Sermon preached by the Reverend John E

Sermon preached by the Reverend John E. Kitagawa at the celebration of the Holy Eucharist on 30 November 2008 (Advent I), at St. Philip’s In The Hills Parish, Tucson, Arizona

ALL THINGS ARE BEING BROUGHT TO PERFECTION

Isaiah 64: 1-9; I Corinthians 1: 3-9; Mark 13: 24-37

The following story, written by Angela, appeared in a publication about a year ago.

Every time my mother calls, she says she’s getting ready to clear off the dining room table… Though I’m 700 miles away, in my mind, I can see the scattered bills, letters, magazines, receipts, and menus that cover every inch of polished maple. She tells me she’s tired of not being able to have people over for dinner. She and my stepfather eat in the living room, in front of the television. And every day more paper streams through the front door and pools on the table and the hutch, in closets and spare rooms. “I’ve got to get organized” [she says.] Sometimes she actually starts to tackle the daunting mess, but it makes her tired, and she soon gives up.

After my mother’s mother died suddenly… her house in Texas had to be sold. First it had to be cleaned out. My mother called me in the midst of this chore, exhausted and crying. There were china, linens, and crystal in their original packaging—Grandmother had wanted to get the house “in order” before using them; closets with clothes that hadn’t fit in decades; and boxes of unlabeled photographs of relatives mother will never be able to identify (grandmother had always been meaning to take care of that). It took my mother and aunt a full month to empty the house. Over the phone, mother repeatedly swore that she was never going to put me through that, ever. But I’m pretty sure she shipped a lot of junk to her home on the East Coast. I feel as if her life and everything in it is streaming toward me, and when it arrives, there is no way I’ll ever be ready[1].

Many of us have closed a grandparent, parent, or relative’s home. Such experiences should be cautionary, and make us think about all the “stuff” we accumulate, and the clutter that complicates our lives. I share this story because it is also a metaphor for our deeper spiritual lives. One of the central themes of Advent is being prepared for the coming of Christ. Today’s Gospel contains these emphatic words: “Beware, and keep alert” (Mark 13: 33). Like the mother and grandmother in Angela’s story, we have every intention to focus on our spirituality, to get ourselves spiritually organized, to prepare ourselves to receive Christ Jesus more fully. Like Angela’s mother, we make efforts in the right direction. We sometimes try hard, but our resolve tends to wax and wane. It is not so much that we are spiritually lazy. It is just that the busy-ness of our lives seems to take over, and unintentionally to take priority. Like Angela’s mother, we resolve to do better—promising God and ourselves that we will be more faithful in church attendance, or that we will participate more regularly in adult formation classes, or that we will give more of ourselves through volunteering, or that we will begin a new discipline of prayer and meditation.

Advent is a difficult season for me. No matter how many times I experience Advent, something in me wants Advent to focus solely on getting to Christmas. It would be much easier to hear John the Baptist’s prophecy, or a portion of Luke’s birth narrative instead of the apocalyptic verses of today’s lectionary. Popular commercial culture emphasizes Christmas. Instead, the Church encourages us to meditate on the end times, and our state of preparedness for them. Whether we read today’s Gospel literally, or in a slightly safer symbolic way, we are still being led to consider conscientiously the state of our spiritual maturity and readiness. St. Augustine, in his preaching suggested, “that for each one of us the ‘end time’ represents our own death.”[2] This makes the issue of spiritual readiness imminent and personal. People engaged in ministry with people facing imminent death will testify to the blessings and fruits of an intentional spiritual pilgrimage versus the fears and trepidations of those who have not intentionally journeyed in the Spirit.

In fact, some of the most inspiring moments of my ministry have been with people facing certain death full of hope and without fear.. By hope I do not mean optimism or belief that God would suddenly and miraculously snatch them from the jaws of death. Hope is confidence that, despite all the calamities of our world and the tragedies of life, God is “by the effectual working of [God’s] providence, carrying out in tranquility the plan of salvation; and, that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection.”[3]

As we look at the world around us, we can identify with Isaiah’s plea for God to “tear open the heavens and come down” (Isaiah 64: 1), and with his desire to see God’s “hidden face.” If we can see beyond the perplexing, perhaps alarming imagery of today’s Gospel, we will discover hope woven into the text. Such hope, I think, is born in our ability to see God’s hidden face (Isaiah 64: 7) and to find Christ at work

in our world as it is, not as it could be. The fact that the world is other than it might be does not alter the truth that Christ is present in it, and that his plan has been neither frustrated nor changed[4].

For example, on Covenant Sunday, many people placed cards in the basket expressing thanks for the ways they see God present and active in their lives. One representative card reads:

I am thankful for all the blessings God has bestowed upon my children, my friends, my life, St. Philip’s, and me.

In the video presentation of last summer’s J2A Pilgrimage, one of our youths emerged from evensong at Canterbury Cathedral, saw an awesome sunset, and expressed a profound, awe-filled sense of God’s presence in her life. On 12 September 2001, at our memorial service for those who had perished in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, I asked, “Where is God in all this?” My answer: God was not only present with those who died, God suffered with them. The mystery of the Incarnation is that God became fully human. So, God not only sees and feels compassion for our pain and suffering, God hurts and suffers with us.

Those who do not believe in God, or who doubt the existence of God, often argue that if a good and just God existed, God would not permit terrible evils to exist and persist. They also assert, “we embrace hope because we deceive ourselves.”[5] Writer Andrew Greeley[6] suggests there are only two answers to the question of whether hope is valid. For the first answer, he quotes Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

For the alternative, he quotes Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.

Either life is completely absurd, or there is goodness and purpose in life. As Christians, not only do we affirm Teilhard de Chardin’s assertion, we embrace it as a hopeful Advent theme. As Christians, we believe goodness and purpose come from and through God’s continuing presence and activity in the world. To uphold these beliefs is to live in hope.

As I said earlier, Advent is a difficult season. It is difficult enough to wrap our minds around and to comport our lives with the first coming of Christ at Christmas. Given the passing of two thousand years, it is even more difficult to wrap our minds around and to comport our lives with the idea of the second coming of Christ. Interpreting today’s Gospel, one writer offers this:

What is uncertain is not the “coming” of Christ, but our own reception of him, our own response to him, our own readiness, and capacity to “go forth and meet him.”[7]

Referring back to my opening story about getting organized and getting ready, a good Advent starting point is to remove barriers or to clear the clutter that prevent us from acknowledging, at the deepest level, our need for the coming of Christ into our lives. Work with the texts, “tear open the heavens and come down,” and “stir up your strength and come to help us”, until you identify with Isaiah and the Psalmist’s longing for God, and for a sense of God’s activity and power. Then you will be more prepared to become an observer, looking for the ways God in Christ is present and active. Then you will be more prepared to become God’s agent whose actions reflect the hope that the wrongs of the world will be righted, the evils of the world will be overcome, and the brokenness of life will be healed. AMEN.