Advent
December, 2006
Fr. Andrew Walmisley

Advent is the season of new beginnings; the Christian New Year when we celebrate fresh opportunity, hope, birth, and rebirth; the time of longing, gestation, and eager (as opposed to anxious) expectation. Advent is well-placed in autumn, when both mellow ripeness and death combine in what is, for me, the most hauntingly beautiful season of the year. It seems most appropriate that now we contemplate ultimate truth (the Eschaton) and delve into the heart of the great longing that we all know. What is it all about anyway and where is it all going? Where’s God and when and how does she come? “Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell” are the four Advent sermon themes I was taught to address in my days in the English Church. It’s meant to put the fear of God in you! And, as you who have borne a child in your womb know all too well, gestation has an element of terror mixed with the joyful expectation! What will it mean for our lives when this little creature comes forth at last? What does it mean for us all when Perfect Love is born among us?

And it is in this season of hope and longing that Kristin is born among us, at least as a fledgling priest. How long she and her family have waited, so patiently, for this day! Now it is here and she is a priest presiding at her first eucharist – surely one of the most powerful moments of any person’s life! The awe and expectation of this great season of Advent seem crystallized in the moment Kristin holds up the Body of Christ, which is not just what we eat but what we become. God in Christ comes to us here and here we discover at last who we really are: Christ’s Body, his hands and heart for the healing of the world.

Kristin, I’m sure you know that this bread is Christ’s Body not because of any “hocus pocus” you perform: it is Christ’s Body because through his people Christ makes it so. You are in the awesome role of having the voice that affirms it. Your job is to be a catalyst that enables all the baptized to recognize, reveal, and live out their own priesthood. Nothing could be more false than the understanding that the laity are here to support the priest in her ministry, for we are all called to support one another in all our ministries, and the priest’s particular job is to do the work that will help everyone claim their vocation as Christ in and for this world.

This isn’t an easy vocation! Not for the faint of heart! If you’re anything like me, Kristin, because the job is never done (like that of a mother, by the way!), you always feel guilty. There’s always someone out there “disappointed” in you; people’s whose “needs you haven’t met.” I’m sure that this won’t happen to you, but I have experienced people who haven’t been “spiritually fed” by my sermons; who thought my pastoral counseling only compounded their problems; who preferred to receive communion from the other priest because they didn’t like me. Hard to imagine, but these things happen in the Church! People withdraw their pledge, write cross letters, transfer to the parish next door. Usually, in my egotism, I blame myself: if only I could have…blah, blah, blah. Often, I am to blame: I blew it, dropped the pastoral ball, said something inappropriate. Yes, these things happen! Often, people have issues in their own lives that have nothing to do with you as a priest. As hard as it is to believe, it isn’t always about us! And this is precisely the point I want to make: we are all, priest or lay person, but clay vessels of God’s grace. Some of us are fragile and even broken, but God really does use us for his purpose, and often it is in our very brokenness that God uses us most effectively.

So, Kristin, understand now that this is the most joyfully undoable job you could ever do! You can never fulfill either your own or other’s expectations of you. But you can know that God loves you through it all and will use you as an instrument of his peace if you can let go of any illusion that it is all about anything but attempting to preach and live out the self-giving love of Christ. Yes, even by attempting to reach for that amazing Love you can and will do astonishing things in your ministry.

That brings me to my next point: we are called to renew that Love afresh in every generation. This means allowing Christ to come in all his glory and messiness here and now. I use the word “messy” because he really does mess up the tight little world of security and self-preservation that we’ve all created. Just yesterday at the Cathedral some of us were talking about how the job of the Church for much of the last two thousand years has been to control, one might say, tame, the Holy Spirit. Kristin, as a freshly minted priest of the Church, let the Spirit free: let her mess up our neat institutional structures; let her break the bounds; let her run amok in the lives of us who seek safety and personal security above the awkward claims of love. Our Bishop yesterday challenged the newly ordained deacons and priests of the diocese to take the Church to new places; to embrace a Gospel of radical inclusive Love. These are trying times, when it would be so much easier to take the well-beaten path of conventional wisdom and morality instead of the radical new life promised in Jesus Christ. Kristin, priest in the Church of God, lead us all into a fresh new way of being; the way that breaks down the ancient barriers; the way that Christ has traveled before. From what I have seen of you already, I know you can do it with that amazing inner strength, confidence, and deep faith and love that you have.

Finally, in this job you’ve simply got to have a sense of humor. To begin with, without a keen sense of irony, you can’t be an Episcopalian at all. The contradictions, nuances, and strange things that we take so seriously would make you a crazy person if you couldn’t laugh it off. Even the most sacred truths and rituals of our tradition require a finely tuned sense of humor if they are to be fully valued: you have to go full circle from the place of taking it all ever so seriously; to one of laughing at the absurdity of, for example, God entering this human condition; back again to that place where you live in awe at this greatest of all miracles at the heart of things. In honor of this need to keep a smile on your face, I have something special for you…