Beginning Again

Advent I, Year B
November 28, 2021
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from…
 
Seven Sundays.  In 28 years of ordained ministry, I have never gone so long without standing in a pulpit, here, everywhere else I have served, or on the road as a guest.  To be a preacher is to live very closely with the Gospel flow, not necessarily texts of my choosing, but of rolling three-year cycle of lessons the Episcopal Church follows.  Seven Sundays.  Not with vacations, the birth and leave for two children, funerals of friends and families, and way more than a few traveling weddings and baptisms.  In these seven weeks, we have gone to Church.  My neighbor, Gary, pastors Cove Presbyterian, and Janice and I went there a few times.  He is an amazing preacher.   As well, I have been, and will be, regular at the Church of Alcoholics Anonymous which has its own prayers, liturgy of sorts, and of course, the ubiquitous coffee pot.
 
If you have followed the plot of my story recently, you know that I was granted that time to seek treatment for an illness, and that is what mental health concerns and addiction are: illness.  In spiritual terms, they are demons not to be minimized, denied, or left in solitary closets.  Given that context, you might wonder: “what is he going to say?”  If you are new or not in the Emmanuel email loop, now, you may have the same question.  To be honest, so do I.   A sermon is never done until it is preached.  I have a high doctrine of the Holy Spirit working in words, ears, and even, the tangents of our minds when something queues a memory, a reminder, or even wondering about what we might do for lunch.  I have been there and done that too.
 
For the month of October, I was a resident of Williamsville Wellness, a great place of intensive mind and body healing, and not a little rigorous honesty. I rather enjoyed myself, just remembering who JT really is, without the roles and labels we tend to embody as if we were doings and not human beings.  In that time, I came to.  I came to frame the full and complete surrender to God as one of strength and hope, rather than shame and failure. 
 
When I began the program, it was football season, pumpkin season, and the season of long shadows and crisp nights.  Save for some walks on deserted country roads, I did not travel more than five hundred yards for a whole month.  The world, however, continued to spin.  A big shock came when on the way home, boom, it was Christmas.  Forget earth toned fall accoutrements, All Saints Day, All Souls Day, and Advent, the world had gone red, green, and twinkly.  That was a shock of reentry I had not expected.  Fortunately, Frieda, who provisions our parish, had ordered advent wreaths, wreaths, and greens.  Deacon Karulyn has prepared a series of weekly reflections, and we planned to print Advent devotionals that are here for your taking today.
 
On this first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of the Church Year, we begin again.  In a coincidence that I call a Godcidence, this resonates loudly and clearly for me.  We will get to the Christmas card birth story in time, but as I so shockingly observed, our culture likes to skip straight to the trappings of what’s next, creating a fervor of sentimental and material preparation.  I am all in favor of lights, decorations, carols, and even, Mike Robinson’s love of inflatable yard art.  Bring it on, but not without spiritual preparation.  We do well to remember the whole story, even the hard parts that can be obscured by all the visual noise.  Advent is a place of some uncomfortable labor pains that an unvarnished, non-postcard Holy Nativity entails.  The world Jesus comes to save is a mess, then and now.  This is not an old story; it is a reified and contemporary story.  If we can see around the seasonal consumer culture and find fresh newness in the season, we will have come nearer to the Holy.  The challenge here is to slow down… and be quiet… (pause) and listen, somewhere and somehow.
 
The new year story the Church engages this morning, is not one revelry and merriment.  There are no hats, horns, or sparkling beverages.  It does not come with high wattage signs of 2022, it comes with signs of redemption coming near.  Jesus observes that all of this chaos is frightening, but it is a prerequisite for clearing the lot of our soul - for something to be made new.  Jesus warns us away from maladaptive coping mechanisms like dissipation: the foolish waste of time and resources, drunkenness: the act of physical, emotional, and spiritual numbness, and worry: the ever-present angst about a future that we cannot control.  In place of those reactions, Jesus encourages responsive alertness to the signs, praying as an antidote to worry, and awareness that God is really close at hand.
 
The equivalence of a New Year with God comes each new day.  Advent means coming.  Rather than spinning off into the chances and changes of earth life, we may see them as contrast to the long game of forever life, the ultimate Way, not be found in chaos, but in the order of creation’s way of dying to live.  Head on over to Chiles’s peach and apple orchards and see their dead looking pruned branches that will sprout and bring even more fruit in time.  I could go on about that.  
 
In the world of words in images, really great companion gospels are storytelling and poetry.  The former connects our story with the story.  Poetics take thoughts, images, and/or experiences and give them an evocative economy of words, like stopping to take a long and whole-hearted look at something new, different, true, and memorable.
 
For my money, the poet T.S. Eliot nails the essence of all of this as if he had our Gospel in one hand, and a pen in his other hand.  I do Advent with him too.  He writes:
 
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
 
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
 
 
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from…
 
 
(T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets:  Little Gidding)
 
With that, we begin again.  Happy New Year.
 
Amen.