Note: St Gabriel is one of a small number of churches which is experimenting with Extended Advent--extending it by three weeks, beginning three weeks earlier, to give us more time to enjoy this time of self-examination and thoughtful preparation. It's designed to give us a little breathing space and help prevent Advent being really just the "pre-Christmas" season.
It's interesting that the Irish church in the old days had the notion of Extended Advent in their "three Lents." The Lent of Jesus is the one we celebrate, but there was also the Lent of Elijah, in Ordinary Time, and the Lent of Moses, which was anticipating the incarnation. With its added three weeks, Extended Advent is effectively a 40-day journey of preparing and anticipating the light coming into the world. What is lovely is that our Extended Advent coordinated with the beginning of a three-week class on Celtic Spirituality, so we had a happy synchronicity with what the earlier church had set apart as the Lent of Moses.
However...we have continued the use of the lectionary in conjunction with the formal Church calendar--so our propers correspond with the very ending of Pentecost.
What are we
waiting for?” That’s the question the Rev. Dr. Bill Petersen asks in his book
about Extended Advent, and that is the question we at St Gabriel agreed to take
up when we decided to embark on our Extended Advent journey. And so we begin
Advent, the first season of the church calendar, and we have given ourselves
more time, and more space, to prepare, anticipate, wait, and watch for the coming
of the light of Christ into the world.
And
yet, as far as our lectionary is concerned, we are closing out the calendar year—we’re still finishing Pentecost. So we come to those readings, especially in Matthew’s gospel,
and also in Paul’s letters, where the followers of Jesus are thinking about end
times, not beginnings. They had known Jesus in his time on earth and looked for
his return—which they believed was to happen any day. They too, are anticipating,
and waiting, and watching--for the second coming of Christ. And they too
wanted to know: What exactly are we
waiting for? And how do we prepare?
When
Paul wrote his first letter to the Thessalonians--the very earliest, chronologically, of his letters in
the Bible--he himself assumed that Christ’s return was imminent. He was
learning of the Thessalonians’ anxiety by way of Timothy, along with their many
questions, including what happened to people who died before Christ’s return.
Had they missed the party? Will they see them in heaven? Paul assures them that God has not forgotten them, that Jesus will
bring them with him when he returns—and all God’s people will be brought
together at that time. So yes, he says to them, in effect: you may feel sad, but do not be anxious. Your
grief may be tempered with hope, the hope of Christ’s return.
Hope
is a frequent message in the apocalyptic texts. Like this letter, and like today’s Gospel,
apocalyptics in both the Old and New Testament reveal what is to come. They
tend to follow a pattern: Suffering will happen or is happening as a result of
evil in the world. There will be a sorting, and much stress and strain over who
stays and who goes. But God will prevail in the end, and so will those whom God
favors. So wait, with hope, endure the suffering, for all shall be well in the
end, because God is in charge. That’s the general message.
Today’s
Gospel takes up that “sorting” question, but it’s a tough one for me. Among my
questions: How come the wise bridesmaids don’t help the foolish ones? Why do
they get to the party, when they didn’t share their oil? And what’s with the
shut door? Is this really Christ who
will not let them in, after they’ve stumbled around in the dark? Dylan Breuer, a priest whose blog I follow, says it sounds like a Jesus that Arnold Schwarzenegger would play: The
Christinator. “I’ll be back,” he says, “and some of you will get in and some of
you won’t!!” As someone who can definitely identify with the foolish bridesmaids,
the ones whose oil ran out and are running around looking for a 7-11 in the
middle of the night, that’s not very encouraging.
The
truth is, we don’t actually know what will happen at the end of days--we just know that we will be with Christ. I
don’t read the parable so much as speaking to the “who’s in/who’s out” formula. First
of all, I think it’s more about what happens within us, more than it is about
world events. After all, Jesus tells the disciples--don't waste your time trying to figure out the day and the hour. He wants us to live in the present. And second, it's important to remember that this is still the Jesus of Nazareth we
know—not the Christinator! This is the Jesus who tells us that the kingdom of
heaven is full of the ones who welcomed the least of us: those who fed the
poor, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, visited the sick and imprisoned. Those who showed hospitality and love for
others. And here’s the thing: this message
is true on earth--where the light has come into the world in the incarnation
and remains with us in Spirit—as well as in heaven—the kingdom yet to come—the
one that we, along with the Thessalonians and the Jesus-followers of Matthew’s
day, still await.
So
for me, whether we celebrate the first coming, or anticipate the second one, it
is about waiting well. Remaining alert to Christ’s presence in the world and preparing
a place for it.
