Advent 1B, 3 December 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

• Isaiah 64:1-9. O that you would tear open the heavens and come down….We are your people.
• 1 Corinthians 1:1-9. So that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.
• Mark 13:24-37. Keep awake.

O God of repentance, repair, and reconciliation, 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.

Hello! Happy Advent! Happy Churchy New Year! I’m so glad to be back with you after four months of time away.  I’m eager to hear about how you’ve changed and grown while we’ve been apart.  I hope you’ll find a time to talk with me so we can catch up; or if you’re new to Emmanuel, so that we can get to know one another. I have stories to tell you about my adventures learning about my Maryland ancestors and my Civil Rights pilgrimage with my wife Joy across the deep South – from Louisiana to Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. I’ve been learning about and reflecting more deeply on my family’s relationship with racial oppression, my Church’s (big C) relationship with racial oppression, and my government’s relationship with racial oppression. Along the way, I’ve been building new relationships with folks who are engaging in racial reckoning by learning and practicing restorative and reparative justice in meaningful and sustainable ways. My heart is full of gratitude for Emmanuel Church’s gift to me of time away for rest and restoration, and for education and inspiration.

It’s good to be carrying gratitude for Emmanuel Church in my heart this Advent, because Advent is a hard season.  I don’t mean hard because of extra programs and extra services, extra decorating and extra shopping, extra advertising and extra cold weather; that’s all hard. I mean hard because of the mirror that Advent scriptures hold up to us. As my friend The Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge recently said, Advent “locates us within the coming of the divine reign, the dream of God.” I love the ambiguity of that phrase the dream of God, because it can mean our dream about God and also God’s dream for us. Either way, Advent is decidedly NOT about passively waiting, and it’s not just about counting down or ramping up to Christmas.

I want you to notice that this Advent doesn’t start our new church year with festivities or celebrations, but with Isaiah’s shouts of lamentation to the Holy One: oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so the mountains would quake and the brushwood fire would cause water to boil, so that the nations might tremble at your presence, O Love Divine, and that you would forgive us and remember that we are all your people. Because, O Love Excelling, we have made a mess we do not know how to clean up. Tear open the cloudy veil. Come to our aid.

This Advent also begins with a letter from Paul written in response to reports of in-fighting – of quarrelling in the church in Corinth. What were they arguing about? Oh the usual – marriage and sexual intimacy, how to get along in a world with non-Christians, how to get along in a world with other Christians, the right (and wrong) ways to worship, women’s leadership…things like that. The same things the Church still quarrels about, right? 

This Advent also begins with the Gospel of Mark’s apocalypse, which means revelation or unveiling. Here it’s in the form of Jesus’ prediction or disclosure about the end of life as his disciples know it. The end, according to Mark, will end up being a very good thing, because the enormity of suffering and desolation being experienced will come to an end. I feel like I get this at a deeper level than I ever have before because of the revelations and devastations of these past months. 

There’s a curious contrast in Jesus’ teaching about the experience of tribulation, of suffering, deprivation, misery, or persecution. In one breath, Jesus is quoting Isaiah about the darkening of the sun and moon, the falling stars, shaking heaven and earth. In the next breath, he’s talking about a plain, old fig tree. Biblical scholars can’t agree on what this means: why this reference to a fig tree is there in the middle of this story. Maybe Mark made a mistake; maybe he missed part of the story. More likely, the connection, once obvious to Mark’s community, is now obscure. I think, however, that Jesus was inviting his distraught listeners to focus on was going on right in front of them. The lesson of the fig tree is that as soon as its branch becomes tender, vulnerable, yielding to pressure, splitting open and putting forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see terrible sufferings, vulnerabilities, splitting openings, overwhelmingly intense pressure, you know that your Redeemer is near, at the very gates. The Gospel of Mark’s emphasis is on keeping awake. The Greek is probably better translated keep watch, be alert, be alive: watch for signs in whatever is right in front of you; be alert for Love’s saving action in the world; be alive to the possibilities of grace happening when the stars begin to fall. Heaven and earth pass away, but Jesus’ words remain. That’s true, isn’t it? We are still listening to Jesus’ words spoken and set to music all these years later.

