University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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A Communion Meditation by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

First Sunday of Advent      November 29, 2009

(This letter owes a substantial debt to Rick Spalding and a paper on this text he presented to the January 2009 meeting of the Moveable Feast, as noted below.)

            Scott Black Johnson, who is pastor of New York City’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, shares a story that seems fitting for today’s intersection of Thanksgiving weekend and the beginning of Advent. He says:

In recent years, Thanksgiving feasts at my house have all featured a culinary wonder that I simply call “The High-Heat Turkey.” This family tradition began about [ten] years ago, when a food critic for The New York Times, Suzanne Hamlin, published an article that gave an account of her own turkey-roasting research. This critic had roasted nineteen identical turkeys. Each turkey was cooked at a different temperature. Some were roasted slowly at low, low heats; others were placed in ovens with elevated temperatures that were gradually reduced over time; some were basted, some were not; some covered with cheese cloth, some not. At the conclusion of her study, Hamlin declared turkey #19 to be the winner. Turkey #19 was roasted at a blistering 500 degrees from start to finish. The critic acknowledged that while the process had made a mess of her oven and basically destroyed an enamel roasting pan, the resulting bird was a triumph! I have been a believer ever since.

My usual pattern on Thanksgiving Day is to flip on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and to get our roast beast ready to go in the oven just as Santa Claus crosses the finish line in front of the department store. Ninety smoky minutes later, dinner is ready. Now my wife, Amy, while enjoying the end result, is not a particular fan of the High Heat Turkey. In fact, she now views my roasting of the bird as a perilous variable that menaces our family celebrations. She came to this conclusion a few years ago, one rainy and cold Thanksgiving Day, when our oven produced so much spattering and smoke that we were forced to run around opening all of the windows in our house – clearing our lungs, but chilling our guests. Ever since, Amy lifts an eyebrow when I begin talking with enthusiasm about preparations for the meal, and the bird that she now calls, “The Lone Turkey of the Apocalypse.” “Can't we have Thanksgiving,” she asked me this past year, “without all the pyrotechnics?”[1]

            I know some people have similar feelings about the beginning of Advent each year, with its somber hymns and its texts full of apocalyptic scenes of doom and destruction.  As Johnson puts it:

In my experience, many in the Church are of two minds about Advent. We like some of the symbols associated with this season. We celebrate the arrival of the Advent wreath with its four candles. We look excitedly for the appearance of evergreen boughs, trees, and poinsettias around our homes and churches as we edge closer and closer to Christmas. Yet, as much as we anticipate these markers of Advent, there are other signs of the season that hit jarring notes in us. For some, the first discordant tone is struck when the liturgical color shifts to purple … at the tail end of November. Then, of course, there are the Advent hymns with their sober melodies and stern admonishments. “Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand” feels far-removed from “Joy to the World.” And, if the hymns aren't bad enough, along come the biblical texts for Advent. It is a shock to our holiday spirits when each year the … Lectionary – the orderly set of readings shared by many churches throughout the world – kicks off the season of Advent with a reading from the gospels known as “the little apocalypse.” It is a passage in which Jesus speaks of the end of the world. Standing in the temple not long before his crucifixion, Jesus speaks of roaring seas and nations in distress. He describes a scene in which a great earthquake shakes all of creation – a cataclysm so terrifying that people are fainting out of fear. It almost seems cruel to plunge those of us who are humming ‘Jingle Bell Rock” into readings that describe the end of the world. Why does the church seem so out of step when it comes to Advent? Can't we make our way toward Christmas without all the pyrotechnics?

            I suppose it was something of that sentiment, and the fact that we have read “the little apocalypse” for so many years now on the First Sunday of Advent, that led me to the two readings we have shared with you this morning… also from the lectionary … but with, well, fewer pyrotechnics. There’s Jeremiah’s gracious and compelling words of the coming fulfillment of God’s promise to Israel and Judah… and then the reading from the Apostle Paul’s spacious first letter to the Thessalonians, which sounds a note of encouragement and gratitude even in the midst of Paul’s own experience of persecution and distress. First Thessalonians truly is an appropriate choice for this day, says Rick Spalding, because it

is an Advent letter. It affords a glimpse of a faithful community preparing itself for the conclusive return of Christ – for the most part without panic, strife, division or theological dissension. For many commentators its primary contribution to the spirit of Advent is Paul’s reminder [in chapter 5] that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (5:2) and his urging to “keep awake and be sober” (5:6) in order that “you may be blameless…at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and his saints” (3:13). But particularly after receiving Timothy’s glowing report of the faithfulness of this community in Paul’s absence…Paul does not seem overly concerned with…ethical critique…. This is a church, it seems, that is (mostly) ready.

