What does Advent smell like?

   What does Advent smell like?

Not Advent as we have come to know it, as a commercially-intensive period leading up to the gift giving of Christmas, as the weeks in which we rush to get our Christmas decorations up that we might be in the holiday mood. So not the smell of evergreen bough and peppermint candy canes, not the spritz of genuine imitation aerosol pine scent for the artificial Christmas tree.

What does Advent – the season of waiting and hoping for the promised return of Jesus, the season that is like the deep dark blue of the sky just before the first rays of sunrise wake the rooster to announce to watchers the dawning of a new day – what does Advent smell like?

What does a promise smell like, what does hope smell like for you? Can you think of a time when there was a scent, a smell, a hint of something on the air that spoke to you of promise and hope?

            Maybe it was the early spring smell of a well-broken in leather baseball glove, a mitt rubbed to a soft suppleness through generous applications of Neats Foot Oil and a winter’s worth of being shaped around a Spaulding baseball by tight rubber bands. A scent that held the promise of  afternoons on the baseball diamond under a clear blue sky, punctuated by the ping of bat on ball, shouts of “dig it out!”, the anticipation of the next at-bat, the joy of hearing that first umpire’s cry of “Play ball!”

            Maybe it was that wondrous mixture of smells springing forth from your school bag on your arrival at the first day of school – the woody scent of meticulously sharpened #2 lead pencils, the deeper aroma of the pink rubber erasers, the tang of the vinyl three-ring binders. All holding out the promise of a new year and a new start, a clean slate, a chance to make new friends, to learn to love a new teacher, to discover things about the world you never imagined.

            Maybe the smell of promise and of hope was what greeted you on your return from college for winter vacation, the whiff you got of those Toll House cookies baked in anticipation of your arrival, or the pies baking in readiness for the evening’s celebratory meal.

Or maybe it was that Elysian fragrance that seemed to rise from dashboard and seat cushion as you found yourself behind the wheel of a new car, a scent that we all recognize by its scientific name, “New Car Smell.” A fragrance redolent with the promise of adventures on the open highway, of escape, of freedom.

            When I was a child my families summered in Ocean City, New Jersey, some 90 miles from our home outside Philadelphia. One glorious and much celebrated day, with school out for summer and the car packed to the gills, we would head out of the stifling heat and humidity of early June in Pennsylvania; back in those days before air-conditioning sanitized the passing scents, we drove through the noxious fumes of the gas refineries that lined the approaches to New Jersey, then down the long highways through the evergreen scent of the Jersey Pine Barrens, until, there it was: that heady salt marsh fragrance emanating from up ahead, followed soon by the salty tang of the bay as we approached the causeway to our summer home. As I drew in those seaside fragrances through flared nostrils there came, unbidden and yet not unexpected, the hope of a summer filled with body-surfing and laying in the hot sand, of sailing and bike riding throughout the town, of reconnecting with old friends, of meeting (this was later, but no less important for all that) new girls.

            Or maybe Advent smells for you like generic disinfectant, that ammonia-based pungent odor common to school stairwells and newly-swabbed church basement meeting rooms, like the one a man I know once frequented. Hope and promise smelled like that for him, a smell far different from that of smoke and gin and stale beer; Advent is ammonia transformed to perfume, a delicious scent that reminds him of the night he turned a corner, admitted he was an alcoholic, and began a rise to new life.

            What does Advent smell like? For John the Baptist, advent, the coming of the one for whom he prepared the way, smells like fire. He intends to scare us: repent, turn your life around, get a new attitude, get right with God; if you do not bear good fruit, you will be like a tree that is cut down and thrown into the fire; you will be the chaff, the stalks of the wheat, which will burn in an unquenchable fire. John’s hope is in the coming judgment, when our acceptance by God will be based not on our heredity, not on belonging to historic Israel, but on our response to God’s call for a decision, and on the fruits which grow out of that decision. John’s hope is in the fire that purifies.

