This Sunday is the second Sunday of Advent in the Christian liturgical calendar. In that tradition, Advent is a time of waiting and personal preparation to receive the mystery and the miracle of the birth of Jesus.
Mystery is our spiritual theme for December and I am looking forward to exploring it from the pulpit. Our religious tradition(s) have a complicated relationship to the idea of miracles and our experience of mystery. But like many of you, I find myself waiting for miraculous changes…for vaccines to end the pandemic, for a new administration to end the lies and mean-spiritedness, for a New Year to allow us to put the past year behind us. Advent offers a good and very timely opportunity for some serious reflection.
There is no record of Advent being celebrated until the 5th century of the Common Era. At first, it was about waiting for Jesus to return…literally. His promised physical return was a central mystery in the early Christian church.
But the focus has long shifted, for most practicing Christians, into preparation to receive the mystery that Jesus represents into their hearts and into their lives. Advent locates the mystery within us.
The celebration of Advent is a recognition that “We Are the Ones” we’ve been waiting for.
Many of you may now be humming the Sweet Honey anthem by that name. If you don’t know it or can’t recall it, here is a link to jog your memory. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHsJHZpOJCc)
Sweet Honey borrowed the phrase from poet June Jordan who, in 1978, presented at the United Nations a poem commemorating the 40,000 South African women and children, of every ethnicity, who presented themselves in bodily protest against the expansion of the pass laws (“dompas”) to include women. The women were in flagrant violation of apartheid, but the government did not move to disperse them. They delivered petitions with over 100,000 signatures.
They stood in silence for 30 minutes, then sang a protest song that had been composed for the event. Its title translates: “Now you have touched the women. You have struck a rock.”
June Jordan’s poem concludes:
“And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea
we are the ones we have been waiting for.”
Alice Walker years later borrowed the phrase “We Are the Ones” as a title for a book. She wrote of her 30-year friendship with June Jordan:
“We were not friends who saw each other often; not the kind of friends who discussed unpublished work. In fact, we sometimes disagreed profoundly with each other. We were the kind of friends instead, who understood that we were forever on the same side: the side of the poor, the economically, spiritually and politically oppressed, ‘the wretched of the earth.’ And, on the side, too, of the revolutionaries, teachers and spiritual leaders who seek transformation of the world. … It seems a model of what can help us rebalance the world. Friendship with others…that is, in a sense, impersonal.”
Friendship that is…in some sense…impersonal. Relationship grounded in broader underlying values and commitments. Relationship that generates accountability that can hold differences.
It is counter-intuitive. It defies the logic that demands that agreement is a prerequisite to collaboration.
Is this a notion that might allow us to move beyond tribal boundaries? Not to leave those boundaries behind, but to operate beyond them? Even in these aggressively divided days?
I will be using both June Jordan’s famous phrase and Alice Walkers’ hopeful reflection in my own devotional life and no doubt my preaching as we wait and prepare our own hearts for whatever the New Year may bring.
And Sweet Honey will be singing within me as we search for hope in the mysteries of this season.
Blessings,
Bill