What spoke to me in the parable of the bridesmaid were the many allusions to a hospitality of
spirit: mindful waiting, and welcoming. In
ancient Jewish marriage tradition, the bridegroom prepares a place for the
bride, literally in his father’s house, and cannot return for her until his
father is satisfied with what his son has made. When the bridegroom is asked, “when
you are coming?” he answers, “Only my father knows.” And when the room is
finally ready, and it’s time to get his bride, she is warned only by the distant
noise of the crowd and a shofar blown to signal his coming. Whatever the day or
hour, she must have everything ready to make her new life with him. Then, after
he is welcomed into her household, she, along with her bridesmaids and family,
goes with him to his house for the consummation of the marriage, and literally
a solid week of partying. She knows neither the hour nor the day he will come, and
she has to be ok with that. She and her party must wait with patience and
faith, and be prepared to welcome the bridegroom, and also to be welcomed into
his household.
And
so, we too wait, and do what we need to do to prepare a room in our hearts and wait
for the light to come.
 |
| Painting by Carol Aust |
This idea of patient waiting, of making a place for
others, fits so well with our foray into Celtic spirituality in our Advent
series, because hospitality is a deep Celtic value. The Celtics are pilgrims, rooted on the land on the one hand, but always on a journey. The Gaelic phrase, Céad míle fáilte --a hundred thousand welcomes--reflects this emphasis on hospitality to the traveler. There’s an old legend that a warrior--one of the “bad
guys” in Celtic myth--is made king, and he quickly becomes renowned for his
stinginess. The bards complained that visitors to his house could count on
leaving with no smell of beer on their breath! He was A Very Bad King.
My
story of Celtic hospitality came on a visit to Scotland with my cousin. We were
on an island, trying to make the last ferry to the next island, where our bed
and breakfast was. The roads were literally one lane, with little passing
places, and the going was slower than we thought. We were running out of petrol,
but also, we were running out of time. We made the ferry with five minutes to
spare, only to learn that the petrol station by the landing would be closed by
the time we docked.
The
folks who ran the ferry told us to drive to a huge construction site nearby – it
ran 24/7, they said, and they’d have plenty. But first, we called our bed and
breakfast and said, we might be late. We might run out of gas!! “Don’t worry,”
we heard, in their soothing Scottish brogue. “However late you are, we’ll be here,
and we’ll come get you if it comes to that.” Then, they welcomed us warmly into
the construction trailer—we, the hapless American tourists--but it was a
diesel-only site. No petrol. Then they thought of a worker who had a can of
petrol in his pickup, and went and got him. He not only gave us some petrol
from his can, but he followed us to the station up the road to make sure we were
safe. He wouldn’t let us pay him. He
wouldn’t let us buy him a beer. So we
hugged him. Ha ha!! He tolerated it—he was
a good sport. We were a good two hours later than we had promised, but our
hosts at the bed and breakfast were waiting for us. The lamps were lit, the
door was opened, the party began. We were in Scottish heaven.
Our
hosts had anticipated our every need. They had prepared a place for us. And so
we too must prepare a place for God in our hearts. Like good hosts, we set
aside what is convenient for us, and let go of our own expectations. Seeing how Christ is working around us and in
us requires a patient attentiveness and watchfulness. Like the wise bridesmaids, we must learn holy
waiting, and we must keep our lamps lit.
In the secular world, waiting is disparaged. It
is a waste of time. A long wait time is a sign of bad customer service. But the
Dutch priest and writer Henri Nouwen (quoting Simone Weil) wrote that waiting is
the foundation of a spiritual life. The vigil of waiting and watching is deeply
embedded in the Christian mystical tradition. As we say in Compline: “Guide
us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that
awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.”
Good
waiting is hospitable. It is to live as though each moment is full, not empty.
It requires us to give up our attempts to control the world and to be willing
to see where God’s hand is at work. Rather than wishing for it to be a
particular way, we learn simply to rest in hope. Nouwen wrote,“we experience
more rather than less of what God has for us if we cast aside our useless
wishes, and instead, hope in God’s promises.”
He
goes on: When we pray the Lord’s prayer,
we say, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Why
shouldn’t we expect the power of God to enter the moments and circumstances of
our ordinary days on earth? God
is always coming to us, but rarely on our terms, according to our calendar, or in
line with our expectations.
And so, let us strive to wait well. To prepare our hearts to be welcome, for whatever
the hour or whatever the day the light comes to us, and joins with the little
flame we have kindled and nurtured in our own hearts to greet it.
Amen.
Preached at St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland, OR, Nov. 12, 2017
