The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
November 30, 2008

1 Advent – B
Isaiah 1-9a
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
Mark 13:24-37

“Advent begins in mystery, and it ends in mystery,” Diane Ackerman reminds us. It begins with a vision of cataclysmic events, with apocalypse, with warnings of signs in the heavens, in the sun and moon and stars. “In those days, the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give her light, the stars will come falling from the sky, the celestial powers will be shaken.” It begins with warnings of turmoil in the seas and nations in agony, and of people fainting in terror. The Advent mystery is “a mystery of emptiness, of poverty, of limitations,” Charles Edward adds. “And it must be so. Otherwise it could not be a mystery of hope.”

If Advent were not a mystery of emptiness and poverty, a mystery of our need and our human limitations, it could not bear the message of a voice crying in the desert, the voice of one searching out those, like us, whose address in the world is wilderness.

The language of Advent is poetry through and through. It is the language of salvation, God’s way of assuring us, through the medium of mortal words, that his Word, the Word, is eternal, God’s way of assuring us that what is transient will pass away, but what is permanent will endure. Even things that seem so permanent to us now – things like the earth itself, and the seas, and the heavens – all this will pass away, says Jesus. But what is permanent will endure. “My words will endure,” he says. “They will never pass away.”

“In the beginning was the Word,” St. John tells us. “The Word was with God, and the Word was God,” that Word which this morning is anticipated by Isaiah in the wilderness of the world.

Advent begins in mystery, and it will end with mystery, with the mystery of things to come, the mystery of new birth, for which we hope and for which we must wait and watch.

In the days to come, some things will prove to be transient, and therefore they will change and pass away. And some things will prove to be permanent, and they will endure. Watch for them, Jesus urges. Watch for the difference between the transient and the enduring, and be prepared for the passing away of the one, and for the resilience of the other.

In the wilderness that is our present address, we confuse the two so much, the transient and the enduring. We spend so much time on the one, so little on the other.

We confuse the transient and the enduring when we do not watch our language. Consider our use of the word “great.” The word “great” used to speak of the enduring; now, because we use it so often, it speaks of little more than the celebrated.

Some of you are old enough to remember Howard Cosell, a once well-known, but now forgotten, sportscaster. Some years ago, back when I was still watching football games, I took the trouble to count the number of times Cosell used the word “great” during one particular game. According to Cosell, that one game contained at least fifty “great” plays and more than a dozen “great” football players. But we all know that’s nonsense. We confuse the great with the ordinary. No game has that many great plays or that many great ballplayers. Few of us today even remember those plays or players now, just forty or fifty years later. I can’t even remember which teams were playing that day.

To get a glimpse of relative greatness, consider Plato, the Greek philosopher who wrote about the meaning life and the world 2,400 years ago. A modern philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, once observed that all thought in the Western world in the last 2,400 years – that includes the thought of Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas and Thomas Jefferson and Einstein and everyone else – has been nothing but a footnote on what Plato had to say. Now that’s greatness in human terms, relative greatness! That’s endurance. Plato’s were words that had staying power.

Or consider Lincoln. At Gettysburg in 1863, President Lincoln was not the top attraction. In fact, having Lincoln address the dedication of the cemetery was an afterthought for the committee planning the occasion. The main event was a celebrity of the day, the orator Edward Everett, a man who made his living with words.

For the 1860s Everett had the drawing power of a modern-day talk show host, even perhaps of a rock star, and the organizers of the cemetery’s dedication were willing to postpone the event for a month beyond the originally scheduled date so that Everett could make his customary thorough preparation. And Everett did not disappoint the crowd that gathered that day. From memory, he recited a carefully crafted text that held the crowd’s attention for two hours. Lincoln’s remarks, by contrast, were over almost as soon as they began, and the immediate reaction was a respectful puzzlement at their brevity.

But who remembers Everett’s words today? It is Lincoln’s words that have endured, and Everett himself was among the first to realize what had happened – that Lincoln, with his profound gift for language, had captured the meaning of the event in 272 simple, but eloquent words that had staying power. “I should be glad to flatter myself,” Everett later said to Lincoln, ”that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”

“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.... Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.... From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion....” These have proved to be words with enduring significance. That’s greatness.

It is similar in the life of the Church. Who today remembers the theological conflicts of the eighth and ninth centuries? Who today remembers the words of the emperor, Leo III, words spoken 1,200 years ago with which Leo declared all images, all physical representations of the holy, to be idols and banished them from the Church? Who remembers the arguments that ensued over icons and over the wording of the Nicene Creed, words that split the Church in two in the eleventh century, and over which the Church remains divided a thousand years later? Who remembers the Azymites of that day, and their heated insistence that God requires only unleavened bread in the Eucharist? Theirs were heated arguments, much like the endless arguments that consume so much of the energy of the Church today, words piled upon words. But heat and quantity do not generate greatness. In the Church, as in every area of life in the wilderness, there is the transient and there is the enduring.

