Sermon by Rev. Victor Carpenter, December 2, 2007
First Religious Society, Carlisle, Massachusetts
Those of us who have watched any or all of Ken Burn’s new documentary about World War II, named simply “The War”, got a full dose of the horror and the pressure of that conflict. What you might have missed was the fact that war involves a lot of “waiting”.
A family longs for a letter from a young man in harms way;
A kid gazes each day at a photograph of a far-away sweetheart;
There is deep yearning for a great homecoming when the war would finally be over. The waiting permeated the whole society, soldier and civilian alike.
This Sunday is the first Sunday of the Advent season. Hence the candle lit to celebrate that fact.
Advent means “waiting”. One commentator described this season as being the time when “the spirit of God is arousing us within and we’re feeling the birth pangs. And, like a pregnant mother, we are enlarged in the waiting.”
I know s that such a poetic, not to say “religious” description of this season is really out of step” with our normal inclination to “stop waiting and get on with it - whatever it happens to be at the moment.”
We are impatient people. “Waiting” resembles “sloth. That’s why we are constantly tempted to do things, to work on things – including ourselves – to be more THIS and less THAT.
Which means that we generally run our lives in direct opposition to the sacred traditions of the world’s religions. Religions which urge our observation of the times and places of Sabbath and Jubilee.
Consider: the moon does not “race through” its “new phase; it “rests” in its new phase; Consider the Psalmist speaking of the soul’s necessity to “WAIT” for the lord and renew you strength; Consider the zen Buddhist teaching that says,” When you are most tempted to do something, Don’t.”
Several years ago I received a gift - a large amaryllis plant in a pot. I knew nothing about this strange flower except what I saw in front of me – a long, leafless green stem careening upward like the trunk of a palm tree. It went up some thirty inches to the top where I saw three large blazing red blossoms turned in all directions - searching the room like beams from a lighthouse.
I was delighted with the gift. I put it in a place of honor in the living room to be admired – as it was for a month before it began to drop its blossoms one by one and mysteriously retreat into a gnarled lump that looked like dirty celery root.
I took it out of the living room, put it under the sink (along with the other things that inhabit dark places) and forgot about it.
A year went by; my life changed; we planned to move from our house. In the preparations and packing I pulled the pot with the dead root out from under the sink along with the other odds and ends. It looked just as dark and dead as it had the year before, but, several days before the movers arrived, I noticed this miniscule shoot - a fingernail- clipping – size splash of crayola green color peeking out of one side of the root.
Within hours the little shoot had stretched out its tiny hand a whole inch toward the light.
NOT dead - only waiting under the sink.
Now that amaryllis stands miracle tall with three new blood red flowers.
I invoke the flowers true name: Belladonna Amaryllis (Our Lady of Beauty), but I suggest that the beauty is also suggested in the WAITING – in the long dark months spent under the sink.
Waiting is an interior discipline. It grows from the inside out. It’s not passive, but it is PATIENT. Someone described this kind of waiting as a condition of being “ gently alert”.
Remember the Carly Simon song “ Anticipation”? It begins, “ We can never know about the days to come, but we think about them in many ways…”
Well what does it mean to” think … WITH ANTICIPATION?”
Several Options: there’s the “better not pout, better not cry” childlike waiting for the goodies that will appear in a narrowly defined future.
Goodies that will appear with no help from us.
Such an attitude is both childish and frivolous; I suggest an alternative.
Can you anticipate the coming of a time of justice and righteousness???
Can you anticipate a future in which freedom and reconciliation and wholeness are not pleasant dreams but actual realities - when every valley of sorrow is exhaled and every mountain and hill of consumer goods and merchandizing madness is made low???
The theologian Walter Wink can anticipate it. He reports that there is concrete evidence of what he names as “the exponential increase in the use of non-violence for social change in just the last few years”.
Such non-violence goes by many names, “people power”; “soul force”,
“Passive resistance” - each of one of those phrases signify attempts to awaken others to a deeper awareness of their humanity.
Nelson Mandela did it in South Africa; Mahatma Ghandi did it in India; Martin Luther King did it in Montgomery Alabama; Caesar Chavez did it in Southern California; Susan B Anthony did it at Seneca Fall, New York; Eleanor Roosevelt did it everywhere.
The fact is that such actions go on all the time; in situations great and small. They get little or no attention from the media that is conditioned (and conditions us) to believe that only violence produces results and never resolve anything.
I remember an interview with the great singer/songwriter Pete Seeger (himself a veteran of so many non-violent engagements in the cause of peace and justice). In the course of the interview Seeger revealed that he always carried a stone in his pocket.
Asked why, he answered by recalling a protest demonstration some years before at Duke University where workers rights were being denied. Seeger had been invited to sing at a rally supporting the workers demands
The protest had spread from the University workers themselves to the students and the administration was struggling to achieve an outcome that would satisfy all parties.
The struggle was heated and tempters shortened but, despite provocation from the campus police force, both workers and students were acting with restraint and progress toward resolution of the issues was progressing.
There had been little coverage by either the print or electronic media. Someone suggested the NBC and CBS notified. When reached CBZ asked if there was violence; when told “no” CBS asked to be called again when it did occur.
Hearing this Seeger got angry. In his anger that the “vigilant waiting” associated with the non-violent protest did not merit media coverage, he admitted that he picked up a stone and considered chucking it at a nearby window, thereby summoning the cameras to come and record the protest.
Instead he slipped the stone into his pocket. He keeps it there as a reminder that it takes restraint not to fall into the traps that an impatient society sets for us - to keep us from focusing on the possibility of a non-violent peaceful and just future.
On this, the first Sunday in Advent, it’s important to remember that the central figure of this season is NOT the expected infant but his mother.
The scriptural text for this time is Mary’s “song”, the Magnificat (which I read from Luke’s gospel) a few minutes ago.
Mary’s song is a pretty radical, yea subversive text.
God hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts;
He hath put down the mighty from their seats; and exhaled those of low degree.
He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away’
…………Mary is speaking about how the present order of things will be overturned and righteousness shall prevail upon the earth.
It is a stunning pronouncement of love’s establishment. It’s a work that’s worth the waiting !