THE COMFY OLD GARMENT OF SORROW

Every valley shall be exalted

         and every hill and mountain made low.

One of the best-loved verses 

         from Handel’s Messiah is about 

         exalting the valleys and leveling the hills 

         so God can get to us and we can get to God.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NCO6UzZ2R8

Handel got these words from John the Baptist

         who got them from 2^ndIsaiah who got them 

                  from the prophet Baruch.

Baruch was the first to say,

God has ordered that . . . 

          the everlasting hills be made low

         and the valleys filled up,

         to make level the ground, 

         so Israel may walk safely 

         in the glory of God.

Of course, he isn’t talking about 

         literal earth moving.

He doesn’t want to turn White Pine County 

           into Nebraska.

He doesn’t mean the hills and valleys 

             outside us on the ground.

Baruch is talking about the hills and valleys 

of our spiritual in-scape, 

the topography of our hearts. 

Hills are obviously challenges, 

        obstacles in our path.

But the valleys aren’t so obvious.

So Baruch explains the valleys.

They are the low points in our lives,

         the failures, the shame, the depression, 

          the loneliness.

Baruch promises God will lift us up 

         from those valleys if we let him.

Then to explain how we let God lift us up,

         how we give God permission to heal us,

         Baruch shifts to a different metaphor.

                  – a metaphor of changing clothes.

Take off the garment of sorrow and affliction,

          he writes, and put on forever 

          the glory of God.

He says to take off the black veil of mourning

         and put on your best red party dress.

We prepare the Lord’s way in our hearts

         by taking off the garment of sorrow 

         and affliction.

Usually, we think of preparing for Christ 

         by giving up our sins.

But these prophets all say something 

        a bit different from what we expect.

They say we get ready for Christ,

         by giving up our habits of misery.

Baruch doesn’t mean we give up 

           negative experiences.

Unfortunately, we can’t avoid some hardships.

So, Baruch doesn’t say to give up 

           sorrow and affliction.

He says to give up the garmentof sorrow 

           and affliction.

That means our identification

          with sorrow and affliction

         – our definition of ourselves 

         in terms of our suffering,

                  our failings, and our shame.

People have a perverse tendency to get attached

         to feeling an old familiar way, 

         even if it’s bad.

We get into a comfortable habit 

       of thinking of ourselves 

in an old familiar way even if it’s shaming.

We may think of ourselves 

          as someone people don’t like.

We may think of ourselves as the loser, 

         the lonely one, 

         the responsible one, the martyr, 

                  or the one people take for granted.

The role of victim is especially 

         in vogue these days.

So ask yourself, this Advent, what tragic roles

         you habitually play,

         because these roles are your

         garment of sorrow.

If we dress for sorrow and affliction, 

         then sorrow and affliction 

          is what the world will serve us.

The habit of suffering clouds our perception,

                  until all our new experiences look

                           just like the old ones.

We see the world through sad-colored glasses.

A wise friend once said to me,

         I was marred at 13 and a mother at 14. 

         My son was a drug addict, 

                  and my first husband beat me.

         If I choose to live in that I can.  

         But I’d rather get on to something else.

So, she did. 

She went back to college at 40, 

          graduated, then joined 

         Volunteers In Service To America

          helping prevent kids from dropping out 

                           of school as she had done.

Instead of living in her victimhood and failure,

         she got on with life.

Advent, is the time, as the hymn says,

to leave the gloomy haunts of sadness,

Advent is the time because 

           this isn’t just pop psychology.

It isn’t advice for positive thinking.

There’s far, far more at stake here 

          than a better mood.

This about is the birth of Christ.

That’s what we are here on this earth to do,

         to give birth to Christ, to incarnate Christ,

         to be the light for this darkened world.

If we aren’t doing that, 

         we’re wasting our time here.

In Advent, we make a space 

           in our hearts for Christ.

We empty out, make room, push things aside.

We let go of old ways, 

             and clear out a place 

              to let Christ be Christ in us.

We shape our soul like the womb 

          of the Blessed Virgin  Mary, 

         so we too can each be a Theotokos,  

                     a God-bearer.

In her poem “The Pool of God,” 

         Sr. Jessica Powers wrote:

         There was nothing in the Virgin’s soul

         that belonged to the Virgin –

         no word, no thought, no image, no intent. 

         She was a pure, transparent pool reflecting

         God, only God. . .

I pray to hollow out my earth and be

         filled with these waters of transparency.  . .

         Oh, to become a pure pool like the Virgin,

         water that lost (even) the semblance of water

         and was a sky like God.

 We hollow out our earth, become transparent,

         by letting go of our habitual gloominess.

We clear out the pain and it makes 

           a space inside us.

Spaciousness, brothers and sisters 

           – spaciousness -- 

         we cultivate spaciousness,

         that Christ may enter us 

         and fill our spaciousness.

Then we will become Christ 

         for a world that desperately needs Christ.

Then we will shine forth the holy light 

         that the darkness cannot overcome.

THE TWO SINS AGAINST HOPE

The real enemies of Christianity 

             are not our critics.

            They keep us on our toes.

The real enemies are so-called Christians 

         who smuggle their personal pathologies

into the faith and distort it into something false

         – something that makes people 

          cruel instead of kind, 

          judgmental instead of forgiving.

No one has done more harm to Christianity 

          than John Nelson Darby, 

         a 19th Century clergyman who invented 

        the modern heresy of dispensationalism,

  the currently popular version of religion 

  that threatens people

        with the Coming of Christ in vengeance.

It’s the God’s gonna get you kind of religion.

