November 27, 2022 – The First Sunday of Advent

The Rev. Claire Keene

The Temple Mount in Jerusalem is not as high as Mt. Guyot in the Smokies, or Clingman’s Dome, or even Mount LeConte. But if you’ve ever been to a fort atop a hill, you get why there’s a long history of towers, forts, palaces, and temples being built atop hills. It’s quite easy, unless there’s thick forest, as in the Smokies, to look down from the top and out across the plain for enemies who might try to encroach on a hilltop city.

Jerusalem is built on a ridge of three main hilltops, with valleys on three sides of the ridge. King David, who captured the site from the Jebusites and made Jerusalem his capitol, thought it a strategic place to try to unite the tribes of Judah to the south and the northern Israelites into one kingdom. Jerusalem was the site of the Temple David’s son Solomon built, God is said to be directly present to the Covenant People. Lamentations speaks of the grief the inhabitants of Jerusalem suffered when, as a result of their unfaithfulness, the city and temple fell to the Babylonians. In today’s Old Testament reading, Isaiah lyrically proclaims the people’s joy at the mountaintop city’s restoration.

Even without fortifications and towers, mountaintops bring us a larger perspective: i when we step to the highest overlook, it can feel as if we can see forever. A mountaintop is the territory of triumph and of peace. Think about the last time you climbed a mountain and looked out at a vista unobstructed for miles and miles. It’s easy on that mountaintop perch to feel as if we share a tiny glimpse of a God’s-eye view.

If you’ve hiked up LeConte or another of our nearby peaks, I’m guessing you’ve felt, as I have, a small sense of triumph simply at having made it to the top, having finished the work of climbing, looking down at your feet on the pathway or out at eye level into the evergreen boughs. Finally you step toward an endless horizon. What could seem more triumphant, more successful, more worthy. So imagine being one of Jesus’ ancestors, climbing up to Jerusalem to attend religious festivals in the Temple with a huge crowd of worshippers, all of them singing Psalms 120 through 134.

These are the “Songs of Ascents,” Psalms that become a liturgy of praise as the people of God sing them, walking uphill to the Temple Mount. In Isaiah’s picture, whole nations are streaming up to the mountaintop in praise to receive God’s teaching, ` to submit to judgment and arbitration between the nations , thus establishing peace, so that all can beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks because they have no further need to war with each other. They walk together in faithfulness, into the light and peace of the Lord. When and how can such light and faithfulness come to be true? When and how will ascending faithfulness become real? Don’t answer too quickly— even Jesus doesn’t know the answer to all our questions about that victory, Matthews’s gospel tells us. So, when and how can such light and faithfulness come to be true? When and how will ascending faithfulness become real?

Okay, so I’m not asking for a show of hands, here, but just let me ask you: does anybody else besides me f feel inadequate this time of year? Inadequate, as in “I can never do this Advent and Christmas season justice?” If I hadn’t felt that way before I became a priest, and then a rector, I certainly did after. You know, there’s all that planning and finding volunteers and practicing for the Christmas services. Not to mention any special Advent classes or retreats or wreath sales or Christmas pageants to nail down, not to mention four weeks of keeping the Advent wreath green and the candles filled with oil.

Then there’s hoping that, this year, Advent 4 doesn’t fall on December 24, so that there are Advent services on Sunday morning all the hangings and decorations of Advent that must be changed to meet Christmas specifications for two Christmas Eve services the same evening— one around suppertime and ` another that ends around midnight, and then a Christmas Day service the following morning after breakfast.

And then there’s the family stuff we all have— shopping and wrapping for gifts, I always need to hear that Good News. mailing some early enough to get there by Christmas Eve, planning and buying groceries for a family-gathering meal, cooking as much as possible ahead of time, coming home after multiple services to finish cooking and to lay the table for the extended family’s feast. You have your own version of this frenzy, I bet. At least some of you.

