Advent 1: “The Inner Change”

12/3/06

Advent is a season of change. We sense it in many ways. Here, for us, the season usually coincides with the most dramatic changes in weather. It turned cold this past week! But in our present culture, the changes are not just in nature. Bright colored lights appear, first in shopping centers and then in individual homes. Lots full of Christmas trees suddenly appear, as if overnight. The every-present commercial Muzak blasts out holiday music. Here in church, the colors change, too, and the liturgy, as suddenly we find ourselves back at the beginning of a new Christian year. Advent is a time of change.

So many of the changes are superficial. Colored lights are beautiful, but they are tacked on to storefronts or rooflines that haven’t really changed. In our homes we deck the halls with boughs of holly, and things look festive; but these changes, too, are short-term, surface changes. In a sense, these decorations, as much as we love them and enjoy them, are symbols of the superficiality of our culture and of our lives. Leonard Sweet puts it this way: “The exterior decorations we rely on . . . to get us in the ‘Christmas spirit’ often do remarkably little to alter the barren landscape of our souls. Red-nosed reindeer, spray-on snow and hosiery on the mantelpiece reveal little about our hearts. Indeed, they themselves can contribute to a culture filled with people without insides—all exterior, all appearance, all image.”

Advent is a season of change—but the change it calls us to is not external and superficial, but internal and very deep. It is the way God works change—not by covering the facade with bright lights and tinsel, but by making interior changes—interior decorations, if you will! Hal Brady suggests that the Christmas tree is an example of the difference. We decorate the tree on the outside, with all the loveliness we can find—lights, cranberries, popcorn, ornaments. But when God decorates trees, he does it with leaves and fruit and flowers—adornments that come from the inside, from the rich earth, the water and food he provides, taken up into the tree through its roots. And of course our baubles and doodads only last a few weeks, while God’s decorations continue, month after month, year after year, through the life of the tree.

Advent is a season of change in external things; but could we make it also a season of deeper change, change in us, change on the inside? Could we decorate our hearts, and not just our halls? And how would we do that?

We might start with the sense that some change is needed. We don’t like that idea too much! Leo Tolstoy once wrote that “everybody thinks of changing humanity, but nobody thinks of changing himself.” We decry the troubles of the world—the materialism, the violence, the lack of compassion and concern. But we are apt to place the blame somewhere else, and ignore the responsibility that lies within our own hearts. The apostle James was right when he observed that conflicts and wars in the world arise from the discontent and cravings of the human heart. Quaker writer Thomas Kelly put it this way: “We Western people are apt to think our great problems are external, environmental. We are not skilled in the inner life, where the real roots of our problem lie.”

This is the function for this season of Advent for us. It is a time when we are called to turn to our inner life, where the roots of our problems lie, and to make some changes. And the nature of the change that is needful is found in our Gospel lesson this morning. There we hear Jesus’ admonition to “be alert and pray”—or, as the older translations used to put it, “Watch and pray.” Those words are the key to this season, the key to how we change within. “Watch and pray.” Let’s think about what that means, and how we do it.

Many years ago, when radio was still a rather new contraption, the corporate offices of NBC received a letter from a prospector who lived in an isolated cabin out in Montana. Written on a piece of a brown paper bag, the letter contained an unusual request. “I am a regular listener to your programs, and as a friend I want to ask you a favor. It gets lonely up here, and besides my radio and my dog, I have not much else for company. I do have a violin that I used to play, but now it is badly out of tune. Would you be kind enough to strike me an “A” at 7:00 next Sunday night so that I can put my fiddle back in tune?” At first the NBC employees found some amusement in this petition, but the President of NBC had a good perspective on things, and at his instruction, the following Sunday night the network interrupted their regularly scheduled programming to sound an “A” and give their friend the proper pitch with which to tune his violin.

Well, all of us get out of tune—perhaps never so badly as at this time of y ear when we are so hurried and so busy. And we need to take some time to listen for that “A,” so that we can get our lives back in tune with God. God wants to give us the pitch, if we will stop long enough to listen.

In this season, we are asked to watch and pray. To watch means simply to focus our attention on what is ultimately important. That, of course, is God, and the way of life we has set before us, the paths of love and faithfulness (as the Psalmist puts it). We are to focus on attention on him in this season. It isn’t easy! This is our busiest month—I think that is true for almost all of us, employed or retired, close to family or far away. This is a busy time. Watching and praying takes some intention. We have to decide to do it. How about some suggestions?

First: Join us each Wednesday afternoon at 4:45 for our Advent Organ Vespers, followed by Evening Prayer. Stop by on your way home from work, or on your way out to Victorian Christmas, or make a special trip into town for the purpose. We’ve been doing this services for many years now, and many of us have found them an important way to carve out some time to watch and pray. Thirty minutes of quiet reflection during a loud and bustling week—it’s a gift you can give yourself! Come and watch and pray.

Secondly, don’t neglect time for prayer and reflection at home! If in your life a time of daily quiet and prayer has fallen by the wayside lately, take it up again this month. In the fine print on the back of your bulletin cover you’ll find the Scripture lessons for next Sunday’s worship. Read one or more of them each day during this week, and let their words take root in your heart between now and next Sunday. Make it a priority. Make it more important than cooking and shopping and decorating, because it is more important than those things.

Third, plan some family time. Light candles at the dinner table, and sing a carol together. Read aloud from the Bible; use one of the devotional booklets we have available in the Fellowship Hall. All this is especially important if you have young children at home, but it is important, too, if you don’t—even if you live alone.

“To pray is to change,” writes Richard Foster. “Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us. If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer as a noticeable characteristic of our lives.” Where are you, my friends? Are you willing to change? Are you willing to work on some interior decoration right now, and not just the exterior stuff? As we begin a new year of grace, the call of our Lord is insistent: “Watch and pray.” “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down.”

A century or so ago, the explorer Knud Rasmussen interviewed an Eskimo holy man. “What do you fear?” he asked—a stunningly interesting question, seems to me! The reply was equally fascinating. “We fear,” the Eskimo said, “the cold, and all the things we do not understand. But most of all we fear the doings of the heedless ones among ourselves.” In that icy wilderness, you see, the heedless ones can bring disaster on themselves and on others simply by not paying attention. And it is that way with us. Jesus talks about signs in the sun and moon, the Son of Man coming in glory. His point is that we must not be heedless. Rather we must watch and pray, so that our feet might be led in paths of love and faithfulness, and our hearts might prepare him room.