Today is the first Sunday of Advent, and Advent begins in the dark.<\/p>\n Today is the first Sunday of the new church year, with the light of day waning far too early and all of us huddled inside with glowing lamps, trying to push away the darkness.\u00a0 And the darkness outside mirrors the darkness we carry inside\u2014in these weeks leading to Christmas the two converge: the darkness of winter and the darkness of doubt, of fear, of insecurity\u2014all of the very hardest parts of what it means to be a human being on this earth.<\/p>\n Into this darkness we declare that something new is coming, and so during Advent, we wait. We wait in the darkness, we wait in the absence, we wait in the silence.\u00a0 We wait for what we believe is right up ahead of us, on its way.<\/p>\n Like the shepherds who sat on a Galilean hillside in the darkest, inky black of night, we\u2019re waiting for something.\u00a0 We can\u2019t see it; we can\u2019t hear it, but we\u2019re stubborn in our insistence: it\u2019s on the way.\u00a0 We are people who will look back and remember what happened to the shepherds when, in their darkness and silence, faint notes echoed over the hills, lilting voices carried on the wind, ears perked up in the silence and they heard the sound\u2026of angels singing.<\/p>\n We\u2019re listening for that\u2014something like that.\u00a0 In the meantime, though, we wait.\u00a0 And while we sit here, in the darkness and in the silence, waiting, we do the very hard work\u2014perhaps the hardest work\u2014of living in anticipation of the in-breaking of God.<\/p>\n Each week in Advent we start worship with the lighting of a candle\u2014one new candle, one little light in the darkness, representing something we cling to\u2014desperately, sometimes\u2014as we wait.<\/p>\n This week it\u2019s hope.<\/p>\n And I don\u2019t know about you, but I need a measure of hope today, because sometimes I find it hard to live as if I believe\u2014believe that the kingdom of God is coming to be in this world, believe that love wins in the end, believe that we can learn to do right by each other once and for all.<\/p>\n For me, that hit home hard this week when I spent the Thanksgiving holiday with my sister and her family in Colorado Springs.\u00a0 You\u2019ll know if you watched the news this week that on Friday a gunman shot and killed three and injured nine in a shopping mall, a mile and a half from my sister\u2019s house, at a Planned Parenthood right next to the grocery store where she shops regularly.<\/p>\n How long, O Lord?\u00a0 Will the darkness finally overcome us?\u00a0 How can we live as if we believe the light is coming with so much evil about to overtake us?<\/p>\n On this first Sunday in Advent, the Sunday of hope, the lectionary assigns a little passage from the first book of Thessalonians.\u00a0 At first glance, it doesn\u2019t seem to fit this theme of waiting for something new to be born; instead, it kind of reads like a love letter.<\/p>\n I swear I am not a fan of Nicholas Sparks\u2019.\u00a0 It was just a moment of weakness several years ago\u2014I had a very unusual free afternoon, the weather was dismal, and I decided I\u2019d let go of control, give up making a plan, go to the movie theater by myself, and watch whatever happened to be playing.\u00a0 To my chagrin, the only thing playing in my timeframe was the Nicholas\u2019 Sparks movie The Notebook, but I ducked in anyway.\u00a0 What would it hurt?<\/p>\n Two hours later, red-eyed, my face streaked with tears, I stumbled out of the movie theater, and ran straight into member of my church.\u00a0 At that moment, I acuired a reputation as a hopeless romantic, Nicholas Sparks\u2019 fan.<\/p>\n I\u2019m telling you, this is a charge that is flatly untrue.<\/p>\n Still, you have to admit, there\u2019s something about a love story that gets to most of us in our weaker moments\u2026the perfect gift, the perfect story, the perfect love letter.<\/p>\n So if you\u2019re a hopeless romantic like most of the rest of us, you will love the passage assigned for our reading today from the book of 1 Thessalonians.\u00a0 The passage is about as perfect a love letter as you can imagine, beginning sort of with a \u201chow do I love you? Let me count the ways\u2026\u201d and ending with a pledge to eternal love forever and ever.