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The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies

St. Martin's Church

November 30, 2008

Advent I B

"O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence— to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!"

Yep - that about sums it up for me. I am yearning, positively aching, ready to get down on my knees and beg - for God to act.  I am ready for some divine intervention - for some heavenly interference – ready for the Son of Man to come with all his angels in power and great glory. I am long past ready for someone to come and get us out of this mess.

At our staff retreat two weeks ago, we started charting all the stressful circumstances that were having an effect on our work together. It was a crowded list – economic meltdown, political transition, international violence and unrest, staff turnover, simmering conflict in the parish, a sense of isolation from the diocese, the quarrels over human sexuality in the Anglican Communion, stresses in our own families – you can make your own list I’m sure, with a personal accounting of the assorted pressures, stressors and demands in the lives of every single one of you here this morning. That list is an indication of just how helpless and overwhelmed we feel.

Charles Jenkins, the Bishop of Louisiana, tells a simple and eloquent story about his own experience of feeling helpless and overwhelmed, as he watched the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina from his evacuation headquarters in Baton Rouge. Watching the disaster unfold on television, and knowing that it was going to redefine and redirect his ministry, Bishop Jenkins felt utterly unable to meet the challenge that lay before him. His past comfortable life of southern white male privilege was no preparation for what would be his life post-Katrina. And so, Bishop Jenkins says, he got down on his knees and prayed for God to come down and equip him to be the spiritual, political, and practical leader his diocese was going to need. He acknowledged how completely overwhelmed and powerless he was; he acknowledged that for all his whiteness, maleness, wealth and advantage – he had become an exile who was never going to get home again without God’s help.

My work and experience in New Orleans has given me a deeper understanding of what it means to be an exile – to no longer be who you thought you were, to be cut off from everything that informed and shaped your prior identity. Being an exile is much more than just being cut off from home – being an exile means having your whole sense of self torn away from you, being forced to rebuild everything that defines you and your relationship with others.

We don’t use the word exile very much when we talk about faith and experience in the church – it isn’t much of a New Testament word – but it is the essential word – the essential, defining word for the Old Testament, and the Old Testament was what shaped and defined and formed the identity of Jesus of Nazareth.

So maybe – here this morning of the first Sunday of Advent, this first Sunday of the new church year – it’s a good idea to reflect on what it means to be an exile – what it meant for the Jewish people, what it meant for Jesus and for St. Paul – and what it means for 21st century Christians – what it means for all of us gathered here for worship this morning at St. Martins.

Exile is the essential, defining word of the Old Testament. It is the lens we have to look through to understand every word of Torah, the psalms and the prophets, because it’s the lens that the priests who redacted and edited that scripture were looking through. For centuries, the Jewish people had understood themselves to be God’s covenant people: chosen for a particular purpose, given special responsibilities, shaped for a unique destiny. That purpose and destiny flourished under mighty King David, who reigned perhaps one thousand years before Jesus was born, and who built Israel up into a mighty nation and whose military triumphs encouraged the Jews to believe that their very history revealed the will and intention of God.

It’s actually not too different from the founding myth of our own nation – a myth that politicians still like to evoke at campaign rallies when they are rousing the faithful. The United States has a long history of believing itself to be a chosen people, destined for a unique purpose that will reveal the will and intention of God. We should pay attention to how well that worked out for ancient Israel.

Because after the death of David’s son, Solomon, the whole kingdom collapsed. It splintered into northern and a southern kingdoms, with rival dynasties, corrupt rulers, and mounting threats from their much more powerful and aggressive neighbors. The northern kingdom was conquered first – succumbing to Assyria in 721 BC, but the southern kingdom, centered around the Temple in Jerusalem, hung on until 587, when Babylon sacked and burned the city, destroyed the Temple and drove the rulers of the nation into captivity.

Who are you when what you believe about who you are is no longer true? Who are you when, not only your future is taken away from you, but your past is destroyed, too?

That’s what it means to be an exile. If you are no longer God’s chosen people, destined to be a great nation that will shine with the glory of God forever – if your history is no longer a story of how favored you are by God – then who are you – how do you stand in relationship to God and to others? You have to reconstruct yourself, cobble your identity back together – but you can’t go back to who you were before your exile began. You have to seek meaning and purpose in the life you have now – in the life of your exile. And you have to be look forward in hope, to the day when your exile will end.

