"‘Twas a Strange Night in Advent”

9 December 2012

The Second Sunday of Advent

Kent School

St. Joseph’s Chapel

If you listen closely to the readings of this Advent season, the results can be strange and jarring.  The comfortable expectations of this sentimental season—especially during these last few days before our long awaited vacation--come up against the hard edges of the Advent discipline on this second Sunday.  The figure of John the Baptist in today’s gospel is provocative, and unsettling.  The tight tension, or seeming contradiction, of Advent warnings or doom and expectations of Christmas cheer, is at its most dramatic in John the Baptist, who comes to us with prophecies of judgment if we don’t wake up to how we are living our lives.

God is coming, John the Baptist warns us, but what will that mean?  Will God’s wrath or God’s Love come among us as our guest this year?  Unlike the Christmas story itself, the lessons for Advent are edgy and dark.  John the Baptist lived in the wilderness, and people came to him, including Jesus, to hear his prophetic voice.  The tame moments when we approach the Christ child radically contrast with the Advent voices of our tradition that call us to account, and repentance; we are not ready for, nor are we worthy of, the love of God, so we are told by John. 

So, John the Baptist, the voice crying in the wilderness, won’t let us be free, awash in the warm glow of Christmas.  It says in today’s gospel from Luke that the word of God came to John, but it’s not a very nice word if we read Luke past the lesson assigned this morning.  Here’s John the Baptist just a few verses later in Luke:

“You brood of vipers!  (Vipers are snakes by the way).  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bear fruits worthy of repentance…Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees.”

             

So today, on this last Sunday before the break, I will tell you a story from my past, from long ago; a story that is both funny and sad, tragic and comic.  My own prophetic ministry, as a satirical John the Baptist, was a personal failure.  But I survived, just barely, to tell you the tale.  To make a long story just a little shorter, I once stole a Christmas tree.  I will have to take you back to my first year of divinity school at the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan, to a time before you were born.  At General Seminary, there is always an historic reading of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” with all of the children from the seminary and the neighborhood gathered around the massive fireplace in the common area.  A favorite reader of the story was the then Governor of New York Mario Cuomo.  His son Andrew is the current governor of New York.  However, my own controversial ministry to General Seminary was more along the lines of the morality play “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.”  I was the Grinch.

It all began so simply on a December day of cold and wintry Advent gloom.  It was then that I first noticed the early appearance, the premature arrival that is, of a Christmas tree on the afternoon of December 6^th, 1989.  Ah, the Christmas tree; this is a tradition which has no scriptural support, or theological justification, or religious meaning whatsoever.  The Christmas tree is actually Pagan in its origins.  The tree in question was set up in the exact middle of the Oxford style Close of General Seminary in Manhattan. The children had decorated the tree to celebrate St. Nicholas Day on December 6th.  I hadn’t known that last fact when I first began plotting the Pagan tree’s downfall, but it wouldn’t have stopped me.  I was young and impetuous, and full of brio.  “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees,” says John the Baptist, after all. 

But here’s the problem; technically, religiously speaking, the tree, which has—let me repeat—no religious meaning, should not make an appearance until December 24^th, the beginning of the Christmas season, after Advent is over.  The tree should stand for the twelve days of Christmas, and then go down at Epiphany.  If you’re going to be technical, which I certainly was.  My theft was during finals week, judgment season as the Baptist once warned us; and a plan was instantly hatched in my stressed out, homework-addled brain.  I tried, unsuccessfully, to focus on my upcoming Koine Greek exam, but a Grinch, not a scholar, was lurking in the shadows of General Seminary.

I wasn’t planning to steal the tree, not exactly, just to move it, under the veneer of satire and the cover of darkness.  Due to the great size of the tree, I needed some help; a few disciples if you will.  So I shared my Advent plan for a commando strike with two of my classmates, who are now both priests, here in the Northeast.  We went into holy Advent motion in the first hour of 7 December, a day that still lives in infamy at General Seminary.  They still tell the story to their children.  We Advent guardians were clad in black cassock (robes like the vergers); our visages were darkened with face paint—just three ghosts of the seminary tidying things up to insure a pure Advent.  As I said, the season of Christmas begins on December 24^th, and not a minute before. 