\u00a0 It is a love letter, from a pastor to his people, the Apostle Paul to the Thessalonian Christians.<\/p>\n You remember that the Apostle Paul set out to plant churches all over Asia Minor, spreading the gospel message into strategic cities, planting little churches that would help advance the message of Jesus.\u00a0 The town where the Thessalonian church took root was a strategic, seaport city with a population of about 60,000 people.\u00a0 Trade was brisk through the city, and there were people there from all over the world.<\/p>\n The worship of idols was the order of the day, and what made the Christians strange was not that they followed Jesus, but that they claimed to be followers of only one God.\u00a0 Because of that strange belief, Paul had been driven out of town and the Thessalonian church pressed in on every side, facing persecution and rejection in their families and in their communities.\u00a0 Paul, who had a special affection for the Christians in that little church, sent his student Timothy to visit them, and Timothy returned to Paul with reports of abiding faith and love within the church there, good news for Paul to hear.\u00a0 These Thessalonian Christians were living as if they believed, creating the kind of community Paul envisioned the church growing into, and he was deeply missing his friends there.<\/p>\n And so Paul sat down to write them a letter, a little piece of which we heard today, Paul\u2019s love letter to the church.\u00a0 Today\u2019s passage is unusual because Paul uses a rare form of Greek called the optative mood, an arrangement of language that communicates wishing, or hoping.\u00a0 His words have almost a wistful tone to them.<\/p>\n Given all that these Christians had been through, Paul is wishing for them that they would increase in love for each other\u2026and for all, he writes.\u00a0 He knew that if these Christians could manage to live believing in the middle of incredible hardship, persecution on every side, and rejection all around them, then their love for each other would increase and abound, and the love they managed to put into action would change the world.<\/p>\n Paul speaks with a wistful longing, because he must have known then what we know now: that it\u2019s hard to live as if you believe that love can change the world.\u00a0 Why? Because black teenagers are shot by police in the middle of the road, and climate change is making the poorest among us poorer, and children don\u2019t have enough to eat, and anyone can pull out a gun a mile and a half from my sister\u2019s house and kill whomever he feels like killing.\u00a0 That\u2019s why.<\/p>\n Violence and death and injustice keep breaking in all around us, interrupting our Thanksgiving holidays and the insulated lives we\u2019ve built to ignore the pain.\u00a0 But today is the first Sunday of Advent and Advent begins in the dark.\u00a0 This is the season where we live as if we believe that the promise of God will be the interruption that surprises us, born again in us, echoing Paul\u2019s deep yearning for love to increase and abound in you and me and all of us so that the world God wishes we would build will actually come to be.<\/p>\n It\u2019s Advent.\u00a0 And Advent begins in the dark.<\/p>\n Okay, I\u2019ll admit it.\u00a0 I probably am a sucker for a good love story.\u00a0 One of my favorites I heard on an episode of Radiolab, the story of Alan Lundgard and Emilie Gassio.\u00a0 Two twenty-one year old art students, they were living the dream in a loft in Brooklyn, studying art and basking in the glow of young love.\u00a0 They\u2019d met at a party only nine months before, and had, as Alan describes, \u201ca moment.\u201d\u00a0 On the program he waxes poetic about Emilie\u2019s \u201ciridescent\u201d eyes, and when the interviewer says, \u201cSo you knew in that moment that this was more than just a thing,\u201d Alan breaks in and says, \u201cOh yes, it was more than a thing\u2026it was THE thing.\u201d<\/p>\n One day on her way to class, Emilie is involved in a traffic accident\u2014she\u2019s on her bike and she\u2019s hit by a huge truck, in ICU, clinging to life.