Happy New Year!
Don’t worry, it is still November – you haven’t missed weeks of baking and Christmas shopping, and I haven’t forgotten what month it is – but today is the new year, at least in liturgical time. It’s that Sunday when we start again to tell the story of the life of Jesus Christ that we tell every year through the cycle of Advent and Christmas and Epiphany and Lent and Easter and Pentecost and Ordinary Time.
It’s interesting that the liturgical year, that long, beautiful story, doesn’t start with a big celebration, like our secular New Year’s does – there’s no ball drop, no fireworks, no big parties or feasts or live broadcasts from New York City.The beginning of the church year doesn’t happen on one of our big feast days – not All Saints, not Pentecost, not Christmas, not even Easter, the day of Resurrection – the beginning of the church year starts quietly. It begins in Advent, in a season of waiting. It begins not with fireworks, but with a single lit candle.
In a season when many of us are preoccupied with baking and Christmas shopping and planning parties and feasts, Advent is countercultural. It is significant that this is where the story of our faith begins – in quiet, in prayer, in hope, in anticipation of the birth of a child who changed the world through a life and death and resurrection that were countercultural – a king born in a stable, into a family who became refugees; a controversial Messiah who performed miracles and befriended and reached out to the outcasts and the misfits. He was arrested and executed by an empire and then rose again from the dead, and inspired and transformed generations for the next two thousand years.
It all starts here, in Advent. No fireworks. No broadcast from Times Square. Just the lighting of a candle – one today, another next week, another the following week, and another the week after that, illuminating the darkness little by little, points of light as the days grow shorter, like winter stars in the sky, as we wait the coming, the Advent, of a child, and all the hope and restoration and life and grace and healing that child brings.
Cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light.
The night is far gone, the day is near.
Today’s readings invite us into the journey that is Advent, finding us wherever and whenever we are. From Isaiah:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
Today, the start of Advent, is an invitation first into holiness, an invitation to acknowledge this new and quiet beginning, to adjust our lives to listening, to praying, to paying attention to the light, especially, at least in our hemisphere, as the days grow shorter and the night comes sooner and the sky grows darker. And it is a waiting that is not just about the four weeks before Christmas, or just about a child born two thousand years ago – it is about waiting, now, for the peace to come, for a time when we will beat swords into ploughshares – leaving the work of war for the work of planting and nourishing – when nations and peoples will finally be at peace – these are the hopes that continue to speak to us, to make us grieve – and to make us hope – in every century and every decade.
Advent is also an invitation into action, into intention. What can you build into your days? What can we do to to enter into countercultural holiness, to spend some time on God’s mountain in the fray of obligations and work and social expectations? We might take a few minutes every day, not just on Sunday, to light a candle, to read a devotional, to write or create something, to pray. What can we do as people, as a people, to see the hope of peace come to be? How does prayer turn into transformation, in our own lives, and in the lives of those who travel this way with us?
And if Advent is an invitation into holiness, into intention, it is then an invitation to the human journey, into a story that is earthbound just as much as it is heaven bound. In celebrating Advent and Christmas, we remember the life of a child, the life of God incarnate, that Christ lived as we live, with friendships and family and griefs and fears and joys just as we have, a life he spent in city and in wilderness, in synagogue and in the public square. We wait, living our lives too with friendships and family and griefs and fears and joys, in city and in wilderness, in church and in the public square, knowing that our human experience was shared by the holy family, and is shared by those who move through Advent with us.
And so today, the start of Advent, is finally an invitation into transformation – the place where the holy and the human meet, where we acknowledge our fears and our joys and our shared experiences in prayer, and we invite God to work through us, listen for God’s voice and look for the path to be made clear. It is a journey – in fact, today’s Psalm is a Psalm of pilgrimage. Advent is an invitation to step into the story that is beginning to unfold, that holds all of this together – birth and incarnation, death and resurrection, Epiphany and Easter, the hope of peace, two thousand years ago and today.
Advent begins where we are
and it does not leave us there
It is the beginning of a journey
not the end of one
it is light unknown and unexpected
sending us on the way
it is light hoped-for and unimagined
that the way moves us toward
it is light of angels and of stars
the light of candles and of night watches
the light of winter dawns and sunrise gardens
where we beat swords into ploughshares
planted and plowed and prayed in and named in and buried in –
but not forever
Advent is the winter garden where we plant
and where we are planted
when the ground is cold
and the days are short
Amen.
— The Rev. Cara Ellen Modisett, Curate, Trinity Episcopal Church of Staunton
First Sunday of Advent, Year A, November 27, 2022
Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122
photo by Jarl Schmidt on Unsplash
