Preparing the Godscape

 ( preached in Craig Chapel for the final worship service of the semester)

Most of you know me well enough to know that patience is not my middle name! I would usually prefer to get something done efficiently if at all possible. So it may come as a surprise to learn that Advent, the season of waiting and expectation, is my favorite part of the liturgical year. I love the advent candles on my table at home; I love advent hymns; I love the images of fertile darkness that emerge from this season and I love the poetry – like the poem we read as the call to worship. But for an academic, this first week of December brings a real calendar clash. For just as I should find myself in an expectant and waiting mode, I am in the actual “end times” of the semester with a dizzying array of expectations and activities. My calendar for the week leaves little time for reflection or silence – I’m living with the mere hope that next week has to be calmer! And then there is the secular world where Santa has arrived and we are expected to be busy elves.

Into the midst of these calendar clashes come the marvelous texts of advent reminding us that Advent is about something more active than just waiting – it is about preparation. I’d like to reflect for a while this morning on “Preparing for what?” This is a question that has occupied the curriculum committee during the semester as we have discussed the mission of the Master of Divinity degree. Now before I worked in the theological school I could have given a very simple answer to the question of what seminarians were preparing for – for service as ordained ministers in different denominations. But after many years of working here, I have learned that the reality is much more complex. Even the m div students who are proceeding apace towards ordination are asking the question “preparing for what?” The church of the past? The church of the future? A dying institution? Would Jesus really want me to be supporting this institution? And certainly the many m div students who are called to forms of ministry that take place outside of the parish are asking “preparing for what?” (along with “why do I have to take that class?”) Do I really need pastoral care in order to serve as a community organizer? Do I need to take preaching if I’m going to be serving as a pastoral care giver? And many students are still discerning the “what” of their call to be here at this time.

The church gives a lot of lip service to the idea of the “ministry of all the baptized.” And yet we offer little guidance as to what that vocation looks like. The lessons for this week call give us a wonderful clue to this question – we are called upon to be John the Baptist. Now we can probably get away with avoiding the locust and wild honey part of the job and the camel’s hair, but surely we are called upon to “prepare the way of the Lord” each in our own unique way.

The gospel reading, from the very beginning of Mark’s gospel, begins with a title, an announcement: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” I like to think of this sentence as not only a title but also an indication of our role as preparers – we are called to begin, to introduce people to the power of God as revealed in Jesus, to be part of the line of prophets and preachers that stretch back to Isaiah and forward into our own time. We aren’t called upon to be the leading figure in this work but to get things ready.

As I was working on this sermon, I was interrupted by a question from Ernie who works for our food service. He wanted to know exactly where he was supposed to set up the food for the interfaith dialogue lunch. This is just one step in the preparation for a meal around seminary hall which also includes ordering the food and delivering the food. Ernie’s job this morning was to set the table. As the Message paraphrases our gospel passage,

John the Baptizer appeared in the wild, preaching a baptism of life-change that leads to forgiveness of sins. People thronged to him from Judea and Jerusalem and, as they confessed their sins, were baptized by him in the Jordan River into a changed life. John wore a camel-hair habit, tied at the waist with a leather belt. He ate locusts and wild field honey.

As he preached he said, “The real action comes next: The star in this drama, to whom I’m a mere stagehand, will change your life. I’m baptizing you here in the river, turning your old life in for a kingdom life. His baptism – a holy baptism by the Holy Spirit – will change you from the inside out.

Ernie was serving as a stagehand. A lot of times we aren’t satisfied to be the stagehands. We think it would really be much more fun to star in the dramas of our own lives than to be in the role of preparers. I’m certainly not immune from this myself – in fact, I’m here preaching today because I thought that if I were playing the role of “acting dean” for a few months, I should certainly get to preach the last chapel service of the semester as Dean Beach does!! I find that it is often helpful, especially when I get a bit irritated or frustrated, to remind myself that it “isn’t all about me” – that in fact, I’m a stagehand or maybe on stage as a figure in the crowd scene.

The epistle writer asks, “what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God?” What sort of persons indeed? The answer to this question perhaps lies in two Wesleyan concepts of personal and social holiness. We need to live the gospel in our own lives and we need to seek to change the social order to reflect the reign of God. Often conservatives and liberals have emphasized different sides of that equation rather than seeing the interrelationship between personal and communal. It is hard to keep them balanced and very easy to get so focused on one side or the other of the equation that we fall into the mode of judgment rather than preparation.

I’d like to suggest that Advent is not a cozy season of happy anticipation but a time to consider seriously the “godscape” – what the world would look like if each and every one of us were able to embody the love of God fully and at all times. How do you envision the godscape as revealed through Jesus?

I’ve seen some wonderful signs of the godscape this week. I’ve heard it in the tales of people who are working with people with HIV/AIDS that we heard in chapel on Tuesday. I saw it in the brave young Turkish woman who sat at a table in Seminary Hall 101 and dialogued with three Drew students and me. I felt it in the candles raised high in the air in the Advent Lessons and Carols service. But most particularly I felt and experienced it at Edna Mahan prison on Tuesday night where I was privileged to share in the semester end celebration of the “Search for the Good Community” class. This course, a class which Dr. Graybeal has taught at Drew since 1956, took place in the prison all semester with 10 of our students and 13 inside students. Together they learned and shared and opened their hearts. The inside students learned that outsiders could value their insights. The outsiders have new friends, friends whose faces will come to mind whenever people talk about prisoners or convicts or ex-cons. No one who has met Sonja or Mary or Angela will ever be able to forget their grace and power. No one who has heard Cynthia talk about having a son graduate from Drew and how she plans to graduate from Drew too will underestimate the abilities of an inmate. There was no question but that every woman in that class had experienced a truly wonderful community and had been changed by it. For me it was a deeply exhilarating and incredibly humbling experience. The laughter and joy in the room was palpable. As one of our students expressed it, she had always felt that she had to be the savior of the world but now she had really experienced the truth that small actions can make a mighty change.

So how might you prepare this godscape? What kind of life would you lead? Are you someone who is called to gently carry the lambs? To preach repentance? To dance the presence of God? To help us reduce our carbon footprint? To lead people into a deeper knowledge of God? To sing us into harmony and peace? How can you kindle the divine spark within to be a light for the world?

This season of advent is about preparation for the coming of Jesus- then at the first Christmas and now in 2008 in this time of bombings, financial crises, greed, and destruction of the natural order. Each of us is called to prepare for the coming of Jesus by embodying the light of Christ through our own gifts and graces. Preparing the godscape  is hopeful and terrifying work if we take it seriously. The creation of “good community” can make it possible and powerful. I invite all of us, gathered here in community, to find ways of deepening and enriching the communities of which we are apart.