The tree was coming down. 

Strange church mischief was in the midnight air.   

We three, we merry Advent Police, left a lovely sign in purple calligraphy where the tree had been raised the day before.  Our calling card sign boldly read: “Beware you secular n’er do wells!  The Advent Police.”  Naturally, naturally, I chose the Dean of General Seminary as the honorary commander of the Advent Police.  We moved the tree into his office (the next day breaking and entering was among the charges against me).  The dean’s office was far too small for the enormous Christmas tree.  Even placed at an angle, it was still bent at the top by the ceiling, forming an upside down L shape.  The angel was set sideways by our mad midnight work; but the tree still looked very pretty, quite special, when we turned on the Christmas lights in the dark office.  Surely we had laid the groundwork for a lovely day at the helm for the veteran dean.  Good morning, sir.  It is more blessed to give than to receive.  A letter of introduction from the mysterious and apocalyptic Advent Police was waiting for the good priest on his desk.  What a glorious night it was.  We even rang the bell in the seminary tower to celebrate the holy Advent that was upon all the sleeping Whos in Whoville. 

Or something like that.

  

But my Advent adventure, or misadventure, became my very own painful Christmas lesson by the next morning. 

I learned, so much, by the very next day.

Here are the lessons I learned:

1)  I discovered, very quickly, that one person’s satire is, sometimes, another person’s disciplinary investigation.  And it’s not very fun to be the subject of a disciplinary investigation when you’re supposed to be in graduate school.  It is also better to confess when everything points to you.  The assistant dean came to my dorm room before breakfast to ask me a few questions about my whereabouts on the previous night. 

How did they know it was me?  How?  I ask you.    

2)  A dean, however stern and foreboding, can be a very kind and compassionate figure of authority at the same time, especially when you’re in trouble.  It often doesn’t feel like it at the time—only when you look back years later.  The dean put me on probation, even though some members of the faculty wanted the perpetrators expelled.  Yes, I was now a perp.  Breaking and entering takes you from the school handbook to the police station apparently, even during Advent.  

3)  I’m not as funny as I think I am.  And neither are you.  I learned that a good idea in the middle of the night can be a very bad idea by 9 AM the next morning.  Let me say this again: a good idea in the middle of the night can be a very bad one by morning.   

4)  The most important.  One person’s familiar holiday can be a small child’s very first Christmas, or the first time decorating a tree.  Think of the magic of your first real snowfall, or the first time hearing the story of the birth of Jesus, or hearing the rich beauty of the Lessons and Carols service on Wednesday.  It’s always somebody’s first time.  Or this year could be the first time a person you know really feels the true spirit of this season, a time of giving not just receiving.  And it can also be a loved one’s last Christmas.  Near the end of your life, I have no doubt that sharing a Christmas with your family is a foretaste of heaven itself.

It was through my failure as a Christmas Grinch that I learned the important lesson of this season.  Though John the Baptist was right about many things, he was also deeply, terribly wrong, in a sense—but an important one--about the most significant thing of all: Ours is not a God of doom, but rather a God of grace, love, forgiveness, and unspeakable beauty.  A God who makes each of us a beginner when it comes to experiencing, and sharing, the mystery of Love.  To be a child of God is to live in wonder; to find the mystical in the ordinary, and the ordinary in the mystical.  In God’s mercy, in those terrifying depths of divine love too bright for our mortal eyes to gaze upon, we were and are not condemned by God. 

Something different and unexpected happened. 

God instead gave us Jesus Christ; and God gave us each other. 

The Christian writer and Oxford professor C.S. Lewis once described the infinite grace of God with these words: “The hardness of God is better than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”  

The hardness of God is better than the softness of men. 

God gave, and still gives, everything to win our hearts, and to save our souls, that we too may give freely to each other and to our world as we have received God’s love and mercy.  Love is not simply what we expected, or what we needed; it is more than we can possibly imagine.  The only gift we can give back to God is the very best of who we are: to live again the good life of compassion, forgiveness, and charity to one another, in word and deed; that God may no longer be a stranger in the world, and in our hearts.  Have a blessed Advent and a merry Christmas and a happy Hanukkah.  May God bless all of you, and your families, in the weeks to come. 

