and pans and bananas and beans and bags of charcoal. Their baptismal certificates reminded them to live above "see" level, reminded them that there, above "see" level, is an unlimited amount of love. Their baptismal certificates reminded them of their real hope -- that, as children of God, they are heirs of the kingdom of heaven, that they do not have to expect always to live at "see" level on the road where everything seems desperate, but that there is a home prepared for them where life is different.

And our baptismal certificates, too, remind us of our real hope, of the home of unlimited love which is ours above "see" level.

"Hope is the anchor of our souls," reminds the author of the Letter to the Hebrews. Hope provides the stability and assurance necessary for lives lived on the road, in time. Without hope, there is no assurance of tomorrow, and therefore, without hope, there is only despair. Hope is what makes it possible for men and women and children to go on swimming in the expectation that somewhere, somehow, there is a home where life is different, a life not locked into the slavery of the constant struggle for the acquisition of power or money or status or things, either on the road to Beverly Hills or on the road to Cherry Hills.

Where there is hope, there is life. And faith gives us the assurance of the things we hope for, the conviction of the reality of what we cannot see.

Nothing worries us like the future. The future, in fact, is what all worry is about. Will Uncle Joe like the gift we got for him? Will the boss like the meal I've prepared? Will I be a success in life? Is my job secure? Will we be able to afford our children's education? Will we have enough to live on in retirement? Will we have enough barns, and will they be big enough?

And what Advent tells us is that the future, after all, is not in our hands, but in the hands of God. We have a responsibility, of course. We must still study for exams. We must all save for our later years. We must thaw the turkey before Christmas Day. We must go out and find a job if we need one. In fact, the fact that we work and are on the road at all s evidence of the hope that is in us. The question is, which road are we on? The road to death, or the road to life?

Hope is like the headlights on a car. It is the light with which we can see that the road is, in fact, going somewhere, the light without which we would not be able to move in the darkness. And if, in the darkness we are to live in anticipation of a future, we must do so with the food of hope, for the presumption of despair is poison.

Advent reminds us of the substance of hope. Advent reminds us that above "see" level there is the unlimited amount of love and acceptance we both seek and need, and home. Advent reminds us of the coming of Christ, of that day when Christ will return and judge the world, that day when the world will be different.

But I have discovered that the problem isn't with the second coming of Christ. The problem is with his first coming. Clearly, God has not yet finished his work with the first Advent.

For if I could believe the absurdity of that first Advent, if I could believe the absurdity of God's cutting himself down to human size...

...if I could believe that God loves the world so much, that he sent his only Son, so that whoever loves him and cherishes him will not perish...

...if I could believe the absurdity of Love's coming to us as a human infant, as a refugee child, vulnerable as we are vulnerable, with his mother and father and their pots and pans and blankets and vegetables and bananas and charcoal, fleeing the terror of Herod, as we flee the terror of Herod...

...if I could believe the absurdity of Love's coming as a human being whose whole future would hang on the craziness of living by hope and faith...

...if I could believe the absurdity of Love's coming to us as a man who walks the way to the Cross, and who carries with him no purse, no extra shirt or shoes, no pots and pans or savings accounts or retirement funds, but only his baptismal certificate...

...if I could believe the absurdity of Love's coming to us as a human being whose only assurance is the hope, secured by faith, that above "see" level, and even at the door of death, there is more, and to spare, an unlimited amount of love and life, and home...

...if I could believe the truth of that, then the Second Coming will take care of itself.

For that is precisely what Advent reminds me is the truth about life -- that there, above "see" level, there is the unlimited love of God, and home, where one feeds not on the poison of desperation and anxiety, but on the food of hope and trust and love itself.

And it is Christ who shows us the road to take as he travels the way of exile to Egypt, and then to Jerusalem, and then to death on the Cross, feeding on the manna of hope, the hope that every valley will be raised and every mountain and hill will be brought low, and that all the steep places will be made level and all the rough places made smooth, so that his Father might bring him home to that life that is life indeed.

Advent reminds us that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word of hope that comes from the mouth of God.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.