As in the Church, so it is in popular culture. A few years ago it was reported that Oprah Winfrey earned 98 million dollars in one two-year period. That’s about one million dollars a week, or $200,000 a day. I imagine that Rush Limbaugh and some of the other shrill voices on radio and TV all turn their words into comparable dazzling wealth. It’s astonishing, isn’t it, what we will pay for what is transient, for mere entertainment, for talking heads who traffic in words without end.

But do they offer anything that will last? Will their words endure? Will their words offer comfort and strength when the earth and the heavens begin to shake, and when the world begins to crumble, and when all we’ve ever counted on is no longer there? Will their words offer meaning to your life? Will they offer a hand to hold, something to believe in or someone to love, a word to rely on or a place to stand?

What Plato and Lincoln and Edward Everett knew, as Jesus knew, is that some words endure and some don’t, because some words have power, while other words are just so much beating of the wind. “Sticks and stones may break my bones,” we say, ”but words will never hurt me.” But we know that is wrong, because the truth is that if you ask someone to recall his or her most painful moment, it is likely that it will involve what someone said. Like a never-ending echo, destructive words have a way of reverberating within the psychic walls of each of us. Some words hurt us and contribute to apocalypse, to destruction and decay.

On the other hand – and this is the good news today – some words have the power to create. Words that heal and bless and encourage are words that edify rather than destroy, and so contribute to life, even to salvation. Enduring words of encouragement like, ”You did a good job.” Lasting words of thoughtfulness like, ”Thank you,” and “Bless you.” Lasting words of hope like, ”There will be a day when you will sing and dance again, and I will pray for that day to come soon.” Enduring words of love like “I forgive you,” and “I love you,” and “You mean more to me than I can say.”

The Word that Jesus is has been around for a long time, because that Word is eternal. The Word was with God in the beginning, and even after the heavens and the earth have passed away, we are assured, that Word will not pass away. For the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, not to confuse or condemn the world, but to save it, because God loved the world so much that he sent his Word into the world so that all who hear and receive him will have life, abundant life, life that endures, life that has meaning even when all that is transient is crumbling around it.

Monica Helwig, a contemporary theologian, once said that “if it won’t play in a cancer ward or in a shoddy nursing home for the elderly, then whatever it is, it is not the Gospel.” In a crisis, in a cancer ward, in a nursing home, or when divorce papers are filed, or when a child runs away from home or is killed, or when so many things that one has held onto for so long are changing or passing away, one needs that which will endure – a word of strength, a hand to hold, someone to love, something to believe in, a place to stand. The Word we await in Advent is such a Word. He was sent into the wilderness of the world that is passing away to speak a word of hope for the world that is to come.

Advent announces that Word, the Word who reveals the meaning, the significance, the destiny of your life, regardless of circumstance, regardless of apocalypse. It is the Word which the Cross shouts from Calvary – that when all else fails, know that you are loved, loved by Him who was with God in the beginning, and who is with you now, and who will be forever.

The mystery that Advent heralds is that when all has been said and done, when all the talk show hosts and sports broadcasters and preachers have at last mercifully stopped talking, when even the words of Plato and Lincoln and Saints Peter and Paul and all the theologians will have been forgotten by the last person, even when the earth and the heavens themselves wash away in a torrent of cosmic dust, even if you find yourself in the cancer ward or the nursing home, even when you are at the door of death itself, even then, God is. And because God is, you will be. Because while we are clay, God is the Potter, and our Father. God’s Word is for you, not against you. That’s what the Word means when He says that God loved the world so much that he sent his Word into the world for it’s sake, and for yours.

The mystery of Advent, in other words, is a word about life and death. Or rather, a word about life out of death, a word about our need and our hope. Put another way, it is a word about thresholds, about the passing of an old world and the birth of a new. It is a mystery to which Edmund Waller (1606-1687) spoke in wonderful words now themselves over three hundred years old, words he wrote in 1686, the year before he died, as he stood on the threshold between the transient and the enduring:


The seas are quiet when the winds give o’er;
So calm are we when passions are no more.
For then we know how vain it was to boast
Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost.
Clouds of affection from our younger eyes
Conceal that emptiness which age descries.

The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that Time has made:
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view
That stand upon the threshold of the new.


Spend little this Advent and Christmas on that which passes away. Invest, instead, in that which endures. Keep watch, even in the midst of apocalypse, for that Word announced long ago. Keep watch for that which creates and builds. Invest in that which endures for life and for good and for blessing. Watch, this year, for the mystery of Christmas, for that eternal trinity, for charity and faith and hope, and for the One God sends to bring them.

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