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The Shortest Season of the Year
Welcome to a “thin place.” I borrow the term from Marcus Borg, who borrows it from Celtic Christianity, where it refers to a space or an occasion that invites us to look through the visible world to sense the presence of God. Thin places can be locations. T. S. Eliot wrote about a small chapel in Little Gidding as a thin place, a place where prayer, he says, has been “valid.” Music can create a thin place. So can art. Or a speaker. Or a friend. Or nature. Borg quotes Thomas Merton, who says that God is shining through the world “all the time.” “God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him.” The only problem, Merton says, is “that we don’t see it.” That’s the importance of “thin places.” They invite us to “see it.”
Advent, the shortest season in the church year, takes us to thin places. When we hear our choirs, the divine can overcome our holiday anxieties. When we light the Advent candles, we ask God to guide our hands. When we find just the right gift for a loved one, we may feel we are in the presence of He who gave himself for us. When our neighborhoods grow quiet in the late evening, we may look to the stars and know we stand in a thin place. In Merton’s words, Advent wants us to know that “God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him.”
Such feelings may be inexpressible, but we should not therefore conclude that Advent emphasizes vague impressions. Of all the seasons in the church year, this one offers the most specific emphases, the most striking contrasts, the most particular demands. This season of expectation, during which we look forward to celebrating the birth of Jesus as savior and anticipate the return of Jesus to the world, is also a season of warning as it announces the return of Jesus as judge and advocate. It is thus a season for taking stock and for facing the realities of sin and mortality. Above all, it is a season of hope in new birth—that in Bethlehem, and that we seek for ourselves through our faith. From first Sunday to fourth, Advent presents us with a compelling agenda.
The hymn we will be singing this morning, which you will find on page 69 of the Hymnal, may be unfamiliar. I doubt that you will hear it in the aisles of Wal-Mart or Target. But I admire it because it captures much of the dynamic range that is Advent. It is bleak at first. It asks probing questions. It raises doubts and concerns. But as we sing it we will hear emerging gradually a sense of hopeful expectation, growing faith, and, finally, joy in gift that Christ’s birth brings.
The first verse raises questions out of perplexity and despair. There is the voice of John the Baptist in the wilderness. What is he saying? Who is listening? Who is capable of listening? John had his own doubts, as we learned last week. He shook up his listeners by describing them as the “children of snakes.” Are we any more attentive to John’s message than those who heard John’s shouts at the Jordan? Our hearts too can sometimes seem as dark as the long winter nights. Please sing the first verse with me and with the choir.
What is the crying at Jordan?
Who hears, O God, the prophecy?
Dark is the season, dark our hearts and shut to mystery.
On the first Sunday of Advent, we pray in the Collect, “Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness.” Then, from the Gospel of Luke we hear Jesus’ warning: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”
But in a dark season of dark hearts shut to mystery, we need to understand that change is being prepared. As we experience the year’s darkest days, there is developing a powerful force. But if we are to perceive and respond to it, to make our way to a thin place, we will not do so without help. Please sing with me the second verse.
Who then shall stir in the darkness,
prepare for the joy in the winter night?
Mortal in darkness we lie down, blindhearted seeing no light.
On the second Sunday of Advent, we heard from the Gospel of Luke a kind of answer to this question. Quoting Isaiah, the Gospel begins to suggest that the crying at Jordan can summon us to preparing the way of the Lord, to making “his paths straight” so that “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” The answer to the hymn is that, with God’s grace, we must “stir in the darkness.” We must “prepare for joy in the winter light.”
Just last week, on the third Sunday of Advent, we heard John’s message directly. His “crying at Jordan” unsettles those who have come out to the desert to hear him, and prompts them to ask the critical question, “What then should we do?” When the practical moral advice he offers them makes them wonder whether he might be the Messiah, he points beyond himself. "I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
Those at the Jordan listening to John and being baptized by him receive grace in many dimensions. In that thin place, they are brought to an awareness of their sins, they become aware of the possibility and importance of repentance, and they are given the hope of a baptism that will be utterly transformative. In the third stanza of our hymn, we pray ourselves for such grace. Please sing it with me.
Lord, give us grace to awake us,
to see the branch that begins to bloom;
in great humility is hid all heaven in a little room.
Our hymn texr writer, Carol Christopher Drake, may have in mind the poet John Donne’s description of the Incarnation in his poem, “Nativity,” where he praises Mary with these words, “Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.” And that powerful image brings us to this Fourth Sunday of Advent, as the Gospel of Luke describes Mary’s visit to Elizabeth. Both women are pregnant, Elizabeth with John the Baptist, Mary with Jesus. And when Mary enters, Elizabeth’s child leaps within her, and Elizabeth greets Mary with words faithful Christians have prayed ever since: “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
We too turn our attention on this day to the birth we have been anticipating. We prepare for the mass of Christ, for Christ-mas. With all that we have heard and reflected on during this Advent, we understand more fully the joy of celebrating Jesus’ birth, but we understand also the challenge of responding to it. Again, our hymn captures this balance in economical, highly charged language. Please sing with me the final verse.
Now comes the day of salvation,
in joy and terror the Word is born!
God gives himself into our lives; O let salvation dawn!
We are asked by Advent to take seriously the signs of our own times, to reflect on the inevitability that we will be judged, to identify with those who trekked out to the Jordan when they heard of someone preaching repentance, and to sense in the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth the potential that became reality in Bethlehem and that must become reality for us. As we take seriously the promise of judgment, as we recognize ourselves in those worried pilgrims seeking John the Baptist, as we say the prayer that Elizabeth said, we move beyond the charm and nostalgia of this season, the Hallmark™ side of Christmas, to its importance for our lives, its summons to our sense of priorities, its threat to our complacency. And we move towards the thin place of Christmas Eve, when we will kneel in the darkness in this church, singing a lovely German hymn, Stille Nacht, and sense beyond all the distractions of the season its reason for being, its powerful reality, Emmanuel, God with us.