And so, We Wait | A Sermon on Unflinching Hope, Advent Honesty, and Post-Pandemic Bucket Lists
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin for the people of St. George’s Episcopal Church on the Third Sunday of Advent (B) on Sunday, December 13, 2020.
John 1:6-8; 19-28
This week, Time featured an article titled, “A Post-Pandemic Bucket List (and What to Do in the Meantime).” [1]
It begins very tongue-in-cheek, humorous really: “Oh, the things we’ll do when the vaccines are distributed, and the pandemic is over!” it proclaims. “The people we’ll see, the places we’ll go, and all the once ordinary, now forbidden adventures we’ll have.”
And yet, it doesn’t linger there for long. Instead, it makes a turn towards the reflective and the heartbreaking. It reads:
What a relief [it will be then] to be able to answer the question “How are you?” without words –to let the tears fall openly, wildly, in a group –communion, not contagion. Such gifts are just across the precarious bridge that stretches over a COVID winter.
It continues:
But, according to CDC projections . . . there’s more sorrow, more loss, more trauma between here and the there we’ve been waiting for. Our bodies know this. Our shoulders are sore from tensing for so long waiting for ‘normal’ to arrive like a summer that’s always six months away, no matter when you look at the calendar.
This claustrophobic Bardo between Before and After feels endless. So we do what humans do: we project our happiness onto an imagined future date—that next summer where all of our hopes for normal are stored. Can any moment bear the weight of such expectations?
And so, we wait. We wait for a vaccine even as we await the coming of Our Lord. A human-made deliverance from our present ills and the divine-intervention of a Messiah from a place and time beyond. And yet, despite what the world might want us to believe, the two are not unrelated or relegated to different spheres of our lives. In fact, Advent would have us bind them together. Laying one atop the other and adjusting the opacity just so until each can be seen, but, of course, as through a glass darkly. Viewed together, even as they are held in tension, they are a more complete, truer vision; one that does not favor optimism over honesty.
Because the beauty of Advent lies in its honesty: in its unflinching eye directed towards our human condition and its uncompromising investment in the redemption of all it. Hallelujah, anyhow, Advent punctuates. [2]
Time magazine also recently featured a photograph that is receiving a lot of attention, and rightly so. [3] Perhaps, you’ve seen it. It is at once deeply jarring and incredibly touching.
In the photograph, one person, fully outfitted in personal protective equipment; barely recognizable in fact, behind it all; this one person, a doctor, the caption tells us, embraces an elderly man; who is, himself, also unrecognizable – his face buried in the crook of the doctor’s arm; his fingers just peeking out from where he is grasping the doctor’s back. If you haven’t seen it, I commend it to you.
It is an Advent image. What I mean by that is this: the season of Advent operates in the tension of seeming opposites: mercy, and judgment; hope, and unflinching realism; vulnerable, and mighty; once, and future.
All are evidenced within the four corners of this photograph. Its caption reads: Dr. Joseph Varon hugs and comforts a patient in the COVID-19 intensive care unit during Thanksgiving in Houston, Texas.
The hope that we will get through this together meets the reality of what we are living through; the sweet mercy that is this one wild and precious life comes face to face with the ways in which we have squandered it and the judgment of just how we got here in the first place; vulnerability and strength on full display and yet somehow indistinguishable. It is an Advent image; and it will ask you to feel all the things at once. To look closer even when you want to look away. Hallelujah, anyhow.
We are not conditioned to that, I think. To holding things in tension, even our own emotions, without movement towards a resolution of some kind or another. Hence the urge for a Post-Pandemic Bucket list. But Advent frankly doesn’t care; it will have its way with us if we let it.
Consider, for a moment, the person of John the Baptist. In the Advent cast of characters he looms large, his wild and unexpected appearance casting a long shadow.
“I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.”
Here is a unique figure standing at the juncture of the ages, at the hinge of it all; the one who, according to Fleming Rutledge, “even before his conception, was called into being by the divine purpose to declare the apocalyptic arrival of God on the world scene.” A very real person, and a prophet. One who was certain of his mission, and yet who also doubted and got it wrong. One foot very much rooted in the dust of the Jordan Valley and the other, somehow, boundless and uncontained by time and space. One hand dipping into the waters of the Jordan and the other pointing at us.
Like all prophets, his very personhood evidences the tensions of the Christian life and faith; the tensions we draw near in Advent, calling into stark relief the distance between the way things are and the way things are meant to be, and yet also asking that we bind them together, knowing that they are all held within the embrace of Our Lord, already and ultimately redeemed.
This is what it means to live in the Time Between [4]. Not the time between now and a vaccine, but the time between the first coming of Christ, in a most unexpected fashion, a baby lying in a manger, and the second coming of Christ, in glory, to judge the living and the dead.
Advent is our bridge over a precarious life, a life lived in the Time Between. And yet, it’s not quite a bridge over, but through.
Time’s article on a post-pandemic bucket list notes with some sensitivity that the well-intentioned planning for a future day when we are back to normal and all is well misses the mark.
It reads,
If you’re oldish or have experienced any significant hardship, then you know there’s no florescent line between joy and despair; fulfillment and disappointment, fear and security; between the ache of now and the ache for the next thing. They only make sense in conjunction, in correlation with one another.
[As an example,] I didn’t fully grasp what it meant to be alive till I saw the life force leave a person I loved. When someone dies, the air changes. You feel the absence, the goneness of an electrical current you didn’t realize was there.” [5]
In death, we taste life like never before.
We move through these last weeks of our calendar year swept up in chronological time, as is necessary and normal. We count down the days and we think longingly and understandably towards a future free of our present hardship. And yet, if are patient and alert, waiting and watching in faith, we will catch glimpses of God’s inbreaking here and now.
In “bits of joy we’ve smuggled out of this crisis, like the babies who slipped into the world amid all the static and fear, messengers of . . . grace.” [6] God dwells in deep darkness too.
In grief, we may meet awe. In struggle, an unexpected beauty. In isolation, a fuller, more honest connection. Even in our weariness, a thrill of hope over which to rejoice. A moment worthy and equipped to bear the weight of all expectations. This is the Advent hope; this is the Christian promise.
Hallelujah, anyhow.
Amen.
*The image is in the public domain and of a fresco in Gracanica monastery, Serbia, XIII c.
[1] Susanna Schrobsdorff, “A Post-Pandemic Bucket List (And What to Do in the Meantime)”, TIME, December 6, 2020, https://time.com/5918335/a-post-pandemic-bucket-list-and-what-to-do-in-the-meantime. This article is referenced throughout this sermon.
[2] The term “hallelujah, anyhow” has been used by systemically oppressed people for centuries. It is the title of a much-beloved Gospel hymn and a memoir authored by the Rt. Reverend Barbara Harris (which I commend to you if you haven’t read it!). Personally, the term reminds me of my youth, where I heard it proclaimed frequently by a Southern Baptist grandmother figure of mine.
[3] That image can be seen here: https://time.com/5916512/covid-19-safe-haven/
[4] Fleming Rutledge speaks to this extensively in “Advent: the Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ.”
[5] Schrobsdorff, “A Post-Pandemic Bucket List.”
[6] Ibid.
