Advent Evening Prayer - December 1, 2009

At my worship parish we are starting Evening Prayer during Advent, on Tuesday nights.

Like anything new, we thought we would get a few hearty souls out to join us in prayer. Things start slowly and that is not a bad thing. Plus it is call to stillness, which what Advent might be about, but as we know, is not always the case.

Imagine then our surprise at having about 50 people present for prayer.

The music was lovely - piano and two cantors. We are blessed with a really great music ministry at our parish. We were in our daily mass chapel - our church is known for its power of community but not for aesthetic. However, people with art and environment skills can and do help. My friend Chris set up the altar table with blue velvet cloth and votives along with a bowl that would soon be filling the air with incense. (You can see that above, sadly lacking the feel of the lights being down and the incense wafting up.)

Our pastor invited me to offer a reflection and I did so; it was based on Isaiah 11:1-10 and which I present to you here today. It was a gift to be present and part of this prayer service, which was intimate and rich. (Note - it does help to read the verses at the link if you don't know Isaiah.)

O come Lord Jesus, but let us slowly be in the Advent, in stillness and peace, with a sense of anticipation that is both delicious and difficult at once.

Here is a written version of my notes; I did not read it word for word. The emphasis were added so that certain words would catch my eye and they did.  I will add - as many of you know - I was really struggling with what to say and then on Monday night I was at my theology class and someone gave a presentation about Dulles. I recalled that conversion story and the call of grace in a bud along the Charles River and that was it; I began to compose in earnest with less than 24 hours to go. There truly no accounting for grace, thanks be to God!

Do you ever think about what Advent is inviting you to? Clearly it is not the container Christmas shopping, but it might be easy enough to think that. We know the real invitation is to prepare for the birth of Christ, but even beyond that... Advent is an invitation; it is the invitation to see, to hear and to recognize what already IS. Advent and its invitation should provide us with to enter fully into the both the challenge and comfort of God.

I was reminded of the power of this kind of invitation when I happened to recall the conversion of +Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, who died almost a year ago, leaving an enormous Catholic legacy behind.

In 1939 Dulles was a Protestant-turned-agnostic undergrad at Harvard. In his memoir “A Testimonial to Grace” he wrote:

I was irresistibly prompted to go out into the open air ... The slush of melting snow formed a deep mud along the banks of the River Charles, which I followed down toward Boston ... As I wandered aimlessly, something impelled me to look contemplatively at a young tree. On its frail, supple branches were young buds ... While my eye rested on them, the thought came to me suddenly, with all the strength and novelty of a revelation, that these little buds in their innocence and meekness followed a rule, a law of which I as yet knew nothing ... That night, for the first time in years, I prayed.

Tonight we pray with the words of the prophet Isaiah who calls us to the invitation of Advent with the rich imagery of a “shoot sprouting from the stump of Jesse, the bud blossoming from his root. “

This impulse to life – the sprout, the shoot, the bud - they ground us in the Incarnation. We are human and of this earth, God is coming to us, made known in flesh. God is not up there or out there, God is here, God is everywhere, very much of flesh and this earth included.

This flesh-God called Jesus is an invitation – he is both a comfort and a challenge.

Isaiah reminds us as we move more deeply into the reading that the Lord does not judge by “hearsay or appearances.” This admonition calls us to the wisdom of knowing that what we might initially see or hear may not be what we think it is - things are not always what they seem. We must be still, silent, waiting – open wide and deep.

This is further invitation - to greater comfort and to more challenge.

The poor, we are told, will be “judged with justice” and “the ruthless will be struck.” The social justice-y among us may feel smug and want to say, “told ya so!” But not so fast! We are all the poor, we are all the ruthless - how will we be judged? We will be “judged with justice”, to be sure, just maybe not as we imagine justice to be.

This should not scare us, it should comfort us… but it should challenge us. And invite us deeply into the Advent season.

Isaiah speaks to us of the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the kid, the calf and the lion, the cow and the bear, the baby and the cobra. These are images of and invitations to comfort and challenge, side by side.

God jolts us into awareness and awe by twinning the untwinnable and pairing the unthinkable using the prophet’s words. And isn’t that the call of the prophet? To bring us to places we might otherwise avoid? I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time avoiding the uncomfortable and I really don’t want to confront that nasty wolf who waits by the door of my own heart! Door? The wolf that is in my heart! Can it be in peace with my lamb? The lamb who is gentle but fearful? It is risky to find out.

Which brings us back to our "shoot out of the stump of Jesse", the bud – pregnant with anticipation and filled with possibility. The very possibility in a tight bud that called out to Isaiah, to Avery Dulles and that calls to you and me.

In the call is the sound of readiness and the readiness is amplified during Advent, especially if we can be patient and quiet enough to hear its steady and persistent call, a call that is meant to comfort us and to challenge us.

Perhaps in Dulles’ case and in our own lives, the comfort comes in the recognition of the sound and then the challenge that follows when we acknowledge what we heard or saw and we must begin the journey ourselves.

This journey into Advent is one in which we are called to the enfleshment of spirit and the inspiriting of flesh. Both are a challenge, when we would rather be really in our body and its pleasures and away from God or with God and not in our body which can seem alien evil.

We must choose both – flesh and spirit. Which is once more comfort and challenge paired up for us to surrender to.

So as we see the bud, we come closer – we lean in to hear the sound of readiness, we must invite our own inner wolf and lamb to be present to one another. Then and only then might we proceed on this path with all the other inner wolves, lambs, cows and bears and more.

The bud shall pop, the child shall be born - “a child to guide us” as Isaiah tells us, with all the unlikely partners huddled together, listening to the prophet as he informs us that:

On that day,
The root of Jesse,
set up as a signal for the nations,

The signal is here. Will we be ready?