At the beginning of every Advent, the first Sunday’s reading is a text from the gospel describing what is commonly known as the “Last Days” or the “Second Coming.” These texts are a type of literature known as “apocalyptic,” which is hidden language, used in times of crisis or catastrophe, to offer a secret message of hope to beleaguered believers. From the greek “apo” (un) and “kalypto” (cover); “apocalyptic” moments and texts serve to uncover the presence of God hidden in the midst of crisis or in seasons of darkness. In popular imagination, “Apocalpytic” predicts the catastrophic end of time, when the world will come to an end. In traditional Christian theology, these readings and their location represent our awareness that telling the story of the advent or coming of Christ at Christmas is not mere remembrance, but also, holy anticipation: a prayerful way of looking forward and acknowledging that our life belongs to God and, as we live faithfully, we practice and anticipate God’s redemptive work being incarnate in the world—not just once, long ago: but now and in the unknown future as well.

More personally, I invite you to consider these texts as an invitation to “uncover” what is hidden, hard, or shaky in your own world. Maybe there is distress about the economy, violence, or political unrest here or abroad.

Maybe your shakiness is centered around a troubled relationship or an illness in your family or friend. Maybe this is a time of spiritual silence or darkness for you personally…a season in which prayer doesn’t work as it once did, or God seems absent or silent. Maybe there is anger, or fear or anxiety in you or one you love. When we find the courage to speak about and acknowledge these unsettled and unsettling places, we open up, and make room in our inner being for hope, and the possibility of a sacred touch. This is what theology means by the word “Incarnation”—which describes both how the Divine One was, once and long ago embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, a man…and how our own human selves are met where we are—whether in distress or gladness and changed by the interplay of divine hope and human experience.

We move through the Advent Season: beginning from our own and the world’s places of darkness and brokenness into a consideration of Voices of transformation and turning, represented by the stories of John the Baptist. Who are the people in your work and world who challenge your best self? Whose are the voices in public discourse that inspire our attention toward a more perfect union; who invite our practices of justice and mercy and kindness to be revitalized, for the common good? What needs to change in me? In our communities of faith? In our nation and world, so that we might move out of places of danger and wilderness into newness of life?

Advent culminates in the powerful example of Mary of Nazareth, a girl of no means, no power, and little prestige…who accepted the invitation of a Holy Mystery, and who allowed what could have been a season of personal apocalypse— an unexpected and unsanctioned pregnancy— to be a moment for spiritual transformation; a chance for the Holy Spirit to birth God’s Presence into the life of a young girl and a particular moment of history. She could have said no. Instead, she said “yes.” This Christmas season; what place in your life needs the “yes” of reverent attention, patient illumination, a dose of hopeful imagination?

May the blessing of Christ Light fill you and yours, this holy season and always. Laurie

Our Advent theme, “Incarnations” will explore the ways God’s presence is becoming visible to us in our own lives, in our communities, and in other religious traditions with which we are in conversation, since all of the world’s major religious traditions can contribute together to adding compassion, love, and peace to our troubled world.

Join us for any and all of these special events during the Advent Season here at Riviera

SUNDAYS: Worship each week at 11 am, followed by an interactive adult learning gathering at noon, with refreshments, considering “Incarnations: the ways and means of God’s engagements with the human family.”
Nov 28: Buddhism and Hinduism in dialogue with Christianity
Dec 5: Judaism in dialogue
Dec 12: Islam in dialogue
Dec 19: Christianity and incarnation in the 21st Century

MARK YOUR CALENDAR NOW:

Dec. 4 Color and Light Art Show and Gift Sale (9 am to 4:30 pm): Celebrating the beautiful, colorful and diverse fabric of people in South Florida, Riviera Church invites you to visit, see and meet these important local artists.

Dec. 4–5 Alternative Gift Sale (9 am to 4:30 pm): SERRV fair-trade world market and African hand crafts to benefit the Church’s education mission in Kenya.

Dec. 12 A Christmas Musical Festival: (11 am) “This Child, This King,” a Christmas cantata.

Dec. 12 A Christmas Family Feast with Caroling (5 pm) Come to the Church Fellowship Hall, bring a side dish or dessert to share.

Dec. 21 “Blue Christmas:” (7 pm) A quiet evening of jazz/blues music, readings and prayers for people who experience sadness or are remembering a loss during this season of family joy. Following the service, the church’s labyrinth will be open for walking and prayer in the sanctuary.

