So, What Are You Hoping For? Isaiah 65:17-25, Song of Mary (Canticle 3/15), 1 Thessalonians 5:12-28, John 1:6-8, 19-28 December 11, 2005, Year B, Advent 3 The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi An essential part of our ethos as Episcopalians is the observance of the liturgical year. A tragedy, however, is we often do so without grounding the practice in an understanding of the signs and symbols and without internalizing the annual rhythm to which it invites us. When observed prayerfully and reflectively the liturgical year grounds us in the essentials of our faith and provides a balance of revelation, repentance, reflection and response. Perhaps the most difficult season to understand and because it conflicts with the secular world celebration of the Christmas holidays rather than the Christmas Incarnation, Advent’s rhythm often alludes us. Advent is a season for warnings; Advent is a season for expectation and hope; Advent is a season of preparation for things to come. It is a time to pay attention to signs and to the symbols for those signs. Advent occurs when our days are at their shortest. The first week of Advent offers Scripture warnings of the bleakness of the end time. Yet in that bleakness there is the promise of hope. And, in this season of darkness, we lit the first candle of the Advent wreath, a sign of the hope promised to us by God, even when things seem their darkest. The second Sunday of Advent invites us to prepare: prepare for all things will be made new, which is the hope promised to us. As a sign of our preparedness, we lit the second candle providing more light and guiding us to the time when God shall make all things new. Isaiah, who the last two weeks invited us to expectant waiting and to preparedness, today reminds us, “The former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.” Thus, Advent is about remembering the past but with the call to look to the future. Notice the Advent candles sit upon a wreath, a circle if you will: without a beginning or end. Advent and our texts tell us only one thing is without beginning or end. And so, we look back to and we wait for the birth of the Holy Child, as we wait for the return of the Light of the World. Most of us live pretty unbalanced lives in so many ways – we work too much; we eat poorly; we don’t exercise or we are obsessed by it; we allow too little time for rest, play, or prayer; and so on. We live in an unbalanced society that equates doing and busyness with self-worth. And the irony is that this time of waiting comes at such a busy, stressful time for most of us – the holiday season – that we forget that we are waiting or confuse what we are waiting for. We forget the hungry still need food, the naked still need clothing, the sick and imprisoned need our attention, the poor and the downtrodden need justice. We forget that is the heart of our call and the heart of this season. After all, we speak of Jesus as Emmanuel, as “God with us,” wonderful counselor, Prince of Peace. If we believe that, if these are more than just fancy words, we have to find a way to make them real, to embody them. Today, we light the third candle, the Rose Candle, a sign that we pass the halfway mark of Advent and providing more light. And, our texts ask us for what are we hoping; for what are we preparing? When you come to church, what are you hoping for? We hope to find hope when all seems hopeless. We hope for peace in our anxious lives. In a world filled with so much hate and evil, we hope for the assurance of good and beauty. We hope for calmness in the midst of our chaotic lives. We hope for the assurance that we are basically good people. At times we desperately need these things, and there is nothing wrong with needing and hoping for them. And, yes, our faith and the Church provide these things. But Advent invites us not to stop there. Not to do more, but in this time of patient waiting to allow the God of Advent to shape a different hope within us. Our problem comes from the fact that we too often make things more complex than they are. God is as simple and as close to us as the breath we inhale and exhale. But, because we humans want to see, hold, and name things, we have tried since the beginning of our ability to communicate to name something as simple and as complex as the breath that gives us life. Therefore, we each have images of God as we understand and have experienced God – some quite accurate, though inadequate, and some both inadequate and inaccurate. Jesus came – light into our darkness. But the problem with Jesus was he was not the sort of light that we expected. That is where the trouble started. Jesus was the hope of the world. But he was not the hope for which the world was hoping! And thus the church in its wisdom confronts us with John the Baptist here on this Sunday in Advent. We are here, just a couple of weeks before Christmas, hoping for Christmas. But here comes John the Baptist, a rather strange figure, an odd preacher, who looked to the future, who knew what was important, but who doesn’t really match up with anybody’s hope. And what does that tell us? The Third Sunday of Advent points to a single reality and asks if it matches what you are hoping for? The answer makes sense of life or doesn’t make sense at all. John the Baptist may be the church’s way of saying that, whatever we happen to be hoping for, as we are hoping for Christmas, what we actually get, in the arrival of Jesus, is at some distance from that for which we were hoping, that we must be receptive for surprise, and wonder, and the shock of a God who is not the God we thought we knew. Again, what are you hoping for? My desire each time I stand in this pulpit is to offer the Gospel in such a way that it helps guide to an answer to that question. The message is never that we are not doing enough, need to do more, are not good enough. In spiritual direction and in my sermons, I never intend to offer answers, instead my goal is always to ask questions that hopefully get one to think and to seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit. So, my Third Sunday of Advent questions are what are you holding on to; what holds on to you? Are there things that will soon be past to which you are holding so tightly that the only thing that is the future is lost? What is it in your life that is underneath all else? When it comes down to it, what are you hoping for? Daily we are reminded of the temporalness of this world. In Advent, Jesus wants our attention so that no matter what we hold most dearly, he wants us to hold God more dearly, to know and admit everything else in life has a past tense: every house will crumble, all savings will pass on to others or dissolve, every lover leaves us somehow, children become parents and grandparents, every “thing,” every life, everything except God. And finally and at the end, our future is only with God. Jesus wants this not to be distressing news but jubilant news. Thus, the third Sunday of Advent, the Scripture texts from today, the Magnificat or Song of Mary we recited simply ask if we believe this or not, and if so, whether our earthly waiting mirrors our liturgical and spiritual waiting? If not, which is askew, our life or our belief? What are you hoping for today? Most likely many of us today are not sure. What brought you to church this morning, this Third Sunday of Advent? Maybe you didn’t even know it was the Third Sunday of Advent. You may have been called here by some strange, indefinable pull, some tug on your heart, that you would find difficult to describe. And maybe John is saying that’s alright. An open heart may be better than one that is filled with definitions and preconceptions and preconditions.