“Advent Marks in Time: God in the Here and Now”

2 December 2012

The First Sunday of Advent

The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees

St. Joseph’s Chapel, Kent School

I’d like to begin this sermon exactly where Rachel Choe ended the meditation chapel on Thursday evening.  She was pondering the way we live our lives.  What exactly are we rushing off to?  Why are we in such a hurry to be out of high school?  Or college?  When exactly is this golden time that we seem to be expecting, just around the next corner?  At our formal dinners, we often hear how many days there are left for seniors.  If we lived our lives correctly, I think the seniors would be sad, and the third form would be overjoyed to hear about the plentiful days until graduation.  This is a special time of year, but we do it all wrong.  We even have a name for the madness: the Christmas rush.  At the meditation chapel, an alternative was presented: to be, simply and deeply, present in the moment. 

There is a wonderful book about the power and potential that is in the moment called The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle.  This short passage is about the mystery of our being that can be found when we stop rushing past our lives, at Christmas or any time. 

            “Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death.  However, Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence.  This means that it is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature.  But don’t seek to grasp it with your mind.  Don’t try to understand it.  You can only know it when your mind is still.  When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.  To regain awareness of Being and to abide in the state of ‘feeling-realization’ is enlightenment.”

            Three years ago, I was giving the opening prayer, the benediction, at a dinner for my high school class in Turlock, California.  The Turlock Bulldogs, it was a lifetime ago.  The occasion for the dinner was our twenty-fifth year since our graduation.  Looking around the room, I reflected on how we were all in a hurry to grow up.  Why were we like that?  Most of us would give quite a lot, maybe everything, to go backward in time; to simply be in the moment as the Christmas break was approaching in the magical time of our youth, now gone.   Maybe, just maybe, I said, we could slow down tonight—and be completely present in the moment.  If we did that, if we could find a way, we would be more than young again.  Somehow I think that’s what God is all about, though I don’t think that’s the word we would use: to describe the wonder of just being.   

In 2010, a documentary about education came out called The Race to Nowhere, directed by Vicki Abeles.  She came up with the idea for the documentary as she watched her high achieving daughter actually become physically sick from academic pressure.  This movie is about highly motivated kids who are deeply unhappy, even when they get the results, like the right college admission, that they’re looking for.  These are not the slackers.  The documentary explores the lives and values of teenagers who want to be the very best, but the psychological cost of their striving is presented in this thoughtful and compassionate movie.  Whether you are a high honors student or not, you are all responding to pressure, be it academic, athletic, social, or extracurricular.  And the toxic cocktail of all of these things is the idea that your college admissions, or rejections, are your measurement of worth as a human being.  Why are we racing off to nowhere?  Human beings are crazy.  Animals actually don’t have neuroses.  Unless they live with people.  Then they start to get a little crazy.        

I have compassion for all of you racing off to nowhere: because I was once an insane little hamster on the crazy wheel myself.  I wasn’t always the Zen master of meditative basketball and sacred hoops.  Twenty-eight years ago, I was the valedictorian in my class, out of some five hundred students.  Now I’m in recovery, I go to meetings.  Being the valedictorian was something I decided to be; it didn’t just happen.  I didn’t have the same problem with athletics because I never played, or rarely played when the game was already decided.  Those coaches are all going to hell, by the way.  I’d be sent in with eighteen seconds left to play, so I tried to shoot as many times as possible before the horn sounded.  But, every night, I studied like a demon, with an agenda.  I had two objectives: one was to be the very best, to be #1.  The second was my holy grail, my golden dream: to go to West Point. 

Then a terrible thing happened: I got everything I ever wanted.  I won the race to nowhere.  Now West Point is a wonderful place if you like military perfection, people screaming at you, marching all the time, firing automatic weapons, and the possibility of live combat (whether or not you agree with American foreign policy).  Aside from being unable to take orders, smirking when people yelled at me, and hating regimentation, I loved it at West Point.  The uniforms were fantastic, and great with the ladies.  But I also had a very important and terrible realization.  I wasn’t there for me; I was there for my father.  I was living his dream, not mine, and I wasn’t going to get any closer to him by doing it.  I wasn’t going to get the love I wanted by following his dream.  So I did something that was very painful—is painful to this very day, though it’s a deep and good pain because it came with self discovery.  My great decision: I dropped out of West Point, and the race to nowhere.  I went in search of my authentic self.  Oh, and by the way, nobody at the twenty-five year reunion seemed to remember, or care, that I was the valedictorian, or that I dropped out of West Point.  I felt exactly the same way.