Dec. 24 Family Christmas Eve Candlelight Service (6 pm) A service of lessons and carols.

Dec. 26 Christmas Sunday (11 am) Join us for a celebrative, intergenerational and interactive worship service—with costumes, caroling and storytelling.

Jan. 9 The Sunday of Epiphany (11 am) “And the Friendly Beasts…” A service for ALL the family in which we welcome our pets into worship for the “blessing of the beasts.” Following the service there will be a potluck lunch in the courtyard for everyone… with kibble and bits for our friends.

Christmas is the season of signs—of stars and portents, of dreams and whispered words of courage; of the mingling of men and angels, of strange goings-on in the places we had least expected. Some of us love it–can’t–wait for the carols, the expectation, the Story, the tingle of renewed hope that Christmas brings. But not all of us…..

Because Christmas is also a Season of Transition, though, mostly, we do not choose to acknowledge it. If someone in the year just past has lost a loved one, sent a child off to college, divorced, retired, endured a life-changing illness or injury—if someone has moved away, metaphorically or really, from a place they long called “home”— the First Christmas After can be a painful reminder of all that has changed and is changing, not necessarily for the better.

Is it any wonder, then, that the character in the bible’s nativity stories whose own life most closely mirrors the experience of Christmas-After is mentioned only in one of the gospels and never speaks a word? Have you noticed Joseph, who in most nativities stands in the back of the manger scene, arms crossed, almost outside the circle of Light cast by the joyous glow of Mother and Child? Whose character, as a friend of mine pointed out, is so non-descript you can hardly tell him from the shepherds, leaving you to pick up first one and then another, wondering did I choose the right father? Which one is he? Which was, of course, precisely why Joseph is the sorry symbol for Christmas as Transition.

For what could be more devastating than, upon the eve of marriage, discovering your beloved is pregnant with someone else’s child? Instead of joyous anticipation, there are hard questions about fidelity and responsibility, and hope yields to an anguished season of betrayal and loss. The future dreamed of has vanished, leaving in its place uncertainty, confusion, and sleepless nights.

And then, when you are at your worst and weakest, tired and tossing and seemingly at a dead end, choices must be made.

Joseph had made his. He resolved to dismiss her quietly, and spare her public disgrace. And that might have been the end of it—for Joseph, at least, if not for the others in the story, whose lives, unfairly, depend on the choice Joseph is about to make. Choosing is hard enough when only our own future is at stake. How much harder when we know, because of who we are, that what we decide makes a difference to the lives of others?

And the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary for your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”

In Steve Carrell’s summer movie take on the Noah’s Ark story, Evan Almighty, a newspaper reporter challenges the freshman U. S. Congressman who has left Capitol Hill to build an ark on the edge of an affluent housing development in Virginia. Are you trying to say God chose you? No, says Evan, what I am saying is that God chooses all of us, only usually, we don’t listen.

In the world of dreams, when Joseph was tired, weak and defenseless, God breached the barriers with a word of possibility, an alternative way to see the world. And
Joseph listened. Joseph, son of David…. not ben-Jakob, son of Jacob, his own father’s name—but rather, Joseph son of David, Israel’s hoped-for once and future king. Joseph is not merely a small-town carpenter, whose choices matter only to himself: he is a person with a heritage, a legacy. He is of the house and lineage of David, and his choices are not only personal privilege, they are of spiritual significance, matters of religious obligation. Joseph’s choice bears the additional weight of the needs of his neighbors, his community, and his faith.
Joseph, like the child he will soon agree to raise as his
own, is of the house and lineage of God’s chosen; he
may be a poor working man, but his soul, like his
son’s, cradles the Light of God. We are not the small
insignificant souls we secretly hoped to be. We have a
legacy and an heritage. We are in truth from the house and
lineage of Joseph, and the choices we make, however
personal, affect how God will—or won’t—
become incarnate in the world.

Sometimes when people learn what it is I do for a
living, they say, wow, that must be really hard, to
guide people and tell them what God wants in their
lives. But that’s not what pastoring is, I tell
them: pastoring is like midwifery: standing by in hope and
partnership while people I love make decisions about how
God will be born through them in the choices they make in
the world. Should I take that job? Should he have this
procedure? Is adopting the right decision for us? Shall we
marry? Or divorce? What college is best for me? Should I
play a sport, or an instrument?

