University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

First Sunday of Advent      November 30, 2008

            It is an odd liturgy we rehearse each year around this time – this season of Advent, with the candles and the calendars and the counter-cultural focus – and especially this first Sunday of Advent.  Everywhere else all around us, thoughts have turned to preparing for Christmas. And Advent is that, of course, in part… but it is more than that, too.

            Some years ago I wrote of spending my childhood Decembers, like many children, anxious for Christmas to hurry up and get here.  But the excitement was always tempered a bit by no small degree of fear and trembling. What caused the anxiety for me was the annual refrain of the old children’s song, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” You know the words: “You’d better watch out/ You’d better not cry/ You’d better not pout/ I’m telling you why: Santa Claus is coming to town.”  There was promise in that song, but there was also warning: “He knows when you are sleeping/ He knows when you’re awake/ He knows if you’ve been bad or good/ So be good for goodness sake!”  The message of the song, obviously written by a parent skilled in the art of motivation by fear, was very clear to me: “Get excited! But shape up!”

            Clearly, something of the same dynamic is at work in the season of Advent.  It is a season of wonderful promise, augmented with a healthy dose of warning, about One who is coming. It is a time of joy and anticipation, but it is also a season of repentance and self-examination.  On the First Sunday of Advent each year, the church’s lectionary always draws us to texts that lean hard upon the warnings, texts that speak of the return of Christ and the final consummation of human history.  Our reading from Mark’s Gospel is a case in point, our annual warning shot across the bow to remind us to be alert, to watch, to keep awake. “You must be ready,” Jesus says, “or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.” “You’d better watch out!”

            Mark’s accent is on the unexpected time and circumstance of Christ’s return, and clearly his concern is that the church be prepared.  The early Christian community had been waiting for the day of Christ’s return, and their repeated question was “When?” The answer Mark remembered for them from Christ’s teaching was, “about that day and hour no one knows” (v. 32).  The more important issue, he argued, was how to live in the delay, and his clear call to them was to live as those who were prepared for that day, ready to give account for their lives.

            I have thought about that phrase – “to give account” for our lives – more than a few times this fall, as we have laid the ashes of so many dear ones in the earth. I thought about it this past summer, too, on our seemingly interminable flight to Johannesburg, South Africa.  It wasn’t the flight itself that brought it to mind, except for the notion that the kingdom might have come before we ever got to South Africa. Actually, it was one of the movies I watched to pass the time – Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman’s “The Bucket List.”  If you’ve seen it, you know it is the rather improbable story of two cancer patients with but a short time to live and how they choose to live those days.  One critic describes the two as “both suffering from cancer that is nothing like cancer, and setting off on adventures that are nothing like possible.”[1]

            Nicholson plays Edward, an enormously rich man of about 70, who has been given the cancer diagnosis and a year to live. He is sharing a room with Carter (played by Freeman), about the same age, same prognosis. It turns out Carter has a “bucket list” – things he had wanted to do before he, well… “kicked the bucket.” Edward embraces this idea, noting that all he has is money, and proceeds to treat Carter to an around-the-world trip in his private jet, during which they visit the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Hong Kong, the French Riviera and the Himalayas. They go sky-diving. They drive stock cars. They do lots of fun things that would make many of the cancer patients I have known want to throw their bedpans at the screen. Of course, it’s not all frivolity and fun; there are epiphanies for both men in the end – and the discovery that there are more important items for a “bucket list” than checking off the pages in their copies of 1000 Place to See Before You Die. If you don’t take it too seriously, it’s a fun movie.

            Knowing the approach of the end of one’s days does focus one’s attention in remarkable ways.  I’ve watched that dynamic at work in the lives of so many friends in this congregation over the years, and I’ve seen some remarkable “bucket lists” get developed… though not in the way Edward and Carter lived out theirs. I’ve known people who found notable ways to finish some unfinished business – a moving reconciliation with a dear one from whom they were estranged … or stirring acts of generosity… or the writing of an ethical will for one’s children, to preserve and pass on to them a legacy of values. I’ve also observed people transformed by immersing themselves in the promises of Scripture, so that Jesus’ admonition to “watch” became an invitation to joyful anticipation.

            “About that day or that hour,” Jesus said, “no one knows.” But some of us do, at least for ourselves; we know that life is short, that the moments of our lives are fleeting and precious… and life in the meantime between the “now” and the “then” takes on a different level of intensity.  In recent days I’ve been wondering, what if this church knew it only had a short time left?[2] I trust it doesn’t, but what if it did? What would we put on our “bucket list?” I spent a lot of time with that question this week, which I see as a question of how we might be more faithful stewards of the time, the resources, the mysteries and the hopes that have been entrusted to us.  A number of possibilities came to mind, some of them too small to include, and some of them, quite frankly, too big.  In the end, when it came time to edit my final list and prepare this sermon, I put down just two.

            First, I would hope, in whatever time we had remaining, that we would feel deeply the world’s pain. It is not as much fun to consider as visiting exotic places, but it is so important for us to claim our common humanity with all of God’s children… and so many of God’s children are in pain. We can’t take away that pain, not in the global sense, but we can grasp and carry and weigh the pain of the world in our hearts.

            Earlier this year a friend shared a story with me about a child, a little girl, who seemed to understand the importance of doing just that. You probably have heard the story; it has made its way around the Internet. The father of this little girl was waiting for her to get home from school one day – and she was very late.  The father was mindful not to be too upset or to appear too anxious when she got home, but she was well past her normal time of arriving.  He went out to the sidewalk to see if she was coming, and after what seemed a long while, he saw her walking toward him.  He continued to remind himself to be calm, so that his first words wouldn’t be, “Where in the world have you been?”