            John, of course, got it partly right. In his sudden, abrupt appearance in Matthew’s gospel, in his call for a decisive decision on the part of the people, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near”, John embodies the message that God is near, and that God’s ways with the world are often abrupt, unforeseen, unexpected.

            And yet the psalmist and Isaiah turned out to have better senses of smells than did the Baptist. What does Advent smell like? In Psalm 72, the Messiah is “like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth.” The One who comes to save and redeem and, yes, to judge, smells like a summer rain on a newly shorn lawn. Can you recall the heady fragrance of that rain, the delicate greening scent that the moisture brings forth from the thirsting tips of blades eagerly drinking the restorative waters, the ozone-rich air that smells of the earth when she was young and new? The Messiah, the one who comes to judge, is one who heals and feeds and uplifts our spirits.

            What does Advent smell like? For Isaiah, Advent and the promise and hope smell like a new-born babe. You know the scent, the one that rises from the scalp of an infant and speaks to you of how good and wondrous life is, of untold possibilities and potentials to be discovered and unleashed, of how much there is to be thankful for. This is not the smell of fire, from which we rightly run; the smell of a newborn awakens us to just the opposite reaction, it attracts us, it draws us in, it makes us want to hug and embrace and bury our nose in the new one’s hair. The Messiah, the one who comes to judge, is one we cannot help but run to and tenderly embrace.

            What does promise smell like, for you?

What does hope smell like, for you?

What does Advent smell like? Remember that smell, search for it -- and follow your nose. You just might wind up in a manger, or at the foot of a cross, or at the door to an empty tomb.

“A Vision of Peace – or Just an Illusion?”

The political situation in Jerusalem some 700 years before the birth of Jesus is bleak. The Assyrians are at the gates, the invaders are ravaging the countryside. The economy is in ruins. Corruption in government is the rule of the day; judges are routinely swayed by bribes, leaders are blinded by partisan propaganda. In short, the dynasty of King David, the son of Jesse, once considered to be the carrier of God’s goodness and faithfulness in the world, is a mere stump compared to its glorious past; the family tree has been decimated by enemies foreign and domestic. Despair and resignation reign.

            Onto this scene strides a prophet, Isaiah by name, announcing that despite all appearances, God has new plans for Jerusalem and for the world….(Isaiah 11:1-11)

            I sometimes think that we like to believe that we are the first people to pick up the Bible, read passages like this one from Isaiah, and say, “What a crock.”

            That we are the first ones to say, “Who can believe any of this stuff about a day when the lamb will lie down with the lion, when the government will really be about serving the people, not feathering its own nest, when people will no longer make war upon each other, when all people will know not fear but security.

            Because we know, and people have always known, that this vision of Isaiah’s of the peaceable kingdom is not a vision, it is an illusion, that it is just not natural, that it is against the order of nature that we learned about in science class.

            Theologian and preacher Walter Brueggemann echoes this almost universal inability to believe this sort of nonsense. He writes in his book, Peace, “Unheard of and unimaginable! All these images of unity sound to me so abnormal that they are not worth reflecting on.”

But then Brueggemann reconsiders.  He goes on, “But then I look again and notice something else. The poet means to say that in the new age, these are the normal things. And the effect of the poem is to expose the real abnormalities of life, which we have taken for granted. We have lived with things abnormal so long that we have gotten used to them and we think they are normal.”

            Isaiah’s contemporaries look around and what they see is a stump of the Dynasty of King David, and they can imagine nothing else, nothing greater. They know what is normal, and normal is corruption, normal is the strong oppressing the weaker, normal is the rich getting richer while the poor become increasingly impoverished, normal is monarchs pursuing war abroad to distract attention from problems at home.

            Isaiah tells them that they have been promised so much more, and that if they put on the eyeglasses that God so freely provides, they can see that what they have come to accept as normal is anything but.

