Unexpected
Isaiah 2:1-5; Matthew 24:36-44
November 28, 2010
Advent, the beginning of the Christian year, is a tough season to sell. Nothing happens during Advent and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. If some important event took place during Advent, then it wouldn’t be Advent, it would be something else, and if it were important enough that would be the beginning of the Christian story. Who knows where Mary and Joseph and the Baby would have ended up? No, instead, we spend four weeks doing nothing and that does us a lot of good.
One, two, three, four, what are we waiting for, if not the unexpected? I know, I know, you will all say together, “We’re waiting for the birth of the Christ Child,” and yes, that’s true. Christmas always follows Advent - because we human beings make it happen that way. That makes the waiting of Advent a routine, an expected buildup that’s countable and predictable. No wonder we’re bored and start sneaking in those Christmas carols before the Advent Police get a wind of what we’re doing. We just can’t wait.
When you wait for something unexpected, you never know what is going to happen. How do we capture again the so-called “true meaning” of Advent and Christmas? By not expecting it at all, and then out of nowhere it attacks all our senses. Religion is too organized when it rules out of order the imagination of something quite different and unexpected.
There was a January thaw and the temperatures went way above 0 so that opening windows was necessary and rejuvenating - this was not in Saskatchewan! We closed them all we thought and went to bed. Around 4:00 a.m. my wife nudged me, “There’s someone in the house!” Groggily, I heard shuffling around in the spare bedroom next to ours. As I got up and yelled some quaint religious oath, the burglar passed right by and practically leaped down the stairs, with me in hot pursuit. All I can tell you is that he was wearing a toque, except that isn’t what we called them. When we caught our breath and our hearts slowed down we noticed the side window open. If only we had known when the thief would come in the night.
About a decade later in a different house, one winter night I had absent-mindedly left the back door unlocked, first time I had. Around the same ungodly hour, I woke up groggily again to hear what sounded like a cat meowing plaintively. I listened some more and it was a human voice, crying not too loudly, “Help me!” I went downstairs and found a young woman in the kitchen bleeding profusely. She had fallen asleep at the wheel and the car had slowly drifted in the light pole right in front of our house. I quickly dressed and took her to the hospital where she was treated. What would have happened if I had not been so unorganized that night? I didn’t hear the crash. The house was big enough I wouldn’t have heard someone knocking at that back door.
So what I am supposed to do? If I were paranoid about leaving doors and windows unlocked lest another thief break in, I would have lived in fear every night and never would have slept for the last 35 years. At what price my soul for being ready? But then, should I leave every door unlocked just in case a desperate angel decides to come in? Alas, I am never given the choice of deciding when the unexpected will arrive.
How we go about waiting in Advent comes right from Jesus as he reminds all about Noah. He was building his ark and everybody else just laughed and went about their business as usual until Noah entered the ark, and “they did not know until the flood came and swept them all away.” What they lacked was not proper security measures, but instead they lacked imagination to see what was happening in front of them. A lot of unexpected things happen to us, offering grace unbounded, yet we do not recognize it for what it can be. We are so used to doing what we are used to doing we cannot imagine our world operating differently.
My favourite dramatic poem, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, by W. H. Auden, concludes the lengthy first section entitled “Advent” with a chorus singing in the darkest days of World War II and the London bombing:
We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.
Nothing can save us that is possible. What is possible is what we expect and plan for and organize and orchestrate and much of that expectedness is good and helpful for human existence. We have long ago decided what is allowable and permissible to run our way of life. Anything else is impossible, and that’s why the world considers Advent and Christmas so useless. What the non-event of Advent nudges us to do is to be ready - to be awake - at all times to nurture the imagination to see the new ways God is breaking into our possible universe to dream the impossible dream, to beat swords and guns into ploughshares, to learn war no more. Nothing can save us that is possible.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan