Tell It on the Mountain
John Wilkinson Third
Presbyterian Church November 28, 2004
Isaiah 2:1-5
Advent is upon us, and perhaps we feel a bit like the giant
Macy’s balloons being blown about by forces beyond our
control. As we have heard already, this season will be a full
and busy one for us here at Third Church, with many opportunities
for worship, study, fellowship and service. Next Sunday, I do
hope you will return for, or remain for, the Advent Festival/Alternative
Christmas Market/Heifer Project Ark Auction, which will be a
fine way to get you in the true holiday spirit. Read all about
it in the bulletin and online, and read also about the December
3 Heifer art auction event.
Also, Bonny and I would like to express our gratitude to all
of you for your prayers of support, cards, calls and kind words
at the time of the death of Bonny’s father. We are grateful
for this family of faith that offers sustenance near and far.
Let us pray.
*****
Several of our members recently participated in a production
of “Mame,” and several of us had the pleasure of
attending it. You may remember the story of Mame Dennis, a Manhattan
bon vivant whose life is suddenly a little less “bon.”
And then it’s “bon” again, but not before
some theatrical twists and turns. In the middle of it all, just
as things could not seem to be getting any worse – financial
and romantic prospects quite dim, what do you do? Why you break
out in song! “We Need a Little Christmas.”
As holiday classics go, it’s about as secular as you
can get. But in the midst of it, in the midst of the upbeat
choreography and full orchestration, there is a poignant little
confessional moment, if you just listen for it. Mame sings wistfully,
“I've grown a little leaner, Grown a little colder, Grown
a little sadder, Grown a little older.” And then it’s
quickly back to visions of Santa and stockings and presents
and the happy life.
We need a little Christmas. We do. But here’s what we
need first. We need a little Advent. Ministers across the country
will preach Advent this morning. I can anticipate two kinds
of fussy sermons, a fussiness that I will try to avoid.
One is a kind of external fussiness, a full-on assault on the
full-on assault of a consumerist American Christmas. It’s
a losing battle, and it’s one I am not entirely sure we
should be waging. The decorations at Eastview or Marketplace
were up sometime around July 1 – the Christmas TV specials
began almost as soon as they ended. Perhaps some of you lined
up very early Friday morning at some store or another, eagerly
waiting to pounce on bargains. Fair enough.
Christmas has become too commercial. Life has become too commercial.
We are driven by a consumerism nearly out of control.
Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
has created a bit of a phenomenon by identifying what some of
us, not all of us, but many of us, are experiencing. Schwarz
tells this story on himself: “As a middle-aged man…he
went to a Gap store and naively asked for a new pair of blue
jeans. The clerk asked if he wanted slim-fit, easy fit or relaxed
fit; regular or faded; stone-washed or acid-washed; button-fly
or regular fly. Spending much longer in the store than he’d
planned, investing ‘time, energy, and no small amount
of self-doubt, anxiety and dread,’ he eventually settled
on ‘easy fit.’ He began to suspect that at some
point ‘choice no longer liberates. It might even be said
to tyrannize.’” (See R. Stephen Warner, “Burden
of Choice,” in Christian Century, July 13, 2004, page
19)
Self-doubt? Anxiety? Dread? Is that what we need right now?
That is not Christmas’ problem, however. That is our problem.
We do live in a consumerist society, and perhaps a portion of
our call as people of faith and followers of the one who came
as a tiny little baby might be to put the brakes on, to re-group
and take a deep breath and to approach the frenzy of these next
27 ½ days differently. Don’t condemn – reform.
Allow whatever may be good in the secular, consumerist, holiday-on-steroids
approach to shine through. Acts of generosity and kindness.
The search for good will. The impulse to give and the grace
to receive. A little cheery music every once in a while. It
can’t be all bad – and perhaps that kind of emphasis
will do something to mitigate against the rampant desire to
consume, or to attach human value to one’s credit card
balance, and human sin to one’s credit card debt.
So no fussiness from me in terms of the culture’s Christmas
preparations, which may or may not include a hint of remembrance
of the main event, but as it gets close, just might.
And very little fussiness on an internal, ecclesiastical debate
as well. It is Advent, not Christmas. We will try hard to sing
Advent hymns, though there are not many and we don’t know
them very well, to avoid overt observations about Jesus’
birth, to sing “Joy to the World” and O Come, All
Ye Faithful” only at the nearest proximate time when joy
seems to be the order of the day. But we may slip up every once
in awhile. We will slip up today, in fact, on purpose, as we
sing “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”
It’s a recent conversation for we Protestants anyway,
who long regarded the word itself, “liturgy,” as
something overwhelmingly Catholic and therefore bad. It’s
a recent conversation, the liturgical calendar, liturgical seasons,
liturgical colors, purple stoles, Advent wreaths. So we will
attempt to be proper, but we may stray from time to time.
