Advent 1B, November 29, 2020.  The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of Repentance, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Today marks the beginning of a new Church year with the first Sunday in Advent. The Christian new year doesn’t begin with festivities or celebrations, but with lamentation in Isaiah, with a letter from Paul written in response to reports of in-fighting – of quarrelling in the church in Corinth, and with the Gospel of Mark’s “apocalypse” – Jesus’ prediction of the end of life as his disciples know it. The end, according to Mark, will be a very good thing because of the enormity of suffering, because of the desolation being experienced. I get this at a deeper level than I ever have before because of the revelations and devastations of this past year.

This week it occurred to me that I want to begin this Church year with New Year’s resolutions, not personal resolutions about better health, better alignment of resources with values, and living life more fully, but resolutions that address those things communally, corporately, collectively, with commitments for repentance, repair, and reconciliation. Those are the themes of Advent: larger-scale repentance, repair, and reconciliation. My New Year’s resolutions are for Emmanuel Church and beyond.

The first resolution has to do with our liturgy. The impetus is a book by The Rev. Lenny Duncan, a Black pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, which the recently ordained clergy of our diocese and their mentors are reading together. Duncan’s book is called Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US. (Apparently, the Episcopal Church is the second whitest.)  Duncan challenges his white colleagues to examine our theological and liturgical language and symbols, starting with Advent and all its darkness-bad/light-good language. He challenges us to examine our use of white vestments and altar paraments for our most important celebrations, and to replace our depictions of white-European-style Jesus in stained glass and statues. Duncan reminds us that white theology does not recognize its whiteness; white theology doesn’t generally think about how we accommodate and support the systemic violence of white supremacy (because we don’t have to). [1] What white theology assumes to be traditional and universal comes from a thin slice of Western European Christendom, which colonized the rest of the world: much more concerned with domination than liberation, with extracting wealth and accumulating power rather than taking responsibility for redistributing resources. White supremacy has possessed the Church in ways that are hard for white people to see. The voices crying out in our scriptures of Advent call for repentance and ask God for help. As a parish, our repentance must be committed to repair of our prayers and symbols in our liturgy for starters.

I’m going to be particularly mindful of our use of darkness-and-light language and making changes when darkness is set apart as either evil or less desirable than light, especially as we move from Advent into Epiphany this year. I began with editing the collect for this Sunday. Rather than “casting away the works of darkness and putting on the armor of light,” the alternative words remind us what Psalm 139 teaches, that to God, darkness and light are both alike, and asks for help to cast away the bonds of sin and stand up for God’s justice and love.  I want, furthermore, to emphasize the blessings and beauty of darkness as we in the northern hemisphere enter this season of long nights.

My second resolution is to find ways for Emmanuelites to engage more rigorously with the anti-racism work from two diocesan-wide resolutions, which passed nearly unanimously earlier this month at our Diocesan Convention. The first convention resolution, “A Call for Repentance and Reparations,” invites all congregations and institutions of the Diocese of Massachusetts in the name of repentance, reconciliation, and accountability to our siblings of color in our Diocese, to prayerfully and purposefully explore their historic involvement in, and present wealth derived from, the forced labor of enslaved people. We are urged to move toward full disclosure of our history and actions as the process of reparations begins in earnest. At Emmanuel, we have done some of this work in our history and archives, and we need to do more.

The second convention resolution is, “A Call to Address the Neglect of the Seven Historically Black Churches of the Diocese and to Strengthen Their Interrelationships.” We have resolved to address the neglect—through overt and systemic discrimination, unequal treatment, and the disparate impact of circumscribed decision-making—of the seven historically Black churches by other congregations and institutions of our diocese. In the resolution, we confess our sin of racism and its dehumanizing impact, we condemn racism in all its forms and expressions, and call on all clergy and lay persons in our diocese to work to systemically dismantle it. Emmanuel has had working relationships with four of those seven Historically Black Churches, with individual connections or small groups over the last dozen years, and we will look for more opportunities to support and engage historically Black congregations in the coming years, moving from charity to solidarity. [2]

My third resolution is that in this new year, we will form one or two dialogue circles with people from Emmanuel and the Cathedral Crossing to participate in the Episcopal Church’s Sacred Ground curriculum, which is an anti-racism pilgrimage using documentary films, readings, and deep discussions about race and faith over a period of 6-8 months. The vestry and I have looked at the curriculum and talked with others who are familiar with it;  we believe that, over the last few years, Emmanuel Church has engaged in some of the hard work of examining ways we participate in white-supremacy, and we want to go deeper and wider. We plan for conversation circles that are diverse in terms of gender, sex, class, age, ideology, regional or national origin, but not race. This curriculum is designed to help white people do our work without leaning on people of color for representation, explanation, or chaplaincy as we deeply engage our history and our present situation in the United States when it comes to race. Stay tuned for details in the next 4-6 weeks; in the meantime, I encourage your questions and your input, whatever the color of your skin! In an interview about race, writer Claudia Rankine asked: “How can I say this so we can stay in the car together?” I want to know how we can speak about race and stay in the same church together? [3]

These New Year’s resolutions will help us keep watch, keep awake, keep alive, look for the disclosure, the revelation of Love. Our Gospel passage from Mark begins, “But in those days, after that suffering (or affliction), the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give her light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” This might be merciful: lights out on the violence and the devastation so we can marvel at the falling stars. In other words, your world is going to be turned upside down and set right. Your world is going to be rocked, and the people, systems, and structures you’ve assumed won’t ever change are going to tumble down; it’s going to be tumultuous. Just prior to this passage, Jesus, speaking to his disciples, has predicted that they will have personal and interpersonal struggles, betrayals, and trials. And that’s not all; there will be institutional failings, regional failings, national and international failings: famines, earthquakes in various places, wars and rumors of wars. That all sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And so It has been familiar through the ages.
The writer of Mark was not imagining a time thousands of years in the future; this is a description of what Jesus and his disciples were in the midst of. In Mark, this is Jesus’ last teaching before his own betrayal, trial, and execution;  this is his last teaching before he asked his closest friends to keep watch while he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, and three times found them all asleep. He never stopped loving them or relying on them to get the Word out. And we know that for the Gospel writer, this story is written for a community experiencing institutional, regional, national, and international failings. This final lesson from Jesus is not about tossing, turning, and worrying all night long; it is about being attentive and alive to the possibilities of new beginnings even in the midst of great suffering or affliction, not succumbing to the deadening despair, numbness, complacency, or willful ignorance, which might get us through the day or night, but doesn’t make us more available to God and one another. American philosopher Cornel West once said, “You must let suffering speak if you want to hear the truth.” For Advent, I’d add, we must let suffering come into our view if we want to see the truth, so that, in the words of Paul, “We are not lacking in any spiritual gift as we wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

I believe that is how we can know that this text can speak to us in 2020, because we too experience betrayals, trials, executions, and regional, national, and international failings. We too must watch for signs of new life in what is right in front of us, being alert for God’s (for Love’s) saving action in the world, being alive to the possibilities of grace happening even and especially when the stars begin to fall.

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