A Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent
The Rev. Richard J. Bormes
Isaiah 40:l-11
Psalm 85
2 Peter 3:8-15a, 18
Mark 1:1-8
Not long ago at the Catholic Worker Infant House in Redwood City, California, a shelter for children, a five-year-old boy named Charlie was being placed in a foster home. It was to be the 7th foster home in which Charlie had been placed in the three years since he was 2 years old. Charlie has no memory of his birth family any more. expectations are often so different from the reality.
In fact, the longest place Charlie has ever lived is the Catholic Worker House. It is the only place he has lived which has any stability or security for him. The staff is the closest thing he knows to being a family. And now he is off to another new and unknown foster home. Charlie is a child without a sense of roots, succession, or heritage. He doesn’t know if he is part of a family, and so he needs constant reassurance that he does belong - somewhere.
The woman who is supervisor of the Catholic Worker House was walking him out to a car to meet his new foster parents. Charlie was filled with fear, meeting yet another new family into which he was being thrust. And he was also filled with incredible sadness of leaving the only security he knew, his only sense of belonging, the Catholic Worker House and its staff. He tugged on the side of the supervisors skirt, and she stopped. “Will you carry me?” he asked her. The woman bent down to reassure him, and told him that she thought he was getting too old to be carried. Charlie responded by saying, “I mean in your heart. Will you carry me in your heart?”
The supervisor could hardly believe her ears, what she had heard, what Charlie had said. But she told him that she certainly would. As they got almost to the car, he tugged once again on her skirt. She stopped again,and bent down to assure him once more. And he asked, “Will you think of me every day?” She said that she would, she would remember him every day, and she would carry him in her heart.
This story is, in many ways, I think, what Advent is all about. Christ is coming again into the world. And we are waiting. We are waiting and wondering if we will be part of his family. Because it’s not a Christmas card perfect world into which He is coming, but a real world. And so we wait with apprehension, and fear, and uncertainty. We wait for Christmas. We wait to be assured that we, in fact, belong to the family of God.
It seems to me that it’s hard work belonging to a family. There’s always tension when a family gathers. It’s never exactly the way we think it’s going to be, the way we want it to be. All the tensions and uncertainties of our lifetime seem present again when we gather, all the family secrets, all the things we don’t talk about, especially when we gather for Christmas - because our think our feelings are all that different from Charlie’s.
And then just as we really get into Advent and Christmas preparation, along comes this Gospel of Mark. It starts out with sort of a trumpet blast: Da da ta da ta da! “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” But immediately after the trumpet fanfare, not Jesus, but John the Baptist, John the messenger [is] sent by God to help us prepare our way for the coming of Christ.
This Gospel says that people from the whole Judean countryside went to hear him preach repentance, and were baptized by him in the Jordan River. Do you think you might have gone? I can only guess about what I might have done. Do you think we would invite him to St. John’s? To tell us how to prepare for the coming of Christ? This kind of tramp: uncombed hair, wearing animal skins, uncut nails, unwashed. Which of us would listen to this homeless person who probably didn't even budget to pay his taxes tell us that we have to change in order to prepare for the coming of Christ.
But this man, John, sent by God to show us how to prepare the way for Christ persists in telling us that preparation means conversion. He says that preparation for the coming of Christ means change, change in our values, change in our selves. It means examining our own lives, looking at who we really are. And so our own lives, our own stories in the here and now, no matter how sad, or how charming, or how cockeyed they may seem, everything that has ever happened to us is the real story of Christmas. And the only real way to prepare for Christmas, for Christ, is to look closely at those stories, so we can change those parts of our lives that need to be changed to be part of God’s family.
In other words, membership in the family of God lives within our own lives. Sacredness is only revealed through our own experience and lives in us. Our membership in our own families and in the family of God can only be realized by looking closely at our own stories and accepting who we are and what we are. It is the only real way to be assured of membership in a family. It is the only way to be assured of the love we so desperately need.
There is a mystery here, I think, in Charlies’ story and in John the Baptist’s, and why we seem so taken by such stories during Advent. And, I think it is because they are our Advent story, too. As we go through this season of busy preparation for Christmas don’t we all long for assurance, security, belonging, and love?
So if we take John the Baptist’s advice about preparing for Christ, preparing for Christmas do you think Charlies’ questions might be God’s questions of us in Advent?