My Gay Old Soulmate and I headed to Kansas recently when my mother-in-law had a health crisis. While there, I started reading the lectionary passages for the Second Sunday in Advent. So while I sat looking at those passages, my mother-in-law sat across the room looking at the challenges that accompany the final years of life. Indeed, this Advent, while the church anticipates birth, our family feels closer to the other end of life.
In that context I read Paul’s words to the Philippians about being “confident that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion . . .” I see a good work being brought to completion in my partner’s mother. I see it in neighbors and relatives who owe much of the quality of their current life to her being there for them through the years.
But speaking of her life as “a good work being brought to completion” does not ease the impending transition. Soon, we will be propelled into unknown territory. We cannot know in advance what life will be like in that uncharted land that will be Life Without Her. But one of these days we will be forced to go there.
Advent is not all Hallmark specials—where dying children experience miraculous cures and old people bequeath their legacy with a wise and nobly quiet passing. Advent can be difficulty territory, unsettling and hard to negotiate. Last week’s passages gave us apocalyptic disruption.
Today, John the Baptist takes us into the wilderness. Yet in that wild place, we are told, the divine visitation takes place.
Beyond ordered empire and safe traditional religion, our Gospel says, “the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.”
In that unfamiliar territory, where our lives are stripped of security and a comfortable past, the divine changes our lives forever and turns us in a new direction. John preaches a baptism (a washing away of the old encumbrances). He brings a baptism of repentance (a turning in a new direction). Micah likewise refers to the process as a cleansing one—but he uses the imagery of a refiner’s fire. “Who can abide the day of his coming?” Transformation will not be without its grief and pain.
Both Micah and Luke hearken back to Isaiah’s prophecy about a voice calling to prepare a way. Lifting valleys and leveling mountains—it is a promise, but also a task to undertake,
People of our class, educational backgrounds, and social situation, welcome such tasks. We solve problems. Give us a shovel, and we will fill the valleys with the mountains we will level. Active engagement has its place.
But sometimes we can do nothing—except wait.
I remember when I was on the transplant list. All my Gay Old Soulmate and I could do was to wait. Welcome or unwelcome, we had to endure the transition. Sit, as our lives changed forever, one way or the other.
Typical Advent meditations counsel us to get ready. And so we should. But Advent living also comes down to waiting.
When Hurricane Sandy headed in, there was a time of preparation. But, finally a time came when all people could do was wait out the storm.
More wrenchingly, I remember the eternity of waiting that followed every casualty report while our Marine friend was in Afghanistan—and how time crawled as we waited for his return.
Now I watch my mother-in-law wait, as we wait too, unable to know the length or quality of any moment that she and we head into.
And God sits there in the waiting. In that time between a disappearing past and unknown future. In the helpless spiritual emptying imposed on us by circumstances. Sometimes terrible, sometimes comforting.
To paraphrase John the Baptist’s father Zechariah, it is there, in that holy eternity, that by the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high breaks upon us, giving light, as we sit in darkness, and guiding us into peace.
This was a sermon I preached for the Second Sunday of Advent at Germantown Mennonite Church, December 9, 2012 The Lectionary passages were Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 1:68-79; Philippians 1:3-11; and Luke 3:1-6.