So I’m here to pass on some Good News– some Gospel according to Matthew: “Fear not!” I always need to hear that Good News! Maybe you do, too, (Well, Jesus doesn’t use those exact words here, but that’s at the core of Jesus’ teaching. Even Jesus doesn’t know exactly what to expect when. So what we need to focus on is keeping awake to what’s happening now, not what may happen someday. Maybe you need to hear that, too, in Advent, when there are mountains of church and family expectations to climb.

One reason I need to hear “Fear not!” is that from my earliest days I soaked up this emotional refrain: “You’d better _____ (fill I the blank) or you’re going to _______ (fill in the blank.)” You know, something like: “You’d better start your homework or you won’t get it done,” the implication (or at least my inference) being, “and if you don’t get it done you’ll get a bad grade, we’ll be disappointed in you, you won’t get into the college you want, you won’t be able to get a good job or live a worthy life. . .”

Or maybe the instruction was, “You’d better get started practicing piano now, before your Dad gets home because either he won’t like the noise or you won’t get to practice as much as you need and your music teacher won’t be happy with you, and Mrs. Mitnick might not teach you anymore and one day you’ll regret that you never learned to play the piano as well as you could have and you won’t be as useful to your church or as pleasant company with your family as you could have been.”

(Whew! That’s a lot of anxious implying and inferring.)

The message engraved upon my nervous system was, “Do the right thing at the right time or else something bad will happen and you’ll miss out. You won’t be worthy and you’ll regret it.” Sounds like anxiety avoidance, to me. That’s no way to arrive on that holy hilltop in the light and peace of the Lord.

Now, fear and anxiety as fight-or-flight responses in a true emergency are helpful. You know, it’s good to get yourself and your innertube out of the river in a lightning storm. It’s good to be careful with dish towels around a lighted gas stove. But fear–ingrained as a first response to every challenge, the kind of fear that makes us run constantly from to the potential pains of life– just gets in our way.

At least, my adult experience says that real pains— the death of a loved one, the illness or addiction of a child, the realization that we’ve wrecked our dearest relationships or our health, the awareness that our souls are empty of joy and purpose— those real pains are, I believe, invitations to trust God’s love more than our own performance. Those real pains are good news, believe it or not, because they point us to a spiritual doorway through which God wants to enter our life more deeply. They will reveal what God next wants to heal.

Instead of avoiding them, and all the other anxieties we manufacture, we can listen to those pains, claim them before God, and to let God turn our fear into healing. Just like discovering aging knees or ankles as we climb M. LeConte, discovering those pains gives us the possibility of a different future: a healthier, freer future. They are holy places, just like the tops of holy mountains.

It takes courage in pain to trust God’s care for us. It takes courage and trust to stand before God and peel off our scar tissue to get down to the real infection. But what a relief! God’s judgment and God’s mercy are a package deal. God’s judgment and God’s mercy are a package deal.

“Fear not!“ Jesus tells us that over and over— every time, in fact, that we don’t know the answers, get afraid, and curl ourselves up into a protective ball. Perplexity is the human condition, and Jesus does not expect us to know everything about our future, or even to understand everything about what’s happening today. But we are expected to do something: to keep living and working in the spirit of wakefulness, attentiveness to our pain and the pain of others. We’re expected to pay attention to what’s right around us, and to act in love, not in fear that if we don’t act or don’t act correctly we’ll be judged, condemned, and punished.

Our call is to keep on putting one foot in front of the other, focusing the path we are on together. We can trust that the one who invites us to keep heading up toward the Lord’s light and peace —Jesus— will continue to welcome, heal, and guide us. We can trust this journey through the darkness together, breathing in grace and breathing out love.

Our mundane tasks done in love here and now, every day make a difference, because we walk this path as Jesus does– with friends and strangers alike, breathing in love and breathing out grace, heading toward the Lord’s light and peace.

Fear not! It’s Advent. Light is coming, even now, when we can hardly see, some days, for the dark around us. We don’t have to know everything or do everything, but we do need to keep awake and to choose hope. And kind companionship. We can hope, we can sing, we can walk together, we can move toward a future beyond fear, and God will make that enough to take us up the Holy Mountain into unity and peace.

Year A   –   The First Sunday of Advent  –  November 27, 2022    –  The Rev. Claire Keene