"Words To Live By I: Balance"
Preparing in Advent means both putting off and putting on.
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, December 1, 2002
Text: Romans 13:8-14
This past Monday afternoon, as I descended the steps of the Victoria University building on the campus of the University of Toronto after having delivered my lecture on church history, I realized I had to make an urgent telephone call to the church about someone who was in need. I therefore rushed outside the building and at the bottom of the steps across the walkway, Saw a solitary telephone booth standing outside; but as I went to it there was already a young man, a student, on the phone. From the extent of his conversation it was very evident that he was in deep, deep thought and conversation. I listened very attentively, although one shouldn't, I know, and discovered he was in a very, very, very moving conversation with his mother.
It was evident that the more his mother spoke, the less he did. As the conversation went on, he just stood there, saying: "Yes, Mother. Yes, Mother. Yes, Mother. Yes, Mother. Yes, Mother."
Finally, at the end of the conversation, he said: "All right. All right. All right. I promise. I will put the lights up tonight. I promise. I promise." And he hung up.
After he had put the phone down, and turned around he realized that his quarter had not actually gone into the phone but was coming out of the coin return. So he grabbed the quarter and saw me hovering, waiting to make my phone call. Out of the goodness of his heart he handed it to me.
And then he looked at me closely and said: "Excuse me, aren't you the guy who's lecturing to those old people upstairs?"
I said: "Excuse me, they are mature people up there. You don't use the term old people."
He said: "Well, you make an awful lot of noise, whoever you are. I'm taking a philosophy course in another room and I can't hear myself think with the laughter going on in your class. By the way, what are you teaching?"
I said: "Church History."
Well, his face glazed over in incredulity and he said: "Well, I suppose that's good. All right. Wonderful." (Not knowing what else to say). Then, he said: "And by the way," (as if I needed to know) "my mother has told me to put up the Christmas lights, ready for Advent. I thought you'd be interested in knowing that."
I said: "Well, thank you very much. I am."
He said: "I've got to get ready, my mother keeps telling me. I've got to get ready so I'm on my way. Goodbye."
I said: "Goodbye." And off he went.
"You've got to get ready," he said "I've got to get ready." Advent is the time when you've got to get ready. It is the time of preparation for the coming of our Lord, Jesus Christ, at Christmas.
I've thought very often that we Christians are like that young man on the telephone at Victoria College. We are people who get ready. We get ready in the Sanctuary, as you can see, by putting up these beautiful trees. We get ready by lighting up our houses at home; by purchasing our gifts (which I talked about last week); by lighting the Advent Candle, which we have done this Sunday. We get ready in an outward sense quite easily and quite publicly.
But one of the things that I think we seldom do, as Christians, and something that we ought to do, is to get ready spiritually, to get ready morally, and to get ready in terms of our whole attitude towards the Christmas season.
This day we have lit the candle of hope; and the passage from the Book of Romans this morning is essentially about hope. The entire book is about getting ready with hope. The problem lies in the fact, however, that we often misunderstand what hope really means. We miss its power and therefore we don't get ready.
The great Vaclav Havel, who was the president of the Czech Republic, once made for me a very clear distinction. He said "hope is definitely not the same as optimism. It is not the conviction that everything is going to work out all right. It is the certainty that there are some things that make sense, whether they work out or not."
Very often when we look at hope, we look at hope as optimism. We think that all it means is being positive, believing that everything is just going to work out okay and everything will just be fine, the Pollyanna Christianity that we are often sold as hope. But the Christian gospel (and Vaclav Havel is right here in talking about our faith as well) is not about some vague optimism that everything will work out all right. Hope is the understanding that there are some things that make sense even if they don't appear to be working out.
The hope that the Apostle Paul is talking about in our passage is none other than the true hope of the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. The message of the gospel of Jesus Christ is the hope, and whether that leads to everything working out all right or not, it does not matter. Christians hope regardless. We hope regardless.
Now, the Apostle Paul is addressing in our text a serious situation. For the early church there was a profound belief that Jesus Christ was going to come again soon and bring about his kingdom. All suffering would end and the glory of the Lord, to quote the wonderful Handel, the glory of the Lord would fill the earth with the return of Jesus of Nazareth. The problem was, as each successive year went along, they found that this wasn't being fulfilled. Some Christians were becoming anxious and were questioning, wondering, whether the gospel message was true and whether their hope was false.
The Apostle Paul, realizing the degree of this despair among the Christian community, stressed then something different. He said what we have to concentrate on is not the timing, or the date, or the imminent arrival of Jesus Christ again, but the extent to which we are prepared for when he comes. For the Apostle Paul, the important thing was to prepare ourselves, to get ourselves ready for the arrival of Jesus Christ; for whatever the time or season, that is in God's hands, but the preparation - that is very much in our hands.
