Observing Advent in Pandemic Times
Sermon by Jamie Howison for the First Sunday in Advent, 2020
A note from Jamie: In the sermon I do encourage people to consider taking on some sort of reflective Advent practice, and mention the availability of several good, free online sources:
In Days to Come: Words for Advent - Published by saint ben’s in 2012, with contributions by Steve Bell, Rachel Twigg, Jaylene Johnson, Jamie Howison, and Malcolm Guite.
Advent: Seasonal Reading by N.T. Wright - Four readings by N.T. Wright, drawn from his 2016 Advent sermons and an unpublished address.
O Lord, How Shall I Meet You? - The 2020 Advent Devotional published by Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN, with brief readings for each day of the season.
Malcolm Guite - The English priest and poet generally posts a daily poem and reflection on his blog, always with an eye to the liturgical seasons and feast days.
Reclaiming Advent - A podcast we released last year during Advent, featuring a conversation between Jamie Howison and Steve Bell.
From our very beginning, the season of Advent has held a very special place in the life of this worshipping community. It was on the 1st Sunday of Advent in 2004—sixteen years ago now—that I began to serve full-time as the priest and pastor to a very new community; a community of some fifty people who had decided to step out together in faith to launch this new expression called saint benedict’s table. In that first year when we set out to articulate our core values, one of the ways we described ourselves was as “a community of Advent spirituality.” We said,
saint benedict’s table is discerning a call to becoming a community of expectation, restlessness, imagination and vision. We experience ourselves as a community of Advent spirituality: always on the hinge between the old and the new, the known and the unknown to which God is drawing us.
And indeed, this is a hinge season. Last week we observed the final Sunday in the old church year, and now here we are again at Advent, launching back through the cycle of teachings, stories, rituals, and practices that are meant to prepare us not only for Christmas, but for Christ’s promise that he is not yet finished with us and our world. No, Advent says be awake, alert, watchful, and ready for the ways in which God in Christ Jesus is always and ever breaking into our lives and—ultimately—into the life of the whole of creation.
You heard those themes expressed in both of our readings today; urgent crisis texts drawn for the prophet Isaiah and from the Gospel according to Mark. The text from Isaiah has as its background the memory of the exile in Babylon, but also a deep sense that the people—Israel—had again faltered and failed, even as they were rescued from that exile. They fear that they have now been judged and abandoned, and so the prophet sings:
Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand.
Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord,
and do not remember iniquity for ever.
Now consider, we are all your people.
The gospel text, on the other hand, doesn’t have Jesus remembering a past event or a present failing, but rather warning of something yet in the future. It comes on the heels of a teaching in which Jesus had pointed to the impending destruction of Jerusalem and its grand temple at the hands of the Roman Empire, but this section feels even more dire than that. Drawing on imagery largely from the Hebrew scriptures, Jesus is giving his followers a good shake, saying effectively that there is work to be done. And that work, the New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado comments, is really to what he has been teaching them all along.
The work that the servants [in the parable] are to do is of course not primarily scanning the horizon for the master’s return and then rushing about in a dither, but rather the steady regular performance of their tasks. Thus, Jesus’ words mean, that his followers are to go on with their mission, preaching and living the gospel, ready for the return of their master at any time, so that he will find them “on the job”.
I’ve taught you how to live and what to do, he’s saying to them. Just keep doing that, even in the hardest and darkest of days. Trust me… and be awake, watchful, ready.
This is how the season of Advent always begins, with a tough edged call to watchfulness, readiness, and life lived as Jesus has taught us to do. As the season progresses we’ll move through texts that bring us closer to the nativity light, most particularly when we come to the story of the annunciation and the proclamation of the Magnificat.
