"The Elephant in the Sanctuary"

Jeremiah 33:14-16; 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13; Luke 21:25-36

Over Thanksgiving weekend,

Tatiana and I went to see

the Radio City Rockettes Christmas Spectacular.

And it was spectacular!

The first part of the show

was all about Santa, and reindeer,

and toys, and parties,

and buying presents

and getting presents.

Pretty much what you might expect.

The second half of the show

still focused on Santa, for the most part.

What surprised me, though,

was that they ended the show

with a full-blown Christmas pageant

about the birth of Jesus.

And the most interesting part of it

was the appearance of the Magi.

With elaborate costumes

and live camels,

the wise men came forward majestically

to present their gifts to the Christ child.

The narrator explained

what each of the three gifts meant.

Something predictable was said

about the gold and the frankincense.

But when the final wise man came

to present the gift of myrrh,

the narrator said that myrrh was brought

to show that Jesus would be "a great leader."

That's where the Rockettes wimped out.

Christian tradition tells us

that the gifts of the Magi

were supposed to represent different aspects

of the life of Jesus.

Gold is the easiest to figure out.

We think of rulers as being wealthy.

Frankincense was something

that was offered to a god.

Those two fit.

But myrrh -

myrrh was used in that day and time for embalming.

A gift was brought to the Christ child

which pointed to his death.

Even the carol "We Three Kings" gets it right.

Verse four says that myrrh's "bitter perfume

seals a life of gathering gloom."

But the sanitized Radio City version

told us that it meant Jesus would be a great leader.

We can relate to that.

We want to avoid suffering,

whether it's ours or anyone else's.

We want to celebrate the happy birth of the baby

without reflecting on why he was born

and at what cost.

We don't want to talk about the unpleasant part.

That's why I think that,

especially during the season of Advent,

the sacrifice of Jesus

and the promised return of Christ

are the elephant in the sanctuary.

I think maybe it's especially true for Presbyterians.

In general,

we're not the best when it comes to evangelism.

You know what you get

when you cross a Presbyterian with a Jehovah's Witness, don't you?

Someone who knocks on your door,

but has nothing to say!

But even more than evangelism,

we Reformed-types

are usually the last ones to talk about the second coming.

We have the details down

when it comes to our sinfulness and God's grace.

We might even have a decent idea

of what awaits us in heaven.

But when it comes to understanding anything

about the second coming of Christ,

it's like we're embarrassed about it.

It's been so long

that we doubt if it could ever possibly happen.

So, tacitly,

we brush it under the rug

and go on about our lives,

and more or less consider the second coming

an outdated relic of the early church.

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Friends,

the first Sunday of Advent

does not give us the luxury

of sweeping the second coming under the rug.

In fact, it pulls the rug out from under us.

To mix metaphors,

the elephant is right there in the middle of us,

and today we have to talk about it.

But isn't it mixing metaphors again

to talk about the second coming of Christ during Advent?

I mean, Wal-Mart and Target and all the rest of them

have us humming Christmas carols

and shopping like fiends

and paying less attention to the manger

than we pay to the parties beforehand.

We think of Advent as a time to "get ready," alright -

get ready to put up the lights

and decorate the tree

and mail the Christmas cards.

This season of Advent, friends,

is not about celebrating the baby.

That would be the Christmas season.

Thomas Merton wrote

that "Advent is the beginning of the end

of all in us that is not yet Christ."

The season of Advent, frankly,

has more in common with the season of Lent

than it does the season of Christmas.

The color that we use for both seasons is purple,

as you can see around here today.

It's not just to honor and support the Purple Warriors!

The liturgical color purple suggests the robes of royalty.

But purple is also a color

which has been associated with death and mourning.

There's been a movement in the church lately

to separate Advent from Lent

by making the color for Advent blue instead of purple.

But that ruins it, I think.

Using the color purple for both seasons

brings overtones of each over into the other.

That means that in Advent,

when we are celebrating the birth of the Christ child,

there are overtones of the grief to come.

And in Lent,

when we are mourning the death of Jesus

there are overtones of the royalty

of the resurrected Christ.

Those two should stay together.

The carols that we sing in Advent

manage to get it right.