It is like being of the house and lineage of Joseph:
being intentional and attentive, waking and sleeping:
believing that each of our small and private choices matter
to God, who continues to wait for a place to be born in
each of us so that God can do his work in the world.

Like Joseph, we can try to stand on the edge of the
story, remain quiet, become invisible . . . but when push
comes to shove, as it must in all birthing stories,
eventually we will have to choose. Will we be right, or
righteous? Despite our deep and understandable desire not
to matter that much, even in the midst of our own needful
tending of our own wounds; if we are of the house and
lineage of Joseph, we really only have one choice in the
end: to be, like Joseph, a stand-up person in a no-fault
world.

Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary.
. . isn’t that interesting? In all of the other
Christmas stories, when you hear the words fear not,
it is the angel of God who wishes us not to fear his
appearing, not to cower in terror before the vision, the
dream, the sign that the world is more than we had
supposed. Shh, it was only a dream. Thus we comfort
a child, or ourselves in the night when we awake, heart
pounding, disoriented, terrified….it was only a
dream, we say, and return to the world as it was.

But Joseph’s story gets it right. Do not be
afraid to take Mary as your wife. . .this angel said.
For fear in dreams is a passing, momentary
discomfort—but the choices we make, waking, are for
good, and forever. Joseph’s story reminds us that
dreams can’t harm us—but what we do when we
awake can change us, and others, forever.

Hold this possibility close, this Christmas or
Christmas-After: the choices you make because of who you
are and what you believe—whatever those choices may
be—are places where God wishes to be present in you,
and through you, in the world. The choices YOU make are the
places God wishes to be in you, for the world. We are of the house and lineage of Joseph. Do not be afraid. It is Christmastime, when the story we tell
reminds us that each of us are part of a greater
tale. We have places in the dream, we are characters in the
Nativity scene, we have an important part to play. On the
strength of what we choose, as once, long ago,
emmanuel: God will, God may be born in us
this day. Amen.

Isaiah 2:1-5 and Matthew 24:36-44

The other evening, finding myself unexpectedly alone and with nothing pressing to do, I was idly flipping through television channels when I happened upon a show my daughter told me I should watch sometime: House. During the moments I was watching, a young doctor agonized over his misdiagnosis of a middle aged man whom he believed had a terminal adenocarcinoma. A three month check up had revealed that the man was not sick at all: the apparent tumors were harmless lesions. When the young doctor told the good news to the man, he was aghast. But my house is under contract to sell, he shouted, I’ve made arrangements, this will cost me money. He stormed out. Feeling responsible, the young doctor wrote a personal check to the man for six thousand dollars, the penalty on the house, and called his patient back in. Six thousand dollars?!! the man exclaimed, enraged, this doesn’t begin to cover it. He tore up the check as the doctor stammered, but I don’t understand. This is all the money you lost, I’ve given it back, and besides you have your life back. I don’t understand. And the man said bitterly, no, you don’t. When you diagnosed me with terminal cancer, you gave me today. For the first time I have really lived for the present moment, believing I had nothing except now. But you have stolen that meaning from me, taken away my life . . . and now I will go on living, but my life is over.

Listen, now, for a word from God in the gospel of Matthew:

But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the son, but only the father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be preparing food together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this : if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

What we know the most is: we don’t know anything. No one knows, says Matthew’s Jesus, they knew nothing. You do not know….

Matthew’s people, waiting for the return of Christ and living instead through the Roman Wars and the destruction of the 2^nd Temple, learned what they didn’t know the hard way, and so, sometimes, do we. Being God’s people was no insurance policy, then or now. We do not know the day, the hour or the way that caution or catastrophe may visit us. We do not know how God will show up at such times either.

We can’t prepare for it. We can’t predict it. If we had known at what hour the thief would break into our house, we would have been ready, but who can know such things? Even the security system isn’t foolproof. There is something impersonal in a raging wildfire; a hurricane, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, of cancer. Something impersonal, and unfair, and frighteningly random. It could happen to us, as easily as it happened to Sean Taylor, or a villager in Mexico and a family of four in Santa Monica. It does happen to us. Two women are working: one gets sick, the other doesn’t. Two men are walking down the same street: one has a heart attack and dies, the other lives to a ripe old age, seeing his children’s children.

Things happen, and there’s nothing we can do about it, except, maybe, to attend seriously the words of Jesus, the words that are, disconcertingly, always the first words of the Church year and the season of Advent: you do not know when the Son of Man is coming, therefore you must be ready.

