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Davidson Loehr
8 December 2002
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INVOCATION:
PRAYER:
SERMON: The Advent of…
What the heck is Advent? We have some sense of what Christmas is, and Hannukah, and the winter solstice. Whether we find any of those stories compelling or not, we have some idea what they’re about. Hannukah is past now, the other two aren’t here yet. But according to the calendar of Christian festivals, we’re now in Advent. So what the heck is Advent?
One answer is that Advent is the time of massive advertising hooey designed to make you feel guilty unless you buy at least $600 worth of Xmas presents in the next two weeks, and spend a total of over $1300 on holiday expenses. That’s about the American average, including about $300 spent online. It will take an average of six to eight months to pay off the credit card debts. Some people just pay off last year’s Christmas bills in time to begin shopping for the next one. Retailers in America make 25% of their yearly sales and 60% of their profits between Thanksgiving and Christmas. So Advent also means we are paying the highest prices of the year for a lot of stuff we didn’t even know we needed a month ago.
If this doesn’t sound like a spiritual exercise, it’s because it isn’t. The idea of giving gifts for Christmas only began about a century ago. Before that, gifts were given on St. Nicholas Day, December 6th, until merchants decided the two days could be combined to mix the secular and religious holidays together into one big frenzied buying spree.
While we’re at it, December 25th doesn’t have any necessary connection with Christianity, either. As many of you know, it was the date of the winter solstice in the ancient calendar. Christianity adopted it as the symbolic date of Jesus’ birth in the year 336. Before that date nobody celebrated Jesus’ birthday because nobody knows when he was born. The winter solstice goes back to prehistoric times. So that too predates Christianity by thousands of years.
The real origin of these holidays is from deep within the human spirit. All our holidays grow out of, and are ways of expressing, our need to feel more convincing connections: to the earth, to our most cherished values, and to one another. We create our holidays like we create our gods, from our own longings for reconnection to sources of life and hope. We are like spiders, spinning our connections to the world from something inside ourselves seeking a place to stick to.
And whatever our religion is, whether it’s a brand name religion or a boutique faith, we know it’s always possible that new hope and renewed trust can be born to us. That’s easy to say, but the truth is that it’s hard to believe this sometimes. It’s hard for me, it’s probably hard for you too.
We also know it doesn’t always happen, and doesn’t necessarily happen. Life can go on being frustrating and hard. It’s happened before, hasn’t it? That’s what makes it so hard to keep hoping. Maybe we’re afraid we’ll just be fools. We hope, we yearn, but we don’t have a lot of faith that it’s likely.
There’s a colorful story about this that comes from W.C. Fields. Fields was a great comic actor of the 1930s and 40s, a curmudgeon who loved being an old grump. One of his most famous famous sayings, for example, was “Any man who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad.” It’s no surprise that he hated Christmas, too.
One Christmas, a young reporter had heard that Fields hated Christmas, and asked him about it in an interview. The young man was kind of a gosh-and-golly fellow who just couldn’t grasp Fields’ style.
“Mr. Fields,” he began, “people have said that you hate Christmas, but…”
“That’s right,” Fields interrupted. “I hate it.”
“But gosh, Mr. Fields, that can’t be true. I mean, nobody can really hate Christmas. It’s just so wonderful with all the songs and angels and lights and everything. You don’t really hate it, do you?”
“No,” said Fields, “I understated it. Actually, I detest Christmas. I loathe it.”
“But how, how could you possibly hate Christmas, Mr. Fields? How?”
“Well, I’ll tell you how,” the old curmudgeon snarled at him. “You know all that rot they tell you about how this is supposed to be a season of love, how the world should be filled with generous spirits and all the compassion we never see the rest of the year? You know about all that hokum?”
“Gosh yes, Mr. Fields, but how could you hate Christmas for that?”
“Because,” growled Fields, “I believe it!”
That’s one of my favorite Christmas stories, maybe because it’s easy to identify with. Like W.C. Fields, I believe it, too. But every year I still have to struggle against the cynicism. If you only watch TV commercials or see chocolate angels and video games of war and violence being hawked for you to buy as part of the $30 billion each year spent by and for kids, it’s easy to feel that not much is going on here that’s sacred.
I don’t know whether W.C. Fields ever experienced a holiday season warmed by those poignant things he really believed in, or if his hopes just languished like a dream deferred, like a raisin in the sun, like a hope abandoned before it could blossom. But if he didn’t, it was probably because he missed the point. He didn’t understand holy days because he didn’t understand what the heck Advent was about.
Advent is the time we have to spend getting ready for holy days, so they have a chance really to be holy. We have to prepare for the advent of sacred times. We have to create a place where these warm and lovely possibilities can come into our hearts. We have to provide the manger in which sacred possibilities might be born.
W. C. Fields built a wall instead of a doorway, a gravestone rather than a manger. He had dreams, but didn’t know that he had to prepare a place for them to be born.
