First Sunday of Advent 2010

The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44

Some years ago, we experienced our first ever hurricane. Hurricane Isabella, a name I shan’t forget, as it is shared with my daughter who broke her arm in the aftermath of this hurricane. My memory of this hurricane is one of living in the uncertainty of expecting something of which I had no expectations. Having never been through a hurricane before, I gathered some candles, a few flashlights, put our kids to bed, and took on the normal routine of the evening, reading, checking emails, and watching some evening TV. When the winds came with ferocity, the lights went out, and there we sat in darkness as the night grew longer and more anxious. However, my expectation was that it would pass, that the darkness would yield to light, and our lives would go on the next day. Indeed, we would spend the night in darkness, listening to ferocious winds, and we did wake to the morning’s light, a new day. Life would go on; in fact, we would go to clear the few limbs that had fallen in the driveway and me to the store to get some coffee. (No power, you see). It was then I realized how unprepared I really was for this event. There would be no coffee, no quick return to the daily routine, for outside of my little driveway lay the chaos of the night before: downed trees, power lines, and surely NO Coffee–no one had power. It would only dawn on me hours later, in the afternoon as dusk promised, that there would be more nights in darkness to come, how many I had no idea; but almost three weeks I never imagined. To say I was unprepared is an understatement, and indeed for days to come, I would come to a deep appreciation of the dance between the light and the dark.

Advent I, and today our Collect of the Day captures the great paradoxical themes of Advent: darkness and light, fear and hope, anxiety and promise. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, implores early followers of the message of Jesus that it’s time to wake up and put on the armor of light. There is a dance between the darkness and the light, between fear and hope, between anxiety and promise. These are the great paradoxes of faith and life, and I suspect all of us live in these paradoxes.

Most of us, I suspect, dance the dance between light and the dark in our lives and, in fact, I would say, in many cases, we may feel unprepared for the fact of darkness in our lives and in the world, and equally unprepared for the hope of the light.

For people of faith, Advent is the hanging on to the reality of life (found in the real life), living in the tension between the darkness and the light, between the fears of our lives and the hopes of them, between the anxieties found in uncertainty and the promise of a peace that passes all understanding.

“Advent” means “coming,” and the themes found today in the Gospel is what Jesus seems to be describing as an “invasion.” "But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father…Keep awake therefore, for you do not know the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.”

The invasion, of course, is what Fred Buechner describes as “an invasion of holiness.” This is what advent is about: an invasion of holiness smack down in the midst of that space between darkness and light, fear and hope, anxiety and promise. Advent is “coming.”

Buechner writes, “What is coming into the world is the Light of the World. It is Christ. That is the comfort of it. The challenge of it is that it has not yet come in fullness. Only the hope of it has come, only the longing for it has come. In the meantime we are in the dark, and the dark, God knows is also in us. We watch and wait for holiness to heal us and hallow us, to liberate us from the dark.”

The eye of the storm, by the way, came in the midst of the darkest part of the night. It was marked by calm in such stark contrast to the ferocity of the winds we had heard before. The quiet was almost poetry. The candle lit across the room spread light on the beauty of the quiet, and I was filled with a sense of awe, even in this between time of the certainty of the darkness and anticipation of what would come next. It was a moment of holiness. In that moment of peace, I poignantly knew this truth. It was the Light I longed and hoped for. I think this is the Advent Truth. Brothers and sisters, put on the armor of Light.