| "Color Advent purple! The color of Lent, the color of sorrow, the color of repentance.
Color Advent purple! The color of royalty, the color of sovereignty, the color of hope. Color Advent purple! And look around you! We have done just that-with flowers, and pulpit hangings, and stoles. For purple is the color that best captures the complexity of the Advent season-the complexity of its multiple moods and times. On the one hand, this season, from now until Christmas, elicits in us quite a somber mood, one that comes from contemplating the injury and pain, the hatred and injustice that suffuse our world, despite our best efforts to the contrary. And purple is the color we associate with humankind's deepest "blues," our deepest bruises, our deepest troubles. So color Advent purple for the injury and pain of the thousands of employees who have lost their jobs in the wake of both 9/11 and the current economic downturn, for the injury and pain of the more than 35,000 adults and children who have spent this Thanksgiving weekend in one of New York City's homeless shelters, and of the myriad children in our city who attend poor and seriously overcrowded schools. Color Advent purple for the injury and pain of the countless women and children enslaved in the sweat shops where much of our Christmas apparel has been manufactured, for the injury and pain of the 900 million people in our world who are enduring chronic hunger while we are experiencing a season of multiple feasts, and of the millions in our own country who are sick and have no health insurance and the 28 million in Africa who are HIVand and have no prospect of medicines. And color Advent purple for the hatred and injustice seen in the murderous attacks by assassins and suicide bombers on innocent persons in Kenya, Israel, the Philippines, the United States, and many other places around the world, for the hatred and injustice seen in the fomenting of ethnic tensions and the fanning of religious bigotry in places like the Sudan, Indonesia, Pakistan, and even our own country, and for the hatred and injustice seen in the withholding of autonomy from subjected peoples, like the Palestinians and the Kurds. Yes, color Advent purple for its somber, Lent-like mood, because we humans have so much to repent-the injury and pain we sanction, or tolerate; the hatred and injustice we inflict, or allow. But that's not the only reason to color Advent purple. For Advent is also to be characterized by a royal, hope-filled mood, a mood rooted in our faith in the goodness of God's sovereign rule over the universe and in the certainty that arises from this faith that, despite every appearance to the contrary, in the fullness of God's good time, all injury, pain, hatred, and injustice on earth will be vanquished. The Old Testament offers vivid testimony to this sovereignty of God. First we see it in God's creation of the world, then in God's calling of Abraham and Sarah to newness of life, next in God's freeing of Israel from slavery in Egypt, and finally in God's returning of the Jewish people to their homeland from exile in Babylon. And the New Testament proclaims the vanquishing of all pain and injustice first through the conception of Jesus in Mary's womb, then through the resurrection of Jesus from the tomb, and, finally through the Risen Christ's promise to come again, in the fullness of time, "with great power and glory" (Mark 13:24-26). So during Advent, we followers of Christ offer our repentance that, under our human stewardship, the world has gone wrong in the past and continues to go wrong in the present. Yet during Advent, we also renew our hope that just as amidst such bleak despair in the past God took flesh and came to humankind in the birth of Jesus, so, too, amidst the bleak despair of this present time the Crucified yet Risen Christ will come again to rule in our hearts and to set in motion through the likes of us the coming to earth of a perfect peace and a full justice. So Advent looks backward to a time of earlier darkness, when, amidst the tragedy of Israel's history, it was nonetheless able to express its hope that God would send a Deliverer, the Messiah. And Advent looks forward to a future in which the promise and the potential manifest in the life of Jesus will indeed be fulfilled on earth such that justice and peace will come to reign. Thus Advent embraces two different moods across three different times-and that's what makes Advent so wondrously complex. Advent embraces both remorse and hope, and it carries these two moods from the past, through the present, and into the future. Advent holds Israel's past remorse in creative tension with our own present remorse, and Advent holds Israel's past hope for the future in creative tension with our own present hope for the future. So during the season of Advent-Present, we relive Israel's past, and we also relive into the future Israel's impatient waiting for the coming of the Messiah, whom we Christians know to be Jesus. Thus during our season of Advent-Present, we cry out to God using words from Israel's past, words from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, words from our First Lesson. We cry out to God, calling out anew: "O that You would tear open the heavens and come down . . . to make Your name known . . . so that the nations might tremble at Your presence!" We utter these