"O come, o come, Emmanuel

and ransom captive Israel"

asks Jesus to come back this afternoon

and not wait until the twenty-fifth.

That was written back in the middle ages.

Or, "Come thou long-expected Jesus,

born to set thy people free."

Even the last verse of "Away in a Manager"

asks "the little Lord Jesus"

to "fit us for heaven to live with thee there."

The mixing together of the birth of Jesus

with the return of Christ

 is nothing new.

It seems to me

that Advent is a time of year

when remembrance bumps up against hope.

We've got the "remembrance" part down!

We remember through all of our traditions:

putting up the stockings,

insisting on listening to Bing Crosby

when decorating the Christmas tree

like you've always done,

singing all the carols that we love.

Advent is about remembering the birth of baby Jesus.

But it's also about hope for the return of Christ.

And if we limit our hope

to hoping that we won't have to return any Christmas presents,

then we have left that elephant

in the center of the room.

This is why I think it's important.

If we leave out the notion of Jesus coming again,

as we are wont to do,

it reduces our faith to a feelgood pop psychology,

a place where with or without John Lennon,

we can "imagine there's no heaven."

Ignoring the promised return of Christ

makes us good people living good lives,

but only because it is the right thing to do //

and not because we are undergirded

by a God who has a plan for us and for all.

And that's where the connect comes in

between Advent and Christmas.

The birth of baby Jesus is part of that plan.

If it were not for our pitiful human condition,

Jesus would not have had to be born.

But Jesus was born

because God loves us -

and because God knows that you, and I,

and all of us needed it.

And because of his birth, and death, and resurrection,

we have been promised

that Jesus will return to redeem God's good creation.

What could be better?

What could give us more hope

when we are fresh out of holiday cheer?

That kind of hope

is the only thing that allows us to stand tall

in the face of all those fireworks Jesus describes in Luke.

Our world may not look at all

like the Kingdom has come,

and it certainly doesn't give us much reason to hope.

But if we can remember

that God has already started the work

of reconciling the world through God's son Jesus,

we can dare to hope

and to know

that God will finish what God has begun.

That's why we light the Advent candles -

to remind us that things are not always as they seem.

The Hebrew word for "hope"

is the word gavah,

the root of which means "to twist" or "to twine."

That is the kind of hope we are called to

in this time of Advent.

The possibility that this good thing will happen,

and this bad thing will not happen,

and a hundred other little strands of hope

become twined together

to provide a golden cord strong enough

to pull us through life.

What we celebrate today //

is that we know Who is on the other end of that cord.

In William Blake's poem, "Jerusalem," he wrote:

            I give you the end of a gold string.

            Only wind it into a ball.

            It will lead you in at Heaven's gate

            Built in Jerusalem's wall.

The followers of The Way in the first century

twined together for us a "gold string"

that reached back in remembrance

to the creation of light in the Genesis story

and forward in hope to this very moment,

to this very Advent. 

The golden cord of hope entwines us together with them.

It is passed, hand to hand,

from one generation to the next. 

Like kindergartners on a field trip,

you and I are given that golden cord

and told to hold on. 

We know that if we were to follow that cord

and roll it up into a ball,

at the end

we would find the One in whom we hope

and for whom we hope.

Advent is a time to remember.

But it is also a time

to marvel at that golden cord of hope

that leads us towards the fulfillment of time.

Having the courage

to talk about the elephant in the sanctuary,

to look beyond the secular "Holly Jolly Christmas"

into the holy and difficult journey of Advent -

to take hold of the fullness of our faith -

that's the beginning of the thread. 

Is the second coming coming?

Yes.

When? 

I don't know.

"No one knows the day or time.

What's it going to be like?

I don't know.

Who's in charge -

of it, of you, of me,

of all of us?

That, I know.

Amen.

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The quotations from Thomas Merton and William Blake can be found in "The Habit of Advent," article in Sojourners magazine written by Rose Marie Berger, a Catholic peace activist and poet.  Thanks to Sheryl Taylor for putting me onto the article.

The story of the Hebrew word gavah is detailed in Frederick Buechener's sermon "The Hungering Dark," in the book by the same name.