The point is a simple one – before we get a little Christmas,
we need a little Advent. We need a little Advent to assist us
in doing all the things we might do in order to be as prepared
as we might be for this extraordinary news we are about to receive.
We need Advent, because without it, we would not have the full
human experience of preparation, of anticipation, of expectation,
that will make the news itself all the more redemptive and reconciling.
Advent’s history itself is a little unclear. It developed
from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, perhaps as early
as the fifth or sixth centuries, and may or may not have been
related to preparation for baptism, much like Lent, another
church season of preparation. Fasting surely was involved, probably
not, however, as a medieval antidote to the office Christmas
party.
Advent clearly has something to do with the first coming, that
is, the birth of Jesus, the incarnation. It also historically
had something to do with the second coming, the return of Jesus.
Read the hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” with that
notion in mind, and you get a sense of what our forbears in
faith were anticipating – not simply the birth of a child,
but the return of a ruler who would set Israel free, cheer spirits,
set death to flight.
Liturgical scholar Alan Barthel reminds us (Presbyterian Outlook,
posted November 18, 2004) that “the Reformed church was
slow to embrace (Advent).” He writes that for we Presbyterians
“little attention is given to the preparation of the people
of God for the celebration of the feasts of the Incarnation
(God coming among us) and Epiphany (God being made manifest
to the nations.) Quite simply,” Barthel writes, with just
a hint of liturgical fussiness, “if we took care to pair
a full reading of the lectionary texts for each of the four
Sundays in Advent with the Advent hymns that best reflect these
texts we would make great strides toward recovering a more profound
celebration of the Advent-Christmas-Epiphany cycle that would
lead us to much deeper levels of meaning and understanding.”
That is what we will seek to do, and in fact, as the years
progress, I have come to a deeper appreciation of the call of
Advent year after year, season after season. We need it. I have
come to love Advent for all of these reasons, and at least one
more. Advent allows us to focus on the book of Isaiah, with
a profound and radical sense of expectation and anticipation,
a profound and radical sense of hope.
Isaiah envisions a day yet to be, using the poetic image of
a mountain. God’s mountain, a mountain higher than all
others, a mountain that will attract all people, all nations,
a mountain that will define life for the people. And I cannot
help but think of these few days between now and then, Advent,
as the time when we stand at the foot of God’s mountain
and prepare for the journey. The key feature of the experience
is clearly peace, and not only peace, but the deep commitment
to the absence of war, and the conversion of all the things
that make for war. Swords into plowshares. Spears into pruning
hooks. In this season of war, in a culture obsessed with violence
on city streets and video screens and between nations, we are
called to take these words as seriously as we ever have. Peace
as the ultimate “moral issue” for our time and all
times.
But we are also to take the context as seriously as we ever
have, the notion that following God’s paths, “walking
in the light of the Lord,” provides an alternative way
of looking at the world, at life itself, at the human soul,
at the relationships we build and the choices we make. That’s
why we need a little Advent, as a kind of rehearsal for the
venture up the mountain.
What would it look like?
I’ve prepared a little list, an Advent list, if you will,
and this season, I have made a personal commitment to pursue
these things, to rehearse, to prepare, to expect and anticipate
actively, not passively, actively , for the coming of the Christ
child.
· Read—read scripture, even just a little, every
day. If you don’t know where to start, start with the
book of Isaiah.
· Pray—just a little, every day. If you don’t
know where to start, use the Anne Lamott approach—“please”
and “thank you.”
· Give something, every day. Be intentional about it.
Give from your abundance. Time. Money. Ability.
· Connect. Connect with someone, or some thing every
day. Phone someone to catch up. Write a note. Send an e-mail.
Invest a moment or two in an important relationship. Care for
someone, something.
That’s my list. Read. Pray. Give. Connect. It is not
so extraordinary, but perhaps it takes a season like this one
to make it happen. And what I promise for you is the promise
I know I will receive—life lived a bit closer to that
vision, that sword into plowshare vision, life on the mountain.
Because we have grown a little leaner, colder, sadder, older.
And the promise is that it does not need to be that way, if
only we imagine it, envision it, together, for God’s sake
and the sake of the world. Life on the mountain. May it be so,
and may we walk in the light of the Lord. Amen.