In many ways, this time of preparation is a balancing act. As we await this arrival of hope in Jesus Christ; we both prepare ourselves and at the same time we open ourselves. We prepare ourselves in a moral and in a spiritual way for the coming of Christ; and we open ourselves to the power of Jesus Christ available, risen and with us right here and right now. It really is, then, a matter of balance.
If you look at the text, Paul also talks about the balance between two things: On the one hand, it is the taking off and on the other, it is the putting on - the taking off in preparation and the putting on in receiving and openness.
The first thing that he tells the Christian community to do, and this is a very powerful idea for us in this Advent period, and he uses a military term, is to put on the armour of light, put on the armour of light. You see, many of the people who lived in Rome, many of the Christian community who were elsewhere in the Empire were experiencing the exact opposite. They were experiencing darkness in the world and they despaired.
Very often, we as Christians look at the world around us and we say: "Well, if Jesus Christ has come, if this light shines in the darkness, to quote the Gospel of John, then why is so much darkness still in the world?"
We see it every day. We have seen it in the past week, with the darkness of people going into a hotel in the beautiful town of Mombasa, on the coast of Kenya, and blowing up innocent vacationers, just because of their ethnicity. We see the same people, who had had this inflicted on them in vengeance, going out into other parts of the country and killing young people. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth - the vengeance of those who vent their anger in the continued cycle of violence.
In the Toronto Star yesterday, there is the darkness of the message that there are 500 missing women in our country, many of whom are native women, whose bodies have been found in farms in British Columbia, or never found. they have disappeared and been murdered in Canada - in Canada. When we see that violence and when we see that darkness, as Christians we should be concerned and we should want to do something about it.
I see this darkness when I hear and see the tensions in our community rising around issues of race. A university professor told me this past week that his great concern is that while we call ourselves a pluralistic, multicultural city in Toronto, to a large extent we are beginning to live as isolated villages, pockets of people who are keeping to themselves and in so doing, creating ghettos.
We have a problem in our society. It is a darkness. It is a dark blot on our society and we should be concerned. We should want justice. We should point to that darkness and we should name that darkness. We should say in the name of Jesus Christ that this darkness should end.
But we must also realize that although we might point a finger at the darkness and we might point to the light of Jesus Christ, we must not lose hope. Not hope that everything is going to work out and be fine, hope born in the heart and in the understanding that in Jesus Christ and the power of his love and his light. With hope, the armour of light bursts into this darkness and gives believers the courage and the power to live within it and to name it and to seek to transform it.
But all of this requires that we start with ourselves. If we want balance and harmony and hope in the world, I believe as Paul was saying to those Christians in Rome, that we as Christians must start by examining ourselves. And Advent is the time when we do this; when we look into our own hearts and our own minds and we analyze who and what we truly are.
In a beautiful book entitled, A Balancing Act: Rediscovering Your Feelings, our own Dr. Barbara Killinger, who is here in the congregation this morning, writes about the need for people in a balanced life to rediscover their feelings and their emotions, to have a sense of a centre in their lives and not just to get carried away by the professionalism and by the power and by the rationality of our age; but to develop a sense in ourselves of a feeling and a compassionate life.
One of the things she talks about is a passage written by Esther De Waal, Seeking God, about the Benedictine monasteries. The monasteries are an example of how to have this balance in our lives and in our spiritual lives. Barbara writes:
Monastery life involves time for prayer, and study, and work. De Waal sees the Benedictine life as an equilibrium (Notice the language - balance), a holding together of ultimate values in one centre, maintaining a balance between polarities, the monks' lives constantly at the point of tension between stability and change, between tradition and the future, between the personal and the community, between obedience and initiative, between the desert and the market-place, between action and contemplation. Such duality is never simple. Balancing the tugs and pulls we all experience on a daily basis is a demanding and a difficult task.
Now Barbara is right. But to get to the point where we look at our own lives and we see whether there is a balance requires from us a degree of contemplation, a degree of inwardness, a degree of finding the centre. What the Apostle Paul is saying to the Romans is that their centre is Jesus Christ. As Christians, our centre is Jesus Christ and, if we wish to put on the armour of light, if we wish to live as people of hope, then we must be people who open ourselves, our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our work, our convictions, to Jesus Christ himself.
There is no point in our just sitting back and waiting for some glorious day when the Kingdom will be fulfilled. As Paul says: "Christians awake! The night is gone; the day is near. Be alert. Get ready. Examine yourselves right here and now. But that examination requires another thing and that is taking off the deeds of darkness.
Paul was concerned that if the Christians wanted to address the darkness that was around them, they must not be consumed by it, but must be filled by the love of Jesus Christ that enables them to be obedient to the law. He did not want them to be consumed with their sin.
Now, I talk of this as someone who received a humbling telephone call from a colleague of mine a few months back. Whether or not he had read this somewhere else, or whether he was brilliant enough to think it up on his own, I will never know. (I suspect it was the former and not the latter).