[Unlike some of Paul’s other writings]…this letter is less an exercise in constructing theology or articulating ethics   than it is an exploration of relationship. Its living tissue takes the form of four layered qualities of relationship, which together may help to open a place in which the One who is to come can live.[2]

            The four layers of relationship in the letter, as Spalding names them, are gratitude, remembrance, love, and encouragement. Gratitude is present, of course, but in the particular style that Paul so frequently employs – never thanking people directly, but directing his gratitude “to the One who is the source of every blessing and the destination of all his energies.”[3] “How can we ever thank God enough for you in return for the joy we feel before our God because of you?” (3:9)

            That first layer of gratitude has its roots in a second layer, which is remembrance. In other churches the memories may seem a bit mixed, but with the church in Thessalonica, Spalding notes, “the remembrance of shared history seems only to fuel the ardor of gratitude, affection and discipleship.” Paul begins the letter with an expression of gratitude for their “work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope” (1:3). Now, as Paul writes to them, his gratitude comes from Timothy’s report that the glad remembrance is a two-way street: “He has told us also that you always remember us kindly and long to see us – just as we long to see you” (3:6).[4] I was thinking of how such remembrance comes into play for us; so much of our experience of faith comes from what we remember together… the work we have done side-by-side at the IFC or in the hollows of Appalachia… the deep sharing of Stephen Ministry training… the vigil we kept when someone was ill or another one had been injured in that horrific accident… the way we grieved together when one of our saints died… the passing of the elements of the Lord’s supper to one another and the way those elements help put the body of Christ back together when we “do this in remembrance” of him.  “As our lives have grown entwined, and as our faith has grown, the ‘this’ comes more and more to resemble, simply, all the living we have done together.”[5]

            The third layer of relationship Spalding sees in the letter to the Thessalonians, so often named among us, is love.  Paul loves the members of this church. They are like family to him. And they love him back, partly for “the way the stories he told them helped them to discover a story of their own,” partly because of the way he gave them into each other’s care and showed them a reason for hope.  Biblical scholar Beverly Gaventa says that the whole letter is so intimate and tender it is almost embarrassing to read.[6] This is, simply put, a love letter, and “it is this very love that will widen our hearts enough to allow a place for the One who is to come.”[7] It is a love that is ever changing shape and form and is never static or assumed. Paul counsels the Thessalonians, “May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you” (3:12) I cannot begin to number the ways I have seen such love expressed in our life together here.

            The final layer of relationship, so important for the sustenance and growth of such ties, is encouragement. And here Paul brings to the surface the deepest purpose of his letter.[8] The way from the present moment to the arrival of the One who is coming is fraught with peril, Paul knows, and the Thessalonians are starting to understand. It will not be easy to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.  It was not then, and though it may have seemed easy to some of us for a season of our lives, it certainly is not now.  The culture will too often stand against the Thessalonians, Paul says, and so he urges them to “encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing” (5:11).  And surely the task of encouragement and support is our task today as well. Encouragement, says Rick Spalding, is not so much a goal as a blessing, not so much a habit to learn to cultivate as an infusion of empowerment, a new reservoir of strength on which to draw as the Thessalonians (and we) continue to sort out the daily complexities of life together in faith. It is also one of the blessed gifts this congregation has come to cultivate and value – the encouragement of one another, beginning with the children we baptize, cherishing and supporting one another all the days of our lives.

            Gratitude. Remembrance. Love. Encouragement. That’s not a bad recipe for any strong relationship, but the ingredients were especially crucial in the early days of the Christian community. And, I believe, they can be particularly helpful for our own community today as we commence this Advent journey together this year. Gratitude, remembrance, love and encouragement may not produce the “high heat” we’re used to at the outset of Advent, but they may just yield a feast of fortitude and strength as we prepare for the days now before us… and as we seek to “open a place in which the One who is to come can live.”