words today, some 2500 years after they were first spoken in ancient Israel, and in our present context they take on new meaning. For, unlike ancient Israel, we know that God's Messiah is Jesus, the Risen Christ. Yet, like ancient Israel, we see all around us the evidence that the Messiah's reign on earth has not yet come in fullness. So when we use these ancient words of Isaiah, these words of longing for God to come down to earth-we use them to express: our own longing that God's will may yet "be done on earth as it is in heaven," our own longing that the justice and peace of Christ may yet come to earth in fullness,our own longing that, with the coming again of Christ, the Messiah, the age of perfect justice and peace may yet dawn. During Advent, we relive Israel's ancient longing for the coming of the Messiah, whose identity it did not know, and we give voice to our present longing for the coming again in power and glory of the Messiah, whose identity we now know to be Jesus. This concept of the Second Coming of Christ is difficult for us modern Christians to comprehend and talk about. It's difficult to talk about the coming to earth at last, in the fullness of time, of Christ's reign of perfect justice and peace. Yet the concept of the church's expectant waiting for Christ to come in power and glory is central to the Advent Season-as the lectionary makes clear when it assigns the thirteenth chapter of Mark as the Gospel Lesson for this First Sunday of Advent. Mark describes Jesus's past ministry in first?century Palestine as just a sample of what God's reign will be like in the future, in the fullness of time, when the Risen Christ comes again. You see, Mark understands Jesus's past ministry in first?century Palestine to have embodied in microcosm the qualities of justice and peace that will be experienced in macrocosm-that is, experienced throughout the world-only in the fullness of time. For Mark, the resurrection of Jesus prefigures this longed-for age and anchors our contemporary hope for its coming. For Mark, the resurrection of Jesus is the sure and certain sign that God has both the will and the power to overcome even the worst injuries and injustices that humankind is able to inflict; the resurrection of Jesus is the sure and certain sign that God's reign of justice and peace will indeed come on earth as it is in heaven. Through the life and ministry of Jesus we have come to know that the groundwork for the reign of God has been laid. Through the resurrection of Jesus we have come to know that the requisite power for the reign of God does exist. Now only the consummation remains. But we in the church have been given no clue as to the time of that consummation. We can but await its coming-patiently, and alertly. In our Second Lesson, the Risen Christ delivers to the expectant, waiting church this straightforward triple imperative (vss. 33, 35, 37): "Keep alert; . . . keep awake; . . . keep awake." In the Gospel of Mark, this triple imperative plays off against the threefold failure, in the Garden of Gethsemane, of Jesus's inner circle of disciples, who just could not "keep awake" on that last night of Jesus's earthly life. Jesus came to Peter, James, and John in the Garden of Gethsemane in the midst of his time of agonized praying, and he found them asleep (Mark 14:37), unable to keep alert, unable to keep awake. Jesus came a second time and also found them asleep (vs. 40), and yet a third time and again found them asleep (vs. 41). So this morning, the Risen Christ is saying to us, the waiting church: Be different from Peter, James, and John. "Keep alert; . . . keep awake; . . . keep awake." It is also clear from our Second Lesson that, as the church awaits the coming of God's reign in the fullness of time, our task is not to keep awake passively-by scanning the heavens, reading our horoscopes, and combing through obscure texts for signs of the coming time. Rather our task is to keep awake actively-by accomplishing during this interim period the work that Christ has given us to do. To keep awake actively is to fulfill faithfully our interim work of ending as much sorrow and pain as we possibly can-inspired by the likes of this morning's AIDS quilt-and of establishing as much justice and peace as we possibly can. To keep awake actively is to prepare the way-as best we can-for the coming of the One whom we continue anxiously to await. Mark writes to inspire us to keep alert and keep awake-actively, as we await Christ's Second Coming. Mark writes to inspire us to fulfill our interim task of preparing the way. Mark writes to inspire us to live each moment of life as a preparation for Christ's coming again-to live each moment of life as a preparation for Christ's coming again. So as we wait, let us color Advent purple-because it is the color of Lent, the color of sorrow, the color of remorse and repentance. And let us also color Advent purple-because it is the color of royalty, the color of sovereignty, the color of our hope for justice and peace. Despite all the changes in the past thirty years for middle-class blacks, very little has uplifted the quality of life for the black underclasses. Many analysts conclude that the socioeconomic conditions experienced today by poor African-Americans are worse than in Dr. King's time. Amen |
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