ABC

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Advent 1, Year A
December 1, 2019
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
For a number of years, we lived in Sewanee, Tennessee.  Sewanee is an interesting place.  It is a mix of Appalachia and academia with an Episcopal boarding school, an Episcopal liberal arts college, and an Episcopal seminary, all on top of a plateau in an impressive collection of gothic sandstone buildings.  The “Chapel” there rivals most cathedrals in its beauty.  The whole rhythm of the place flows the church year as much as the academic calendar.  I refer to it as the nations only Episcopal theme park.  It is almost too much at times.
 
While I was head of the prep school, we lived in this tight little community among undergraduates, professors, seminarians, and a reputable group of biblical and theological scholars.  Among them was the legendary The Rev. Dr. Robert Hughes, an immensely tall man with an Abe Lincoln beard and a stern visage.  Hughes taught New testament Bible and Preaching, but everyone there knew him as the chief of the Advent police force.
 
A little background:  Advent is our season before Christmas wherein we light candles and hear lessons of waiting and anticipation.  Unlike much of the culture, we do not do Christmas before Christmas.  We do simple greenery.  We keep it quiet and reflective. 
 
Dr. Hughes, the chief of the Advent police in Sewanee was deadly serious about observing Advent.  Our gospel lesson for today, Jesus warns “you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”  If you were an unsuspecting seminarian in Sewanee, you may be waiting for Jesus, but you would also be watching for Dr. Hughes.  That’s right, he drove around in seminary housing village, and if he saw the slightest little twinkly light, a red bow, or, God forbid, a Christmas tree, he would knock on the door and shout “Advent before Christmas.  ABC.”  Sometimes the second and third years would hide that fact from first year seminarians just to witness the spectacle.  I guess that is what passes for hazing in a seminary.
 
On this first Sunday of Advent, I am sure that many disciples of Dr. Hughes inhabit pulpits all across the Church, insisting that their congregations remember that Advent is a season of preparation and that Christmas is a 12 day season beginning on December 25 at the stroke of midnight.  I have colleagues who will not be putting up a tree until Christmas eve, and who will lambast those who do as cultural sell outs, claiming some Anglican high ground of liturgical and theological purity.
 
The basic point is a good one.  Advent is a reminder for us not to buy in, literally, to the hype, the noise, and all of the glittery sentimentality Hallmark has to sell us.  The way we observe the season is to slow it down, light a candle, pray expectant prayers, and make room in our lives for Jesus to be born anew.
 
That being the case, the Church’s voice should not be one of shame and rebuke.  We observe Advent with all due respect, anticipation, watching and waiting, but this is a great moment for us, Church folks, to welcome the culture that yearns for what we have to offer not just in this season, but for the whole year.  If the wider world recognizes that selfless giving is a virtue, this is a good thing.  If people want to crowd into our pews and take our usual places on Christmas Eve, it stands as our opportunity to be welcoming and loving and encouraging.
 
A recent Pew Research study finds that more people than ever do not identify themselves as Christian.  Given the way some Christians judge, exclude, and act hypocritically, this is understandable.  I suspect that this survey reveals that more loosely affiliated folks are willing to admit their skepticism where they might not have before, and that is not such a bad thing.  As a thinking person’s Church, we have an amazing opportunity in this season.  With the searching, serving, and saving life and work of Jesus to proclaim and emulate, we have a great gift to offer a self-centered, callous, and cynical culture.  Wielding all manner of technology that is supposed to bring us together, we are more and more isolated and anonymous feeling than ever.  But what we do here is a profoundly low-tech antidote as we gather, love, pray, and care for one another.
 
In our inaugural Advent collect today we prayed:  “Almighty God give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light.”  Those are powerful words that stand the test of time and stand out as a clarion call for us.  In this season where the physical darkness is longer and darker, in a time when dark deeds and motives are as part of the daily news cycle, and in a season where the darkness of depression and anxiety is most prevalent, twinkly lights are a nice reminder that all of the darkness there ever was cannot stand against the light of God’s grace.
 
If you are of the purist Episcopractice and hold fast to a strict Advent observance, go ahead and you be you.  But for God’s sake, let our message to the world not be one of scorn or indifference to those who seek to come in from the cold.  Because Jesus birth brings us joy, we will tell that story.  Because God chooses to come among us a human, we can know God and live closer and closer to God’s will for our lives.
 
As a young man, I was a Boy Scout.  And one of the adventures my troop made was to spend two days caving in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee.  For two whole days, we were enveloped in total darkness, squeezing through caverns and listening to the dripping sounds of water as the only background noise.  As an anxious and somewhat paranoid youth, I was deathly afraid of the dark and of cramped spaces, but part of being a scout was making tackling such fears in the company of others.  I will never forget waking up in the middle of the night, unable to see anything with my eyes wide open.  But when I switched on my tiny penlight, it pierced the darkness and chased away most of my fears.
 
Light has that power.  And we are sent to be light and life for the world in the name of Jesus.  And so we begin our Advent again.  Don’t tell Dr. Hughes and the Advent Police on this priest, but as for me and my house, we are putting up some twinkly lights this afternoon – casting away the works of darkness and putting on the armor of light.  Amen.