            In this Advent season, our challenge is to hear these powerful words of promise for us, words we are tempted to dismiss as impossible, as not a vision of what will be but as a mere illusion.

            Like Isaiah’s contemporaries, we look around and see not a flourishing tree of life, but a mere stump, we see what we are told is normal, never mind that we have been promised so much better than this.

            The new normal is a relentless death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars approaching the longest armed conflicts we have ever been involved in, wars that last week we were told will extend until at least 2014; the new normal is an ever increasing gauntlet of security measures to board an airplane, now featuring full-body scans and pat downs; the new normal is seemingly endless corruption in our system of justice, as the scandals rocking the probation and sheriffs department once again evidence; the new normal is governmental restriction on benefits to the most in need, the threatened cutting off of unemployed benefits to two million American between now and Christmas, on the grounds that we cannot afford those benefits, while perversely we can afford tax cuts for those earning in excess of $250,000 per year; the new normal is politicians of all stripes putting private agenda ahead of common good.

            I think at times we are so used to getting beat down by all this stuff that we really start to believe that this is normal, that this is the way things are supposed to be and always will be, and that resistance is not only futile, it is foolish.

            But then we take another look at Isaiah’s vision, about the promise of a new creation, when the rightly governed world will be detoxified, where the world will be safe for our children, for the meek, for the most vulnerable, where those who rule will have the most important characteristic, the trait beyond compare, that any leaders could possess – the humility to know that they are not gods, and that they owe their allegiance to, and are responsible to, the one God who never ceases to defend the widow and the orphan, the weak and the poor.

            And then in this season of Advent we remember also the one who Israel longed for, but the one who came as well, the one who was full of power and yet brought us peace, the one who though filled with divine might was humble even so, the one who was a descendant of King David, a shoot from the stock of Jesse – the one named Jesus.  We remember the one who despite having all that power chose not to take on Rome’s legions, but instead humbly took the side of the poor, the marginalized, the sick, the oppressed, bringing healing, reconciliation, and new and abundant life. And we remember that his commitment to this impossible – so we say! – peaceable kingdom was such that it got him arrested, and tortured, and nailed to a cross, and how that was to be expected, was par for the course, was what everyone considered to be normal.

            And we remember that God took that old normal and stood it on its head, rolling away the stone from the tomb, raising Jesus to new life.

            Friends, in a world which tells us that what little we have is normal, and that to dream of or even expect anything more is just a crock, this is the Good News for us today, that God wills – and will one day bring about – justice and peace for this world, and for all its creatures. 

“Let Me Help You with That Holiday Stress”

           

             A popular song way back when I was a teen was titled “Does Anyone Really Know What Time It Is”.

            I think a lot of us know what time it is right about now. It is a time when we have finished up our Thanksgiving celebrations, perhaps started our Christmas shopping, perhaps have pulled out the Christmas decorations or at least thought about doing so, perhaps have dug out the Christmas cookie recipes and holiday CDs, and perhaps have had more than a few of the first inklings of that good, old-fashioned holiday stress.

            But being the good Christian folk that we are, we know that it is time for more than just all that holiday stress. It is also time to remember the story of the baby who came into the world long ago, bringing with him the promise of hope, peace, joy and love. And so it is time to get out the crèche, put on a live Nativity scene, pull the Christmas stories off the shelf.

            And yet, the church has the persistent habit of reminding us that it is another time as well. It won’t let us set our clocks forward and jump ahead to Christmas, the anniversary of the birth of Jesus; it won’t let us rest comfortably in a romanticized way-back-when for all the coming four weeks. No, the church turns our attention to the future, and to the present and how we might live in it.

            We live in a time when people are searching for meaning, trying to understand their own lives, seeking to get in touch with their inner selves, but also searching for how their lives fit into the big picture, searching to find something larger than themselves in which to place their trust, their faith, and their hope.

            With all the busyness of our lives, with the way life has of just overwhelming us with all the day-to-day stuff, it can be easy to lose sight of this deep, inner longing. But it is still there.