And what is the message you’ve heard preached here now for years, whether by me or by Rachel? Don’t rush this season. Take hold of it, savour it, learn from it yet again. While the rest of our culture has begun its mad dash into Christmas weeks ago, we always say, we beg to differ. Anyone who has heard an Advent sermon or read any of our Advent writings knows it well. All the references to the malls and big box stores blaring Christmas music since the day after Remembrance Day, telling you to buy, buy, buy the perfect gifts for everyone… and maybe something a little extra for yourself too. The glittering lights downtown, the magi across the street at the Canada Life building, the commencement of the nightly television Christmas specials, to say nothing of the obligatory work and school Christmas parties… take a pause from all of that, even if for just this one hour every week. It will do your heart and soul good to savour Advent, and the Christmas feast will be all the more splendid for it.
Ah, but this year is different, isn’t it? Even if you really wanted to, you can’t go shopping in a mall or big box store for anything aside from essential goods. In the grocery stores and pharmacies the aisles selling Christmas cards and wrapping paper are roped off or covered in a plastic barrier, and to whatever degree Frosty the Snowman and Jingle Bells are playing in those stores it just sounds sort of sad. Yes, the lights are on downtown, but you’re not all that likely to be driving through there at night as most of us have nowhere to go. School or work parties? Not a chance. And looking ahead four weeks, it is pretty clear that our cherished dinners and gatherings with family won’t be happening, at least not in their usual form.
In this part of the world we started into this pandemic in March, just a few weeks into Lent, and sometimes it feels as if we never entirely left that season. Oh sure, the summer here was good, with those low, low infection numbers, opportunities to gather outside and visit in parks and on front porches. That was “ordinary time” tinged with some serious Easter hope, wasn’t it? Yet here we are at the beginning of Advent, with the restrictions tighter and the numbers worse than they were back in the spring, our hospitals at risk of being overwhelmed.
How to observe Advent in pandemic times?
You know how I always challenge you hold off on the Christmas decorations for at least another couple of weeks, suggesting instead you use just an Advent wreath at least for now? And that if you put out a Christmas creche you could consider building it slowly, only adding the infant Jesus on Christmas Eve? Well do those things, but if you’ve already decorated this weekend or are planning to put up the tree on December 1, don’t let me guilt trip you for it. Hey, how would I even know, given that I can’t be paying a visit to anyone’s home right now! Let those lights shine as a bit of comfort in the midst of these days of perpetual dusk; let them proclaim, as the psalmist says, “weeping lasts but a night time; joy comes with the morning.” And that morning will come.
Take up a daily Advent reading or some other reflective practice. In the web post for this sermon I will provide links to a few free resources, including a free download of the Advent book we published a number of years ago, “In Days to Come.” Take the time to write Christmas cards to people… oh, but you can’t even buy cards at the drug store these days, right? So write letters, fold them in envelopes, and put them in the mailbox. Send them to friends and other people in your circles you just know will get a little lift from going to the mailbox and finding something there other than bills and flyers.
And come and join us, week by week, in what we can do online. It isn’t too late to join in on the weekly advent retreat sessions we’re offering, and there is, of course, daily 5pm Evening Prayer. These four Sundays in Advent could be a particularly important part of how you “do” this season… and here’s something to anticipate in this season of anticipation. Along with some other folks in our diocese, Rachel and I have been in conversation with Bishop Geoff around getting his blessing to celebrate communion together online. The table will be set here, and tables will be set in your own homes. At this table bread will be taken, blessed, and broken, while in your own homes the bread you set out on your own table will be taken and eaten—apart, yet together—a sign and a reminder that there is but one Body of Christ, regardless of how and when it gathers. There will be more information and a bit of reflective teaching coming your way in the next week, so do watch for that. We will celebrate communion this way at least once this Advent, and continue to do so as the 12 Days of Christmas fold into Epiphanytide and we begin again the move toward Lent. And maybe in doing that over these hard days we will learn something, and come to know something new.
Newness, you see, is at the heart of Advent spirituality; “on the hinge between the old and the new, the known and the unknown to which God is drawing us.”
Welcome to the season of Advent, filled with promise even in these days of pandemic.