            So, when she reached him, he simply asked her calmly, “Did you know you were late?  What kept you, sweetheart? Did something happen on the way?”

            She said, “Yes, I know I’m late, and yes, something happened.  I was walking home with my friend Lisa, and she had brought this beautiful china doll to school today for show-and-tell… and while we were walking out of the school she tripped while she was showing it to me again, and it fell and it broke.”

            The father said, “Oh. So you stopped to help her fix the doll?”

            “No,” she replied. “It smashed into a million pieces; we couldn’t even pick all of them up.  I stopped… to help her cry.”[3]

            The first item I would put on our “bucket list” would be to feel, appropriate and share in the world’s pain. It is profoundly important, as Chandler Stokes says, simply to show up… to be present with God’s people in the midst of the world’s great grief and pain. Those of you who volunteer regularly at the IFC shelter or crisis assistance ministry know the importance of showing up and letting the experience get to you. Those who have traveled with our mission teams to Haiti or Washington, D.C., or Appalachia know that beyond whatever work you have done there, beyond any of the projects you undertook, your most important task was to meet the people with whom you worked, to listen and learn from them, and to take their hearts into your heart. The church’s mission in such ventures is not “doing” nearly as much as it is “being.” It is about showing up, and listening, and sometimes simply crying alongside those whose heartache and grief and pain are beyond fixing, and making such heartache and grief and pain our own. If we knew we had only a little time left, an enhanced capacity for empathy is one of the items I’d put on our bucket list.

            The second item for the list would be the enlargement of our ability to claim and our willingness to offer an enduring hope to those in pain, to those who see the future as hopeless, to those who have stopped waiting for anything to get better.  We can do so, in part, because we have come to understand the world’s pain.  We can also do so because as Christians we know the redemption of Christ’s suffering and because we know something about the pain of waiting, longing for His promised future. As one scholar says, the “church has always struggled with its pain over a future which fails to come.”

 “Come, Lord Jesus,” the [early Christians] prayed, but it was Roman soldiers who came. “This world is passing away,” they sang, but the world remained. One can live on tiptoe just so long, before the muscles grow tired and the eyes grow weary of looking for the light of a day that never dawns. If the church is standing at the threshold of God’s future kingdom of justice, then the church can dare to touch the wounds of lepers and freely pour out its resources for the poor.  If this world is surely in the throes of death, and the new age of healing and mercy is close at hand, then the church can cheerfully bear rejection, endure suffering, and faithfully sing its alleluias. But if there is no God-shaped future at hand…, then there is only one more day to be endured in an endless string of days, a bottomless pit of human need, and a ceaseless line of the poor, who are always with us. All there is left to for the church to be is another well-meaning institution, and all there is left for the church to do is whistle its liturgy in the dark, collect the pledge cards and keep the copy machines humming.[4]    

            But we are a people defined by the hope that that God-shaped future is before us… and that all our days, therefore, have meaning. And where have we learned such a hope?  Well, from Scripture, of course, and from the church.  But I will tell you where else we will find it, if we are willing to listen: from the very ones whose pain we have sought to embrace in the first item on our bucket list. Here is my experience, which always confounds me, but which I share with you… that those who seem to live in the most hopeless of situations are often precisely the ones who have the most to teach us of what it means to live by hope, for they are the ones who have known the provision of manna. They are the ones who have learned to trust in the power of God to save. They are the ones who know what it is to wait…and to hope… and they live by their hope. They are the ones who understand at some visceral level what the apostle Paul meant in saying:

[S]uffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us. (Rom. 5:3-5)

We have heard these words so often that we may have forgotten their strange logic. We haven’t suffered much, most of us. If I were to ask you to complete the sentence, “Suffering produces…” you might come up with a host of words that would never lead to endurance and then to character and then to hope.  For some people suffering leads only to irritation, which produces bitterness, and ultimately a deep depression and despair. For such persons, suffering leads only to the question of “why?”  But for others, particularly those who claim the name of Christ, suffering does do what Paul suggests; it leads them down the path of humility to a quality of endurance; by steady perseverance it strengthens their character; and through self-reflection it leads to a discovery of God’s providential care throughout life and thus a source of unfailing hope for the future.

            That is why a middle-aged man, a Christian hotel worker in Zimbabwe, could look me in the eye this past June and say to me, in the midst of all the political chaos, the staggering hyper-inflation and the seeming hopelessness of life in that disintegrating country, “Our leaders are hopeless, but I… I am full of hope.” 

            Our world is in such pain. I think not only of the people of Zimbabwe, but particularly this day of the people of Mumbai… and also the homeless of Darfur and Port-au-Prince and the storm-ravaged coastal communities of Cuba. I think of the long-suffering residents of Baghdad and Basra, and even of some in our own communities.  To feel their pain and to take it into our own hearts is not altruism; it is a condition of discipleship, and the very nature of Christ’s church.[5]  But it is also our nature and our calling to learn what it is to live by hope, and then, in turn, to offer that hope to the world.

            Opening ourselves to the world’s pain might open us to what the world can teach us about hope… the kind of hope that does not disappoint us.  So, on this day when we light the candle of hope, we embrace the hope at the heart of Advent. We wait. We watch. We listen.  We learn. We cry. We feel. And, trusting the God-shaped future that Christ has promised, we take courage… and we hope.