It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas – not just here in this sanctuary, but, it seems, everywhere we turn.

Everything in our culture is saying that it’s the Christmas season, and I don’t know about you, but instead of getting a warm feeling in my heart, I get a knot in the pit of my stomach. I react with feelings of anxiety because there is so much to do – cards to write, presents to buy, trees to decorate, cookies to bake. But the church calendar gives us a different message and a different timetable.

Before we get to Christmas, there is first the season of Advent, which begins today. The four weeks of Advent is the Christian church’s New Year’s, our new beginning. And in contrast to the anxious doing of Christmas, Advent is time of hopeful waiting.

But we’re not particularly good at it, are we? Waiting and hoping seems at odds with the rhythm of activity that swirls around us this season. But hopeful waiting is what we are called to do these next four weeks of Advent -- to slow down, quiet ourselves, and wait with joy and anticipation for God to come into our lives.

I know that some of you are doing your own hopeful waiting – waiting for good test results, waiting for the cancer to go into remission, waiting for healing or reconciliation to take place. And we all wait for an end to the war, for peace in the Middle East, for a safer and more secure world.

There's nothing like anticipating a child to teach us how to wait in hope for things we cannot control. Adoptive parents know this. You fill out form after form, you submit to interviews, you round up letters of reference. You wait. You fill out more forms and wait some more. In the end, there isn't much you can do but wait. You wait and hope that the forms are in the right hands and that there indeed will be a child at the end of the process. Just ask Rob and Tara Matthews, who waited and hoped and waited some more until, after more than a year of hopeful waiting, little Chase was placed in their arms this past October. And it will be our joy to baptize him in two weeks!

And hopeful waiting is certainly a hallmark of pregnancy. Mothers preparing to give birth drink their glasses of milk and take their vitamins, expectant fathers whisper endearments over a growing belly...but there's nothing anyone can do to speed things up, nothing anyone can do, even, to ensure that all goes well as cells divide and bones take shape.

However a child arrives in our life -- through adoption, through childbirth, or through a story about a scared young couple giving birth in a barn half a world away -- what we receive, when we receive a child, is a stranger. A beloved one, to be sure, but a stranger nonetheless.

When my daughter was born, that was the first thing that struck me. When I brought Elizabeth, my firstborn, home from the hospital, I remember standing by her changing table, looking at her in bewilderment through the fog of fatigue and asking her out loud, “Who are you, and why are you here?” After nine months of sharing the same space, of being part of the same body, I was surprised at how wholly herself she was -- how she was not, in fact, an extension of me but very much her own little person. And, I might add, in the ensuing 18.5 years, I have found out that much of the work of parenthood is learning to honor the fact that she is, indeed, her own person!

The One whose coming we await together this season can sometimes seem like such a stranger. Even with all we think we know about him, even with all the ways we have interpreted him, Jesus still manages to surprise us and catch us off guard. Today, as we begin Advent, we would expect that our Gospel lesson would give us at least a hint of the birth we are all awaiting; but instead, our passage comes from deep into Matthew’s Gospel and has the adult Jesus warning us to “Keep awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

The dissonance between the meek and mild baby we expect and the fierce words of the adult who appears this morning underscores the paradox of the season. The word “advent” means “to come,” and during this season, we dwell somewhere between the “already” of God’s coming to us as a baby born in Bethlehem, and the “not yet” of Christ’s return at the end of the age, when the Kingdom of God will be a reality here on earth.

In our lesson from Isaiah, the prophet envisions this future kingdom, founded on the promises of God. The longing and hope in Isaiah’s words are as palpable today as when they were first uttered centuries ago: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” In the meantime, Isaiah -- and all of us -- wait in the “not-yet” of this vision of peace, sustained by hope for a better world.

The prophetic voices of Isaiah and Jesus speak of the mysterious coming of God into the time and space of ordinary human existence. The Celtic saints called it “thin space,” a sacred place of encounter with God where the veil separating heaven and earth is almost transparent. Before he died of cancer six years ago, George Harrison – my favorite Beatle -- remarked that his life was about waiting for God. And that’s what Advent is all about; we dwell in this “thin space,” waiting hopefully for God to come, to “advent,” into our lives.

The challenge is to learn how to wait in hope without “falling asleep,” or – to put it in modern terms -- without getting distracted too much by worldly things. Advent is the time to remember that God can and will break in to our lives sometime, somewhere, somehow, and we are to “keep awake” and be ready.

How can we do that? One way to be ready is in these coming days and weeks is to let go of the stuff inside of us which clutters and complicates our lives, which distracts us from God and keeps us from living in that “thin space.” Maybe it’s letting go of your need for material things or for approval or for keeping everything the way it used to be. Maybe it’s letting go of an addiction or someone you are holding on to too tightly, or something that is holding on to you. What in your life do you need to clear away so that you can be ready and fully present for God adventing into your life?

Yesterday was World AIDS Day, and I’d like to share with you the story of Ben¹. Ben learned how to live in that “thin space,” to reduce his life to the essentials so that he was ready for God. As he began to die of AIDS and his health deteriorated to the point that he could no longer eat, Ben managed to pour more and more of himself into narrower and narrower spaces. While he fed himself intravenously from a bag of nutrients he carried in a backpack, he made meatloaf in a soup kitchen for homeless folks -- the best meatloaf they’d ever tasted, with a sauce of sharp, tangy flavors. He was asked how he could stand to cook when he couldn't eat, and he replied, “I taste the smells.” He smoked chickens in a smoker he received for Christmas, and in between, he fainted, sweated out fevers, and had tubes pushed down his throat.

The metaphor Ben chose for his life near its end was simple. “I feel as if my life is being pushed through a small opening,” he said. “It's come down to this,” and he brought his hands together to form a funnel. Ben lived in that thin space – as he cleared away all the extraneous stuff in his life and got down to the bare essentials, he was able to be fully present in the moment, awake and alert for God’s adventing in his life.

To live in such hopeful waiting, with such awareness and anticipation, is to live in Advent Time. We do not know the day and hour the Lord will come, but what we do know is that God will come. Over these next four weeks, may we keep awake and be ready; may we await in hope, for the adventing of God into our lives. Amen.

¹Adapted from Patricia DeJong, “Living on the Line,” First Congregational Church of Berkeley, CA, 11/29/98.

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