If you want to know the difference 

       between the orthodox faith 

        and the Left Behind heresy,

         I recommend Barbara Rossing’s book, 

        The Rapture Exposed.

For today, it’s enough that you know,

         that dispensationalism  isn’t Biblical 

         and it isn’t the orthodox Christian tradition.

We don’t dread the 2nd Coming as a disaster. 

We pray thy Kingdom come,

         because God’s kingdom is one 

          of freedom and peace.

We pray, Thy will be done,

         because the same God, whose love 

          gave birth to the Cosmos,

         wills mercy and healing all creation.

For centuries, the Church has read the lessons

         about the end times during Advent 

because the destiny of creation isn’t that 

 God will wipe it out,

       but that God will redeem it  

in something that looks like Christmas.

The essence of Christianity isn’t fear 

      but hope in the face of all the chaos 

      we read about in today’s gospel lesson 

      and what we read in the  newspaper each day.

We do not dread the coming of Christ. 

We hope for it.

Zechariah described our God-ordained destiny

         as a day in which there is no night.

Isaiah described it as a time when every tear 

                   would be wiped away,

         and the lion would lay down with the lamb.

In Advent, we are looking forward 

         to something like Christmas

         – when angels will sing and people

                  will be still and happy in reverence.

Hope is extraordinary. 

Hope dares to believe in something,

         to trust in something, we cannot yet see.

It’s the difference between Christianity 

         and the religions that teach 

passive acceptance of things as they are.

Christians are not satisfied with things as they are,

         and we do not want to be satisfied 

          with things as they are.

We hope for better. 

We strive for better.

The German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, says,

         “ . . . (E)xperience and hope stand 

         in contradiction to each other . . .

         with the result that . . .  man 

         is not brought into . . . agreement    

         with the given situation, but is drawn 

         into the conflict between experience 

         and hope.”

He means hope sets us against the status quo.

Jesus describes that contradiction 

         in today’s lesson.

Our experience is sometimes pretty grim,

         but, in spite of experience, 

        we set our hearts on hope.

Whenever the world is falling apart,

         people faint with fear and foreboding.

But that is precisely the time, Jesus says, to

         stand up, raise your heads, 

         because your redemption is near 

         . . .  the kingdom of God is near.

Today, when war is raging around the world,

         the sea is rising as the polar ice caps melt,

         mass shootings splatter blood 

          in churches, schools, and malls,

 wildfires rage and storms drown the coastlands,

         things are falling apart on a grand scale.

When our families split into conflict,

         people we love are lost in addiction,

                  and we are falling apart ourselves,

we are apt to faint with fear and foreboding,

apt to panic or collapse into despair.

But Jesus says, this is precisely the time to 

          stand up, raise your heads, 

         because your redemption is near 

                  . . .  the kingdom of God is near.

That doesn’t mean to roll over 

         and go back to sleep

         because God will take care of it.

Quite the opposite.

To stand up and raise our heads 

         is to engage the world,

         to challenge the status quo,

         to do something godly, 

                  to do something Christ-like 

in the face of all the powers of death and darkness.

Moltmann says,

         . . . (H)ope causes not rest, but unrest,

         not patience but impatience. . . 

         Those who hope in Christ, he says, 

          can  no longer put up with reality as it is,

         but begin to suffer with it, to contradict it.

That means we roll up our sleeves 

         and do something about the melting ice caps 

         and the divisions that rend 

         our nation asunder.

In a world intent on waging war,

         we are even more intent 

          on waging reconciliation.

When the people we love disappoint us,

         we find new and better ways to love them.

Godly deeds and Christ-like actions 

         are not guaranteed to succeed 

         in the short run.

In fact, they are more likely to get us in trouble

         than to make our life smooth 

          and comfortable.

The adage, “No good deed goes unpunished,” 

          is usually true.

Mother Teresa kept these words on the wall 

         of her home in Calcutta as a reminder:

If you are kind, people may accuse you 

                  of selfish . . . motives;

                  Be kind anyway. 

If you are honest . . . people may may cheat you;

                  Be honest . . . anyway. 

What you spend years building, 

                  someone could destroy overnight;

                  Build anyway. 

Give the world the best you have, 

                  and it may never be enough;

                  Give . . .  your best anyway.

         . . . It was between you and God 

         . . . not between you and them anyway. 

That’s hope. 

Christian hope is that God redeems 

       all the righteous actions

-- not just the righteous people – 

every righteous act.

Everything that has ever been done 

            or ever will be done

for the sake of justice and peace and healing 

will be brought to completion by the hand of God

                  in the fullness of time.

Our part is to take those actions first, 

         take those actions now.

We act in hope regardless of the result,

         doing what God calls us to do,

         and trusting God to fulfill his purpose.

Advent is the season to practice hope,

         to do something generous or merciful or kind

         – against all odds that it will matter

         – because we trust God, not the odds.

Put a flash light in the basket 

          for a homeless person

         in the hope that it will light his way 

         to a better life.

Send a Christmas card to someone 

         who doesn’t like you.

Write a letter to your congressman 

         even if you don’t think he’ll read it.

This is the season to hope for Christmas

         to pray for the world to be made new,

         to pray to be made new ourselves.

When Lent comes, 

         we will repent of a whole laundry list of sins.

In Advent, we repent of only two sins

         – the sin of sin of satisfaction, that says, 

         We’re just fine, thank you.

         and the sin of despair that says, 

        It will never be better.

         -- both sins against hope.

In Advent, we dream of a better world

         and do our part to make it happen.