December 2, 2018 - First Sunday in Advent - Catching Fire at Worship

Today I participated in worship with a prayer in mind. It came after reading about God and one man's relationship to God in a particular moment. Historically how others reacted to that moment was significant as well. This definitely affected how I experienced this first Sunday in Advent . Here is the passage I read:

How they cut loose together, David and Yahweh, whirling around before the ark in such a passion that they caught fire from each other and blazed up in a single flame of such magnificence that not even the dressing-down David got from Michal afterward could dim the glory of it."

Fredrick Buechner's words appeared in the NRSV Daily Bible on Day 92 in the "Contemplate" section labeled Shameless Worship. This is a quote from the book Peculiar Treasures. Man and God joyfully catching fire from each other's dance reclaims the power of the 2 Samuel 6:14 verse about King David dancing before the ark. Shameless worship indeed! Not only is there, as the ELCA says, "God's work. Our hands." but with this it can be added "God's joy. Our feet." together with "Our joy. God's feet."

I saw this as a great coming together. Buechner described King David's dance as an encircling around and with God. There was a sense in the Bible that David's people understood and participated in this as it was happening. That struck me as new. So often our tendency is to hold back and to not engage in that warmth revolving around our uniting, or in the incandescence of a dance with God and light, or the overwhelming joy that is felt (or can be felt) in God's presence.

This Advent began, as always, with a Gospel reading about ending times. The time of the apocalypse - a time of the uncovering. Something was definitely uncovered today during this Sunday worship. Pastor Sara presided because Pastor Ray's mother just went through a triple bypass surgery and Pastor Ray is with her in Alaska.

Pastor Sara's sermon started with how joy can sometimes be hard for us to feel. Advent is about preparing to take in the joy of Emmanuel "God with us". We may also experience what prevents us from being part of that joy. I was reminded throughout Sara's sermon that Advent is not passive time for the followers. Lived well, Advent is the time when we are most active, most alert, most awake, most in tune with the world because we expect God's breakthrough into our lives.

Pastor Sara preached that Advent is all about how God breaks through into our lives. There is both paradox and mystery in how this happens. She then referenced a faith formation program for children called Godly Joy.  For the children the first week of Advent is devoted, naturally, to the prophets which is symbolized by a finger that is pointing. This was reminiscent remarks by Huston Smith. Someone points to God saying 'This is God' and we look at the finger instead of where the finger is pointed. I am certain her sermon pointed a finger for me to what I was already looking at with Buechner's words in my heart.

All this fused into a fervent and urgent fulfilling, and at the same time a longing for, the need of a different kind of worship. Yes, there was paradox and mystery in this particular fusing. God was both revealed and hidden in the words, music, and those gathered this morning.

Take, for example, our Communion hymn My Lord, What A Morning! In the past I sometimes sang the opening lines as if they were from Morning Has Broken, a song about the glory of God shown in the morning. In this song, however, what is celebrated is the apocalyptic passing of the old world and order when the stars begin to fall. There is a prayer in these lyrics. "My Lord," is gasped in these lyrics and I hear next the line as the one Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Duino Elegies, "this is a beauty that is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure".

Throughout the service there was a falling in love and also being seduced by, all these images and metaphors for, and understandings of, God.

Photo by Ron Houser

Pastor Sara highlighted the difficulty of simply enjoying the light which can be a focus of Advent. When she spoke of enjoying the light I thought of Buechner's fire rather than the Advent candle light alone. For me this light was momentarily untamed. We may desperately try to place bounds on our God and make God eternally peaceful and predictable. Yet the prophets, as Sara preached, are pointing to something else. We can see, a bit differently than they did, the God being pointed to. Yet another part of God remains hidden to us and always will.

And Sara also preached about the paradox that comes to us around enjoying the light. One minute we are engrossed in that enjoyment - perhaps pondering possibilities of change in our lives or imagining the world as it could be. The next minute we can feel like something more should be done besides "just" watching and wishing, perhaps laced with the fear of discovering what that possibility of change or a new world might mean to our lives.

Sara testified in the sermon to repeating this cycle again and again until she finally settled into sheer joy of that enjoyment of light while still making space for the paradox. And there it is - finally caught in the whirl of the dance, seeing who you are dancing with and then turning away, knowing that the whirl will bring back into sight who we are dancing with, only in a new position with a new perspective.

Pastor Sara concluded her sermon by leaving the congregation with three questions which we discussed until her handouts reached the back  I will leave these questions with you as well. They were:

Who are our prophets and what are they pointing to?
What are we being called to "enjoy" or make space for this Christmas? 
What are the paradoxes we find most challenging to make space for?