Some of you know that I like to make new-year’s resolutions on the first Sunday of the Church year. They are not personal resolutions about healthier choices or better alignment of resources with values to live life more fully. I want to make resolutions about community: corporate, collective commitments for institutional repentance, repair, and reconciliation. These are the themes of Advent that I want to privilege because of how the scriptures speak to us. 

My first resolution has to do with our liturgy, and here I’m responding to a book by The Rev. Lenny Duncan, a Black pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Duncan’s book is called Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US. (The Episcopal Church is the second whitest, so we should listen in.) 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 think about how we contribute to 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; it is much more concerned with domination than liberation, with extracting wealth and amassing power rather than taking responsibility for a just distribution of resources. The voices crying out in our scriptures of Advent, however, call for repentance and ask God for help. As a parish, our repentance must be committed to repair of our prayers and of the symbols in our liturgies. 

I’m calling on us again to be particularly mindful of our use of darkness-and-light language and to make 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,” 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 God’s love. Furthermore, I want to emphasize the blessings and beauties of darkness as we in the northern hemisphere enter this season of long nights.

My second resolution is that in this new year, we will continue our conversation at Emmanuel about how to support and engage in the work of relational and financial reparations, which our Diocese of Massachusetts is leading. Emmanuel’s vestry has been reading and talking about a book called Reparations: A Plan for the Church by The Rev. Peter Jarrett-Schell, a white Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Washington. I heard from them yesterday about their recent work, and I shared with them some of mine. What I heard from them is that reparations work is daunting, and that Emmanuel Church has a long history of reparations in other areas such as care for people living with addiction, affirming queer people, and cultivating deep, ecumenical and interfaith relationships. It is daunting, but we can do this.

While some racial reparations work focuses on descendants of formerly enslaved people, we don’t have to go back that far or focus our attention so narrowly. Reparations are due for financial and other injuries sustained by People of Color due to white-supremacist laws, policies, and practices in this city, state, and nation in our lifetime. So as we engage in reparations, we are taking a clear stand against deep-seated and widely accepted, immoral behaviors. And if this sounds like a zero-sum game, it’s not. According to The Boston Foundation, closing the racial-wealth gap in our country would increase the gross domestic product by more than $14 billion. Closing the gap heals everyone; that’s a foundational premise of the Emmanuel Movement.

These New Year’s resolutions will help us keep watch, keep awake, keep alive, and look for the disclosure, the revelation of Love that is very near. As we go, if we are faithful to Jesus’ teachings, we can expect that our world is going to be turned upside down and set right. We can expect that our world is going to be rocked, and the oppressive systems and structures we’ve assumed won’t ever change will tumble down. 

You know, this is Jesus’ last teaching in the Gospel of Mark before he asked his closest friends to keep watch while he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Three times he found them all asleep, yet he never stopped loving them or relying on them to get the Word out. This final lesson from Jesus is not about tossing and turning and worrying all night long. This final lesson is about being attentive and alive to the possibilities of new beginnings even (and especially) in the midst of great suffering or affliction. It is about not succumbing to the deadening despair, the numbness or complacency, or the 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.”

Of course, institutions and communities are made up of individuals. Each of us has the power to make a difference just by showing up. Listen to this poem by Nikita Gill, which came across my desk a few weeks ago.[2]

Everything is on fire.
But everyone I love is doing beautiful things
and trying to make life worth living
and I know I don’t have to believe in everything
but I believe in that.

I encourage each of you to do the same. I encourage each of you to carry gratitude for Emmanuel Church in your heart as we enter this season of Advent.

1.  J. Denny Weaver, The Non-violent Atonement, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011) p. 130.
2. Nikita Gill, “Everything is on Fire”, Wild Embers:  Poems of Rebellion, Fire & Beauty. Boston: Hachett Book Group, 2017.