You become the author of great laments: the psalmist weeps “You have made us the derision of our neighbors and our enemies laugh us to scorn.” You become the prophet who cries out, “O that you would tear the heavens and come down.”

You become a people in mourning – and especially you become a people who wait – who wait with longing and expectation and whatever faith and hope we can scrape together – a people who wait for God to bring us home again. “Restore us, O Lord God of hosts, show us the light of your countenance and we shall be saved.”

Jesus knew what it meant to be an exile – because Israel never did become a great nation again. Oh, Jerusalem was restored, and the Temple was rebuilt, but Greek and then Roman overlords ruled King David’s once glorious kingdom. The Jewish people might be in their own land again, but they were still exiles – cut off from both their future and their past. They were captive in their own country – subject to foreign rulers who were willing enough to let them dabble in their own religious rites and practices – as long as they didn’t get too uppity and start making trouble. The Jews were still exiles, centuries after their Babylonian captivity ended.

It’s funny that our first Advent Gospel lesson comes almost at the end of the Gospel of Mark. This is part of Jesus’ speech to his disciples outside the city of Jerusalem, just before he enters it for the last week of his life. We are eavesdropping on teaching that’s meant for those in the inner circle, teaching that tells the disciples that terrible things are about to happen, that the very foundations of the world are going to shake. Terrible things are going to happen, Jesus says, nation will rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom – there will be earthquakes and plagues – and the mystery at the heart of all these terrible things is that they are the birth pangs of something new. And terrible things do happen – Jesus is betrayed, tortured and crucified – the disciples lose their future and their past – his death seems the end of all hope and faith; they are exiled, overwhelmed and helpless. They do not see, in the terror and despair of the crucifixion, the birth pangs of the resurrection.

Advent waiting is the waiting of exiles. It is awfully tempting, in our culture, to deny how sad and broken we are. We’ve been taught to tell everyone that we’re fine, to keep that upper lip good and stiff, to circle our wagons and keep bad things a secret, to never let anyone else know that we are afraid, that we feel overwhelmed and sad and helpless. I am a master at not telling people how bad I really feel: my family’s motto is “Suck it up and quit complaining.”

But I’m starting to feel some chinks in that armor – maybe it’s just getting too hard to live the way I was brought up. The pressures get to me, too – and something about this weekend – with the brutal terrorist attacks in India, and shoppers trampling a Wal-Mart worker to death – makes me just want to lift up my voice in a wail of despair and hopelessness and plead for God to rend the heavens and come down.

If we can’t admit how broken we are – how desperately we need healing, restoration, renewal – then what on earth do we have to wait for? If we don’t need salvation, if we don’t long for salvation, then why light Advent Candles – why pray for Christ to come – why make all this fuss about getting ready?

Advent waiting is not the waiting of airline security lines and the division of motor vehicles. It is not the waiting of inconvenience and annoyance. Advent waiting is the waiting of exiles – and that kind of waiting is steeped in darkness and despair. If we concentrate so hard on keeping our upper lips stiff, and try so mightily to deny just how miserable things are, then we can’t feel the sense of urgent, hopeful expectation that is at the heart of Advent. We can’t feel the deep longing for our savior if we never allow ourselves to feel the pain of needing salvation.

Jesus says, “Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”

No one knows when the master of the house will come – but nobody doubts that he is coming. No servant wants to be caught napping when the master returns, not one of us wants to be the feckless disciples who can’t stay awake and watch one hour with Jesus in Gethsemane. We know that we are exiles, but we know also that we are servants, disciples, friends and pilgrims and we know that we are called to active, faithful, hopeful Advent waiting.

We light the first Advent candle this morning on our wreath – one tiny flame struggling to illuminate the darkness. It’s not much – it may seem pretty puny against the power of sin, hopelessness, cruelty, greed, and violence. But if we darkened the church completely, and that small candle was the only source of light in an otherwise unfathomable darkness, then it might see very bright indeed.

The Advent season starts here – in the 13th chapter of Mark, with these words from Isaiah – because we absolutely must begin in the darkness. We have to feel the weight of our exile, the terrible acknowledgement that the world is not as it should be, that it is broken beyond human fixing. We have to begin in the darkness, so that we can admit just how desperately we need that light to come.

“Give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armor of light.” The night is long and the darkness is cold and impenetrable. But we have lit one candle – a sign to the master of the house that we are not asleep, that we are waiting and watchful and ready. Rend the heavens and come down: show us the light of your countenance to save and bless us: be our shepherd and our savior; come, and lead your exiles home.