Homily preached at Morning Prayer in St Luke’s Chapel
Berkeley Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut
December 19, 2017 / Tuesday after Advent III
Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.
If much of the Christian life consists in our being asked to do things that we would really rather not do, then Advent is the Christian life distilled and compressed. This is the season of waiting, of patience, of quiet expectation. At first, expectation can be exciting and invigorating. But after a little while, it becomes a bore, and then an agony.
Perhaps not incidentally, therefore, Advent is also a season of self-purification. In the second letter of Peter, the author writes that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief,” and then he asks, “what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God?”[1] Karl Barth loved to quote this line in describing the character of Advent: “waiting for and hastening.”[2] We are actually always doing this as Christians, “waiting for and hastening,” and in Advent this is the particular focus of our attention.
But it is easy to be distracted.
Last Wednesday, Kaleb Horton, who is a writer for Vice, tweeted something that caught my eye. He said: “The rise of the ‘tailored for you’ internet combined with how news is disseminated on social media has led to nothing but algorithmically-enforced tribalism and a million tiny little information bubbles.” Then he said that all of this has “turned online into a drug that gets you anxious… instead of high.”[3]
And then this past Saturday, a friend of mine who is a writer published a piece about the books that she’s read this past year. She began by saying, “I was pregnant with my second child for most of the year and I was also working from home, which meant I was very sedentary and slothful, and able to spend a lot of time reading articles that made me miserable.”[4]
I wonder whether any of that sounds familiar. It sounds familiar to me, and these two quotations have been stuck in my mind ever since I first read them. “A drug that gets you anxious instead of high.” “Reading articles that made me miserable.” The experience of these two writers describes the experience of a lot of people whom I know, and in fact my own experience as well. We are, many of us, trying to keep awake, to be aware, to be on top of things, to be informed. We are trying to do what seems like our moral duty to fight evil via the force of our own attention.
The allure of the drug that all of this information provides is not the anxiety, of course, but the feeling of power. The news at our fingertips – all the time – holds out the promise that by knowing things we are changing things. And yet the more we read, the less it seems that we can do, and that sense of powerlessness is disquieting in the extreme, and the resulting anxiety can lead to a kind of moral torpor. The problems facing our world – injustice, violence, discord among nations, heresy – are too much, they’re too great, and the sheer weight of it all can be overwhelming and defeating.
I can’t do everything, so I can’t do anything.
We are not asked, however, to do everything. We are not asked to fight evil in every far-flung part of the world, all the time. That’s not the question at all. As the second letter of Peter puts it: the question is this, what sort of persons ought we to be, in leading lives of holiness and godliness?
Every weekday morning in this chapel, for the whole of Advent, we have prayed that for Jesus Christ’s sake, God the Father will grant “that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of [his] holy Name.” That is not a small thing. The decisions we make in our everyday lives, with God’s help — the choice for mercy instead of cruelty, for humility instead of pride, for generosity instead of meanness — these choices are part and parcel of Christian witness. They are the tasks commended to us in both the Old Testament and the New, and they are the substance of lives that are awake for the day on which the Lord is coming.
Liturgically speaking, we get lucky this year. The fourth week in Advent is exactly 24 hours long. When the sun goes down on December 24th, the time of Advent expectation and patience will be at a close. But the day of God will remain outstanding, and we will continue as Christians to wait for a day and an hour which – as Jesus says – only the Father knows.
That day of God, the day on which our Lord shall finally come again, Barth says it will be “the day of salvation from our confusions, and the day of the end of our restless disquiet.”[5] On that day, Jesus Christ, who is the Key of David, will open every door, and lead forth every captive who sits in darkness and in the shadow of death, and the end of our anxiety and powerlessness will be at hand. As we wait for and hasten that day, let us tend our plots faithfully, even as our Advent prayer issues forth to the throne of Heaven, and we say, “O come quickly.”[6]
AMEN.
[1] 2 Peter 3:10a, 11b-12
[2] Karl Barth, The Early Preaching of Karl Barth: Fourteen Sermons with Commentary by William H. Willimon (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 25ff.
[3] @kalebhorton, December 13, 2017, https://twitter.com/kalebhorton/status/941010460060524544.
[4] Lydia Kiesling, “A Year in Reading: Lydia Kiesling,” The Millions, December 16, 2017, https://themillions.com/2017/12/year-reading-lydia-kiesling-2.html.
[5] Barth, Early Preaching of Karl Barth, 31.
[6] Thomas Campion, “Never weather-beaten sail,” in The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918, ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 214-15.
That Holy Fellowship 