When my dream of being a West Point graduate and an army officer died, a new dream was born—almost instantaneously.  It is often when you fail that you find the true terms of your success.  That new dream, a new story, would lead me to divinity school and the priesthood; and eventually to you, my home at Kent on the other side of the country from California, and not very far from West Point, the citadel of my lost childhood.  In my first year of divinity school, the dean of my seminary told us something strange and mysterious.  He said we should make all of our study into a form of prayer.  To make all of our study into a prayer.  This idea was the exact opposite of my pre-West Point self.  Everything then was an insane competition where a bad grade (like an A-) was an indication of my worth as a human being. 

Make your study into a form of prayer. 

How can you do this?  Well, here’s a place to start in your thinking.  During my first year at Kent, a young man named Jon Geller was diagnosed with bone cancer.  He played center for Coach Marble on a team that eventually won the New England Championship.  But football was over for Jon in preseason; when his cancer was discovered after he broke his shoulder during practice.  Jon had to leave Kent to take a medical leave for chemotherapy treatments at home in Montreal.  Jon wasn’t facing college admissions stress anymore, or the nose guard across the line.  He was facing the ultimate test that we will all face.  And the gritty, determined young man fought his cancer, with every fiber of his being.  This is a happy story because Jon went into remission.  He returned to Kent; not to be a football player, but to be a student.  To be a human being.  To just be.  In the spring of his senior year, before graduation, Jon spoke in chapel about his journey, back to life as we know it.  I can remember every word.  You could have heard a pin drop in this chapel.  At the end of his chapel talk, he gave two Thanksgivings to God.  The first will surprise you.  Jon said he was grateful for being able to do homework again.  To read, to write, to think, to do math problems, to draw, to understand the world around him.  Jon had learned how to make studying into a form of prayer.  His second Thanksgiving was for friendship.  You never know how important your friends are until your life is on the line.  Being a friend is one of the most important human vocations.  Be kind to each other. 

Make your life into a prayer of gratitude, completely in the moment.  People will notice something different about you, almost instantly, a change in the air, a wonderful disturbance in the force.  This is called peace of mind, the change that comes over you when your authentic self is born.  It is God incarnate, but you probably won’t even need to use that word.  Being will be enough.   

There is a Christmas movie that many of you have seen called Love Actually.  How many of you have seen it?  My wife loves it.  We watched it again last night.  I pretend to hate it, because it’s pretty cheesy at times, but I secretly don’t.  “I feel it in my fingers.  I feel it in my toes.”  The opening voice over is by Hugh Grant, while watching people at Heathrow Airport, as family and friends unite after flights from all over the world.  In his words, Grant speaks of the phone calls on September 11^th , by people on the airplanes.  People who knew that they were going to die made the last phone call of their lives.  They didn’t talk about colleges, or work, or wealth.  They were calls of love to family members, words that live forever.  The conversations were the last words of love, from the deepest place of our being.  It was Love actualized. 

Beyond even approaching your studies with a new heart, make your entire life into a form of prayer.  A prayer of gratitude.                     

            I don’t often wait until the last paragraph to address the gospel.  But here we are at the end.  I think it takes a while to really see this gospel, to wake up to it.  Jesus speaks about the powerful signs coming in the future that will reveal the presence of God in our world.  These lessons are often associated with the second coming of Jesus Christ.  They are read during the season of Advent which is considered a time of watching and waiting.  But if Advent is simply about watching and waiting, we’ll probably miss the miracle, even if it’s right in front of our eyes.  When Advent waiting shifts to simply being, the second coming is in the here and now.  It is.  Don’t miss the magic of the next week and a half by merely counting down the days until you race off to nowhere.  Stop, sit, rest, be, and love actually.  It will make your life rich beyond words.  It’s all around us; as the God of Love, the child of our Being, is born again, and again, in poor hearts like ours.