He said to me: "Andrew, last night I dreamt that I died and I went to Heaven. When I got to the Pearly Gates, St. Peter welcomed me and invited me into this big room with thousands and thousands of clocks on the wall, with little brass plaques under them.
"I asked St. Peter: 'What are these clocks on the wall?'
"He said to me: 'Well, they represent all the people that are alive in the world that I'm keeping an eye on and underneath there are their names on the plaques. Every time they sin, the hands of their clock makes one revolution.'
"'And so,' I said, 'that's why all these clocks are at different times, then.'
"St. Peter said: 'Absolutely.'
"So, Andrew" my colleague said, "I went and looked for all the people that I knew and I found them. There was only one problem. I couldn't find a clock there with your name on it. So I went to St. Peter and I said: 'St. Peter, where is the clock for The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling?'
"St. Peter said: 'Well, actually we've had to take that clock out and put it in another room. We're using it as a fan.'"
We all, says Paul, fall short of the glory of God. If our salvation was based on our own ability to fulfil the law there would be no hope; but that does not mean that we should not be vigilant and careful. Paul says if you want to take on the deeds of darkness and deflect them, if you want to follow in the life of Christ, you've got to put off revelry. Revelry is a word that describes an unruly mob after a sports game, very much like what must have happened today, I think, when Manchester United beat Liverpool at soccer in England. I would be revelrous this morning, I think.
And Paul talks about those who are consumed by drunkenness. While people in the time of Paul would dilute their wine and drink it, and dip bread into it because it was the cleanest thing to do, there were those who would revel in drunkenness. You've got to put off drunkenness if you want to prepare yourselves with hope and have a balanced life.
You have to put aside immorality. Immorality means doing whatever you please with whomever you please, whenever you please. That is immorality. You can't do that.
You've got to put off shamelessness, he said. Shamelessness is nothing more than doing a deed and not caring what others think: having no shame. Well, you do need to care what others think because, as a Christian, you can lead people astray. Put off your shamelessness.
You should put off, he says, your contention. Contention is nothing more than competition and that's at the heart of what's going on in the Holy Land: Today competing forces seeking power and land and privilege and identity at the expense of others. It causes darkness and conflict. We have to put aside contention.
Lastly, says Paul, we've got to put aside envy. Envy is looking at what someone else has and wanting it at no matter what cost. Envy is not being content with what you have, but rather living your life always seeking what somebody else has.
Paul says if you want a balanced life, if you want hope in your life, if you want Christ in your life, put these things to one side and take them off. Advent is a time of preparation, not only to put on, but also to take off.
Now, he says one last thing: "I want you now, after you have done that, to put on something else. I want you to put on Jesus Christ. I want you to put on the grace and the love of Christ."
You see, my friends, there are many similarities between ourselves and the step programs that are out there that bring healing: The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and others. But the Christian faith always goes one step further: We not only have a higher power that we look to, we not only recognize that we have our own faults and claim them, but we also have a Saviour and a Lord who gives us the power and the love and the strength to deal with darkness. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.
The power of this text from the Book of Romans is such that in and of itself it has changed many lives over the years. It changed, for example, the life of one of the greatest of all the saints in the history of the Christian Church, St. Augustine.
In his wonderful (and rather juicy) book entitled Confessions, Augustine says, as he is struggling with his inner self:
I have much to say to you, my God, not in these very words, but in this strain: Lord, will you never be content? Must we always taste your vengeance? Forget the long rewards of our sins for I felt that I was still the captain of my sins and in my misery I kept crying: How long shall I go on saying tomorrow, tomorrow? Why not now? Why not make an end of my ugly sins at this very moment?
I was asking these questions and I was weeping; and then I heard a voice and it said: Take this book and read it.
So I hurried back to the place where my friend Alpheus was sitting, for when I stood up to move away I had put down the book containing the word, Paul's Epistles. I then seized it and opened it and in silence I read the first passage on which my eyes fell:
'Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries, rather arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ. Spend no more thought on nature and nature's appetites.'
I had no wish to read more and no need to do so for in an instant as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.
St. Augustine had come face to face with our passage this morning. He had struggled and wrestled with his own darkness. He had struggled and wrestled with the darkness and sin in the world and he realized for the first time in his life, as he read these words that if he put on Jesus Christ he would have the power to deal with that darkness. Not only would he have to take off, not only would he have to prepare, he could, in fact, put on the grace and the love of Jesus Christ and in putting it on, find that his life, once and for all, was changed.
After I had finished my phone call at Victoria College, I realized that the young student who had been on the phone had forgotten his bag and his books, probably in a rush to try and call his mother again. So he came back into the building and came rushing back down the steps and, as I was putting down the phone, he looked at me and explained: "Father Prof! Father Prof! are you ready?" My mother wants to know." And he ran off and I have no idea where he went.
Are you ready? Are you ready? Are you prepared this Advent to take off that which is of darkness and put on Christ who is our light? For in him is our hope, our life, our conviction, our balance. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.