Preached on the SecondSunday of Advent (Year C), December 8, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Adam Conley.
Malachi 3:1-4
Philippians 1:3-11
Luke 3:1-6
Canticle 16
I had the pleasure of worshiping with you, beloved people of St. Paul’s, on the First Sunday of Advent. As I watched the Livestream last week from Sewanee, much of what Fr. Stephen said in his sermon resonated with me. He acknowledged the shock, fear, and grief many of us feel at the state of our nation and the world. I know the outcome of the presidential election terrifies many in this community, if not everyone. Of course, you are not alone. Millions of people around the country don’t know how to respond to what appears to be our democracy’s tacit approval of the politics of reactionary white nationalism and populist fear-mongering. And beyond our nation’s borders, but not without our nation’s entangled involvement, war-making, death-dealing autocrats seem to be winning the day.
Fr. Stephen offered an alternative from the doom-scrolling that some of us have fallen into. He found a way to take a break from planet Earth and float in the unconcerned vastness of interstellar space. How, with the click of a button, he could enter the galaxy thanks to a few well-curated and soothingly-narrated YouTube videos. I tried this out myself. It works! Soaring into outer orbit online is an excellent way to gain perspective. Time and space have different meanings when considered from the cosmos. Absorbing the stark realism of the universe is a strangely calming tonic.
But the greatest enjoyment I took from Fr. Stephen’s Advent sermon came by way of a happy accident at a very micro level. You may recall that one of the mental health break videos he described was about an asteroid that hit the Earth 66 million years ago. The impact formed the Chicxulub Crater in what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Central America. When Stephen was recounting the storyof the Chicxulub Crater, my closed captioning setting thought he said, and I kid you not, “Chick-fil-A Crater.” I burst out laughing. The idea of a Chick-fil-A Crater sounds like a metaphor that has found its political moment, doesn’t it?
For years, I refused to cross the threshold of a Chick-fil-A fast food restaurant. Some time ago, Chick-fil-A stirred up controversy over its homophobic hiring policies. I considered myself part of a protest boycott, thank you very much. Same thing with Wal-Mart. I avoided shopping at Walmart as an enlightened and urbane sophisticate because I disapproved of how its business practices disrupted smaller communities, deliberately putting ma and pa shops out of business.
Guess what? My staunch political opposition to Chick-fil-A, Wal-Mart, and a few other places was challenged when I moved to rural East Tennessee. It’s not that my values changed so much, as I didn’t have the easy luxury of giving them that particular expression anymore. When I was doing my CPE hospital chaplaincy at a level-one trauma center in Chattanooga, the cafeteria boasted a Chick-fil-A franchise. When it’s down to lime jello or a spicy chicken sandwich. I am … conflicted.
What does all of this have to do with the season of Advent, you may be asking? Everything. Advent, you see, can hold it all, even if everything we hold dear seems to be slipping into a bottomless Chick-fil-A Crater. Advent is the story of Christ’s coming, in history, at the intersection of our everyday lives, and at the end of history. Advent is the promise, reality, and hope of God’s human incarnation. What can’t be held by that?
The author of Luke’s gospel animates John the Baptist’s ministry of repentance and forgiveness by borrowing proclamation language from the Prophet Isaiah. Luke casts John as Isaiah’s echo, “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.” And what is the prophetic message? “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill made low.”
I’m disturbed by these images at face value. As someone born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, I can’t bear the idea of a flatlined landscape. Give me the majestic heights of the Cascade and Olympic mountains right up against the glacial depths of Puget Sound. I’ll take the rich variety in dramatic terrain; I love a topography of difference. And what’s all this nonsense about making the crooked straight? I mean, look at me.
But seriously, when has uniformity been a marker of God’s creation? It’s not, never has been, and never will be. What’s no less true is that reactionary white nationalism, fear-mongering, and genocidal war have no home in God’s creation. These are the mountains and valleys that must give way for the building of the Kingdom. Injustice, violence, and oppression don’t belong to the Advent of Jesus, yesterday, today, or tomorrow.
Yet even in the toppling of mountains and filling of valleys, God is making a new thing. Yes, Isaiah’s language is a metaphor for clearing obstacles to good news, but it has a more literal natural resonance, too. Look at the Chicxulub Crater. What was once a cosmic rock’s violent and annihilating crash site is now hospitable to over four million people. It is a land of diverse ecosystems, lush forests, mangrove beaches, and barrier reefs.
Advent can hold it all.
Before I ate my first Chick-fil-A sandwich or flummoxed my first Tennessee Wal-Mart cashier with a reusable shopping bag, I had an idea that I was going to find a field ed parish – field education is part of our contextual learning requirement – that had some combination of the program budget of Saint Mark’s Cathedral and the liturgical reverence and scrappy neighborhood engagement of St. Paul’s.
Ok, I knew I would never find another St. Paul’s, but I was just about to declare my intentions at a solid Chattanooga parish when Bishop Rickel foiled my grand plans. “Not a chance, Mister,” he said, or something to that effect. “You need a very different Episcopal church experience from what you already had. Go find a small, rural, conservative parish.”
If you say so, Bishop! I’m going to trust that Advent can hold it all. I listened to Bishop Greg, and at a deeper level, I listened to the Holy Spirit. I found a small, rural parish and kept listening. My field ed parish isn’t exactly conservative. It’s quietly queer affirming in a way you have to be in some pockets of the rural south. However, the most significant gift to my ministry in recent months is my relationship with a handful of conservative folk who joined the parish over the last year.
These are incredibly kind and gracious people who have fallen in love with the Episcopal Church. They are not anything like the MAGA stereotype, and yet I know that at least two of them voted for the “other guy” for president because they asked parish leadership if they would be welcome with their political views.
The meaningful answer to this question wasn’t anything we said as parish leaders. It was the welcome they received from parishioners over weeks and months. Ultimately, two new members chose to be confirmed, and another was baptized at the bishop’s October visitation.
Two of them attended a formation series I led over four weeks in November. About ten minutes into one of the sessions, a young trans man and his mother walked in, intrigued by the “Economic Justice in the New Testament” sign we had posted near the sidewalk advertising the series. They found the church, originally, because it is listed somewhere in a directory of affirming parishes. This young man immediately began to talk about his upcoming top surgery. I was not expecting this, especially in this part of the country. I was worried our visitor might soon feel unwelcome or unsafe. At the same time, I could sense one of our new members shifting uncomfortably.
What ensued was not the most smooth conversation in the world, but it was one for which everyone made an honest effort. This, I’m certain, was accomplished by nothing less than the grace of God working through the hospitality of humans. Two longtime members did a heroic job staying curious with our new guest while injecting a little variety into the conversation. All I could think was that every parishioner at that table, old and new, was actively living into their baptism. Whatever discomfort our new conservative members felt, they chose to stay at the table and listen. No one left the conversation.
I’m telling you, Advent can hold it all.