\u00a0 Alan calls Emilie\u2019s parents to hurry to the city, where all three of them keep vigil around Emilie\u2019s bed, her parents splitting the daytime hours and Alan staying every night, all night long.<\/p>\n For weeks they waited for her to recover, with few signs of hope.\u00a0 Finally, the doctors deemed Emilie medically stable but completely unresponsive.\u00a0 Against Alan\u2019s urgent insistence, her parents agreed she was probably not getting better, so they made plans to transport her to a nursing home in their hometown, where she\u2019d likely live the rest of her life.<\/p>\n But Alan thought there was hope\u2014in the middle of what seemed to be complete desolation, he insisted: she\u2019s in there; she just can\u2019t get out.\u00a0 \u201cYou have to give her a chance, you have to give her a chance,\u201d he begged.\u00a0 Because Emilie had sustained some hearing loss in childhood and worn hearing aids before the accident, and because the doctors thought she\u2019d lost her vision as a result of the accident, Alan, in a desperate attempt to prove to the doctors and to Emilie\u2019s parents that Emilie could get better, tried something he\u2019d read about in the story of Helen Keller.\u00a0 One night, deep in the darkness, he traced out on her arm the words: \u201cI love you.\u201d\u00a0 She immediately awoke and responded.<\/p>\n Alan had proof that what he\u2019d hoped was true.\u00a0 But the doctors and Emilie\u2019s parents still weren\u2019t sure.\u00a0 So Alan tried putting in her hearing aids and turning them on.\u00a0 When that happened, when she could finally hear, suddenly everything changed.\u00a0 \u201cJust by hearing his voice\u2026,\u201d Emilie said, \u201cI came back.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n Like the Apostle Paul, we should be people who live wishing for the world we know God intends, living as if we believe it can come to be\u2026it is coming to be.\u00a0 We should never become so complacent that we accept a world in which children are starving, where power struggles and harm of neighbor are the order of the day, where we are diminished in our aggressive exploitation of those among us who are weak and vulnerable.\u00a0 This is not the world God imagines for us, but it is the world we\u2019ve come to expect.<\/p>\n Not anymore. We have rested on our laurels long enough; we have risked the balm of complacency for far longer than is healthy or right.\u00a0 But Advent is here, and while Advent begins in the dark, we live these days expecting something to change.<\/p>\n So our invitation today, the first Sunday of Advent, is to live as if we believe.\u00a0 Live with the vigilance of a neighbor who knows the wellbeing of the other is critical to the health of this whole world.\u00a0 Live with the expectation that love, not violence, is about to shatter our status quo.\u00a0 Live believing God\u2019s way is coming.<\/p>\n Advent is here.\u00a0 Our watching and waiting and bringing into being God\u2019s perfect dream of a just world\u2026well, it has now begun.\u00a0 And so, we live in hope:<\/p>\n Come to our trembling,<\/em><\/p>\n Helpless Child.<\/em><\/p>\n Come to our littleness,<\/em><\/p>\n Little Child,<\/em><\/p>\n Be born unto us<\/em><\/p>\n Who have kept the faltering vigil.<\/em><\/p>\n Be given, be born,<\/em><\/p>\n Be ours again.<\/em><\/p>\n Come forth from your holy haven,<\/em><\/p>\n Come away from your perfect shrine,<\/em><\/p>\n Come to our wind-racked souls<\/em><\/p>\n From the flawless tent,<\/em><\/p>\n Sweet Child.<\/em><\/p>\n Be born, little Child,<\/em><\/p>\n In our unholy hearts.[3]<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n O Little Child of Bethlehem\u2026be born in us today.<\/p>\n Amen<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> from Whistling in the Dark<\/em>, p. 2-3.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> http:\/\/www.radiolab.org\/story\/110206-finding-emilie\/<\/a><\/p>\n![\"candle-704022_960_720\"](\"https:\/\/talkwiththepreacher.files.wordpress.com\/2015\/11\/candle-704022_960_720.jpg?w=300\")
Theologian Frederick Beuchner writes: \u201cIn the silence of a midwinter dusk there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen\u2026.\u00a0 The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment\u2026.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n