A manger is really built out of an attitude. An attitude of hope, faith, and trust that it really might happen, that this year we really might find ourselves opened like a present. Mangers are built from the expectation of miracles. Not David Copperfield kinds of miracles, simpler kinds. Like the miracle of loving and being loved, the miracle of watching young children light up in the certain knowledge that Santa will come, of remembering what it felt like when we knew Santa would come. A manger is a kind of mindset, not a box of wood and straw.
Without preparing ourselves, the holidays have no chance to become holy days. It’s hard to do. Especially now, you might say. For many, the times ahead look very dark and scary. We are watching our government become a right-wing command-and-control government. Individual rights are being restricted under the attitude of fear that both our leaders and our media are working so hard to maintain. Women’s rights to safe abortions will certainly be curtailed, as will civil rights and the right to dissent. A war of unprovoked aggression will almost certainly be waged against a country with no connection to the events of 9-11 at all, but with strong connections to 112 billion barrel oil reserves and a strategic position in the Persian Gulf for our economic and military ambitions.
What’s to hope for? Why be optimistic? All the elves in the world can’t change our political mess. The truth is, there is always enough misery and fear in the world to justify feeling hopeless.
We always have that choice of materials available to us. We can build our attitudes from cynicism, or from hope and faith. But if we build our mangers from cynicism, nothing life-giving can be born there.
Holidays are easy. But preparing for the possibility of a holy day is an achievement. It takes some work, and a lot of faith. The attitude that can make advent happen and build a manger in which something lovely might be born is like the image of a little green shoot growing up through a hard crusted path. New life is only possible if that unlikely little green shoot can appear, even in our lives.
We can still go into an eight-month debt buying glitzy presents without doing any of this work to prepare. But if that’s all there is, the glitz and the presents are really a kind of seduction, as though what we really need in our lives is more toys, and higher credit card bills. That may be a merchant’s dream, but there’s nothing religious about it, even if the department store has a cr”che in front and sells Santa candy and Jesus-shaped candles. Giving presents is the showy part. The gifts stand in as symbols, or substitutes, for the quieter kind of gifts we’re really hoping for. We make the manger, and determine in advance what’s likely to be born there, whether video games or the gift of a holy spirit.
And what if we do pull it off? What if we do manage to get ourselves into the attitude of Advent? What if we can again find the faith that life might become more? What if we do manage to enter into Advent with the ability to trust and hope that this year some miracles might happen? What will come of it?
Like W.C. Fields, we know all the things this season is supposed to bring, and like him we’re usually at least a little afraid because we really want to believe it, but we often really don’t believe it. We fake it.
It’s always easier to disbelieve, it says that nobody’s going to fool us, we’re too smart to be fooled again. But like Fields, we really do believe, no matter how unlikely it is. At least we want to believe.
I don’t mean we believe the old Christmas myths of a baby born under a special star with all the supernatural hokum attending it. The world isn’t built that way, and it wasn’t 2000 years ago.
I mean that somewhere inside, we really believe that life, love and hope can be reborn even within us. We know we can’t earn it, can’t command it, but we really hope it might happen, even if we won’t admit it.
That manger: if we build it, will miracles come? Will those hopes and dreams really be fulfilled, or will we just be fools again, like Charlie Brown falling on his fanny when Lucy pulls the football away again? I don’t know. I only know that if we don’t build it, the miracles probably won’t come. And really, which is the greater gift anyway: the presents, or the ability to believe that miracles could still happen?
I don’t like talking about miracles for too long. It can get seductive and misleading. We do need some realism when we start talking about wishing for miracles. There are lots of things we would be foolish to wish for. There is a difference, after all, between miracles and delusions.
I was reminded of this just awhile back. Since I’ve been in Austin, I’ve used the same hairdresser. Over the two and a half years, we’ve developed a nice familiarity. A few months ago when I sat down in her chair, she said “Well Davidson, how do you want it?”
“I want it to make me look like Brad Pitt,” I said.
She poked me and said “Hey, I’m a hairdresser, not a magician!”
There is a difference between a miracle and a delusion. If we think we’ll find prince or princess charming, win the lottery or undergo a complete personality change for Christmas so all our problems will disappear, we’re not being serious. Those aren’t miracles, they’re delusions.
So hey, you’re probably not going to look like Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Heather Locklear or J-Lo. But you might come more alive this season. You might open to the possibility of seeing and experiencing all the wonder that’s always around us. You might express some warmth or love you’ve felt for a long time but have never said out loud. You might strengthen or reestablish a relationship with someone you’ve gotten in the habit of just passing time and doing chores with. Those are miracles too, and they might really come to pass, if we can prepare for them.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, my favorite philosopher, once said something cryptic and almost magical. “An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.” (p. 73, Culture and Value) Another poet named Piet Hein said the same sort of thing in a poem, and even drew a picture of it, which I’ve put on the cover of your order of service so you can have a mental image of this.
Advent is like this. It takes walking on a thin tightrope of faith as though it might hold us up. The support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it. You know?
The holidays are coming. Perhaps, if we really want them, some holy days will come, too. In the meantime, we need to build some mangers.