Here on Advent Sunday, at this newly constructed in the beginning of the church year, I think part of our problem is that we focus too much on Christmas, as though the season of Advent were merely what the market place would have us believe: so many shopping, or even praying, days before Christmas. The fact is, the coming of Jesus at Christmas was only a beginning. Christmas is not what we are aiming ourselves toward; we who are the Christ’s followers are not at the starting line of a four week sprint towards spiritual fulfillment.

There is a reason Advent begins with a warning, and with texts that are drawn from the end of Jesus’ life and from the end of the early church’s failed expectation in the rapid return of the messiah. The reason is, we do not expect to find our meaning in the meantime, but rather, taking the long view, in the end time. At the beginning of Advent we are not beginning a headlong rush to the baby in the manger; we are attempting once again to set our feet on the path the man Jesus walked as the light of Christ: a path marked by learning, loving, and listening. A path shaped by sacrifice, sorrow, and satisfaction. A path that is at the same time solitary and crowded with communities that need our careful attention to acts of love, justice, and mercy towards others and no less, to ourselves. By entering Advent, we are setting our feet on the long road toward home.

And to do that, paradoxically, we must find a way to live in the present, in the present moment, as Jesus told his followers, paying attention and practicing being ready. To live intentionally, attentively, as though we were living in doom. One may be taken, another left behind. It may be you, it may be your next door neighbor, or your best friend. Did they make the best use of the time they had, honoring the days God gave them upon the earth? Did you learn anything from the suddenness of their passing? Wish you were living your own life differently? Wonder whether you can do better, now that you have been reminded of the fragility and the preciousness of life?

Keep awake, be ready.

The way we live, it’s far too easy to miss the Presence, the presence of God, but even our own presence in the present moment. To be with ourselves, and those we love, and those we ought to love, right now. We are not sprinting toward the manger; we are on the long road, seeking to understand where, if anywhere, the divine presence is finding room among us, and within us.

I hope that the way we have planned the Advent season here at the church this year will help you and those you love to do this. You will notice: we are not having any book studies, few meetings, no Advent mid-week nights around which to juggle your family’s schedule. We are making room, room in the inns of our lives. Today, we are presenting an Advent Alternative Gift Fair following worship. We hope you can practice love and mercy by supporting fairly traded crafts available in the SERRV shop, with alternative giving for the Light Project for the students without electricity in our partner community in Kenya, by supporting Heifer Project. If you shop here, you don’t have to buy into mall madness, and can know that your giving is supporting people in need, not the best commercial retail season in the past five years.

Next week, we are celebrating our Christmas dinner following worship, and right after, an hour of Christmas and Advent music on organ, piano, and voice. Bring your friends, and make time for community and quiet celebration through the arts.

Midway through Advent, on Saturday the 15^th, a two hour morning retreat will use prayer, fellowship, and the labyrinth to remind us that we are in God’s time, taking the long but sure road home. Sunday the choir will lead worship with the cantata “Nativity,” and we will continue to wonder at the ways the world sees the Prince of Peace through our collection of Nativities from Asia and Europe displayed throughout the sanctuary this season. And we will pause for the refreshment of the Lord’s Supper, today and again at the end of Advent, before we welcome the child on Christmas Eve.

We hope you can make time for some or most of these few and quiet Advent moments: that you can enter them as an antidote to the blaring carols, the hideous traffic, the anxious buying and partying that so easily draw us in and distract us from reflecting the Light of Christ in a darkening world.

Last year about this time, RoseMaree Curtis came to me after worship on Sunday and said, Laurie, do you think it would be wrong for me to not be in treatment this month? Not to focus on the future, having chemo and radiation and being sick and tired? Would it be okay for me to just have the Advent season, and Christmas one more time? I’m ashamed to say that it was hard for me to hear her, and that I was so fixated on what I thought could be her future, that I cajoled and pleaded with Rose that she should give up her present in the service of an unknown future. But, she was as adamant as she could be; and as many of you know, that was pretty adamant indeed. She set fear and the unknown future aside, and took her Advent, and her Christmas, and she reveled in being alive and present. And several months later, one was taken, and we were left behind, and all the time she was ready, and I was not paying attention.

There are many prayers for Advent, and more for Christmas. But the prayer in my heart this morning is for another time, and for light on the long road toward Home:

O Lord, support us all the day long, while the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in Thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.