            This is why the church season of Advent is such a beautiful time. A time that is about so much more than holiday stress.

On the one hand, Advent is a time when we tell the story of people who came before, who, like us, were waiting for the promises of God to be fulfilled, and who strove to live faithfully as they waited. Advent is a time to remember that we are not the first people to live in an in-between time. We sing “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”, about the longing of captive Israel for the coming of the Messiah, the one whose coming we remember on Christmas. We read from the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, telling the people to live in expectation of the branch of Jesse springing forth, of the day when a new covenant would be written not on stone or paper, but on the hearts of people. We listen again to the story of how Mary and Joseph anxiously awaited the arrival of the one they would name “Jesus”, meaning “He saves.”

     And on the other hand, Advent is a time when we remember and retell the promises of God to us. Promises not only of what, but also of when.

            First, the what.  Since the time of Jesus, Christians have believed that the death and resurrection of the one who was born in a manger had ushered in a new period, the new era of the reign of God. It was more than just a matter of the calendar, of BC and AD, it was a qualitatively different time, a time when salvation was possible in an unprecedented manner. The age of darkness was being replaced by the age of light; a new heaven and a new earth was on their way; the time was dawning when the fulfillment of God’s promises of a reign of peace and justice and abundance for all was just around the corner, and might arrive in its fullness at any time. Through Jesus, God had broken into the world and history and had begun to set things right. 

            So what does this "what” have to do with you, and with your life, and the meaning of your life? Everything, of course. Your life is not lived in a vacuum, just a marking of time between the two dates on your eventual headstone. You have a part to play in a great drama of redemption and recreation, you are one to whom God draws near to bring you home.

I sometimes think this is hard for us to own. Popular culture tells us that there is always “the Chosen One”, one person somehow destined to be the one with the great part to play in the drama of salvation. In the Star Wars series, Anakin Skywalker, otherwise known as Darth Vader, is “the Chosen One”; in the Harry Potter series, Harry is “the Chosen One”; in “The Matrix” trilogy, Neo is the “the Chosen One.” But Jesus tells us that we are each chosen, that God plays no favorites, that we all have starring roles in God on-going drama of salvation. 

            Second, the when. Jesus himself warns his followers not to obsess over the when, wasting their days in trying to decipher the signs of the times or portents in heaven. Instead, he urges them not to fall asleep, to be ready at all times, for the promised day could come at any time, “like a thief in the night”. And so Paul tells the Romans, in the reading for today, to stay awake as well, to get up before the dawn, to not get so caught up with the minutiae of what passes for all the stuff we think we have to get done that we fail to be alert for what God is doing among us. He writes, “But make sure that you don’t get so absorbed and exhausted in taking care of all your day-to-day obligations that you lose track of the time, and doze off. The night is over, dawn is about to break.”

            Stay awake, and wait, and watch. And, oh yes, realizing that the day is dawning, that it will come with the same certainty that the world keeps turning, live as if that day is already here – not living lives of excess, of bickering with one another, of nursing grievances, of seeking only our own, of using others for our own pleasure, of even running around frantically trying to get everything ready to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Jesus long ago.

            We think we know what time it is, but this is what the time really is.  Time to be ready to meet the living God just around the next bend, coming perhaps, as Jesus foretold, on a cloud in glory, but more likely in the guise of someone in need: a hungry person, a homeless person, someone who is sick or imprisoned, someone who is lost or alone.   

            So maybe this is one answer to that holiday stress – to remember what time it really is, and to embrace that time, and to joyfully make the most of it.

            Amen.

            Let us pray. Gracious God who came to us as a tiny baby long ago, remind us always that salvation is nearer to us now that when we became believers; that even now you come to us where we are, as we are, working to never leave us the same. As these days grow short, as our days grow shorter, awaken us to a new joy of life, that this day we might resolve once again to truly live. Amen.