This sermon was preached for St. John’s Episcopal Church in Lynchburg, VA on the First Sunday of Advent, Year B 2023.
Photo by Ben Cowgill of All Saints Chapel in Sewanee, TN on a foggy day.
Isaiah 64:1-9; Mark 13:24-37

Happy Advent!

This weekend’s fog took me by surprise— as maybe it did many of you. As I drove down 29 on my way to my wife Allison’s church, I was transported out of Lynchburg and out of Virginia entirely. Don’t worry— no visions. I was transported back to Tennessee, Sewanee, where I spent three years of my life preparing to serve the church.

Sewanee, for those who don’t know, has a particular weather pattern. Mild seasons, but being on the edge of the Cumberland plateau, the western edge of the Appalachian Mountains, a few hundred feet up from the valley below, sets us up for one thing, all year round— fog. Fog pours in at the beginning of the fall like pea soup and some mornings, its all you can do to get from one side of campus to another without walking into a building or driving your car into someone else driving at ten miles an hour with their windows down. Streetlights are invisible until you’re directly under them; headlights appear like pinpricks when they’re only a hundred feet away and oh my gosh— there was nothing like curling up with a cup of warm coffee and spending a morning inside as the fog rolled in.

Now for many outsiders, this may sound disconcerting; but for the regular residents of Sewanee, and for fog fans around the world, the fog is welcome… to a point. After about two months of on and off fog days, the fog is no longer as welcome. It lulls the campus into a sort of slumber, a different pace and tone. People in Sewanee begin to forget the magnificent views, what the woods and summer flowers look like… in bad years they even forget what the tops of buildings look like. In the Sewanee fog, it can be a struggle to keep awake.

Seasons have a way of grabbing our attention — they can hijack the direction we think we were going in; imagine the first snow or freezing rain, when parents are struggling to find childcare because yes, the schools did close for that, and grocery stores seem to all run out of salt for the sidewalks before anyone you know has even had chance to get there. For some of us, we feel it physically—fall may bring festive colors and pumpkin spice everything but it also brings depression. Summer’s hottest days make it unsafe to play outside. Wildfire smoke in dry seasons leaves everyone with a sore throat, and keeps the most vulnerable inside and afraid. Seasons can affect us positively, too; think of the first day of warmth and spring, the rain breaking over Lynchburg the Tuesday before Thanksgiving that helped quell the blazes, and any rain breaking out in a hot or dry time; bringing relief, water to the thirsty world. It’s pretty amazing how these seasons can affect us, affect our bodies and our emotions. For me, fog will always pull me back to a beautiful, strange place with a eerie climate that I spent three wonderful, difficult years.

I wonder if you’ve seen where I’m going with all of this yet, because our season has changed. Our church year begins anew today, and our church season changes from ordinary time to Advent. Advent, the purple season, the one with the wreath and the calendars and the extra candles. Yes, Advent.

Were a lot of you thinking about Advent when you woke up this morning? Were any of you thinking of it for the past two or three months? No, the church seasons don’t quite catch us that way. Often, they are surprising, and often, they can be out-of-sync with our bodies, our emotions, or the regular comings and goings of the world. Yet when we walk through the doors of the church, or open up our bulletins and find “O Come O Come Emmanuel” on the first page, we’re transported into a different world. This beautiful and sacred season invites us to slow down. It bids us to anticipate the Incarnation of our Lord at Christmastide. It asks us to prepare, to remember & celebrate his first coming, and to anticipate his second coming as well. As we ready ourselves for Christmas we hear of Mary and Joseph and John; but we also hear prophecies; apocalypses, rumors of second coming. Advent is peace, love, joy and hope, but it is also death, judgement, heaven and hell for others. It’s a season of festivity, and a season of penitence. It’s a season particularly of watchfulness. Keep awake, says Jesus. He is very near.

Has the fog come over you yet?

The season of Advent is contrary to the secular season of “the holidays.” It is a season of darkness, a season that asks the question every year— where is God? When will Christ come again? and every year, we are given the same answer: keep awake. Jesus does not tell us a place or time, Jesus tells us the opposite— no one will know the place or time when he will come again. And so the church cries out in a loud voice— “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence” (Isaiah 64:1).

Yet when we search earnestly for God, God is not apparent. When we plead for God desperately, God is apparent. When we ask God, how long, O Lord? How long must we endure wars, and famine, and disasters! Save us!, we perceive no reply. It is when we are driving down the road in the ordinary course of life, that we are transported season-to-season, swept up from one world into another, to put it in a word we are shaken AWAKE. Maybe it’s fog, or heat, or icy rain, or the first blossoms, or purple on the altar, or “O Holy Night,” or another of a hundred signs of the seasons, but there is something out there that can capture your attention and transport you from the present to another place entirely. That is the lesson of the fig tree— that other story Jesus shares. Your body, your mind can take you somewhere before you know where you’re going there. Summer is near, it says! Time to grow some leaves. Advent is here! Jesus is knocking on the door. Keep awake.

Jesus does not specify the day of his return. We live in-between the times; the time between Jesus’s resurrection, and his coming again. It is a time where we expect things would get better, yet they do not. We say that Jesus has done all the work on the cross to save the world, yet the world is visibly not saved. The tension is incredible. We cannot dull it, we cannot ignore it, and it will not go away. That is where our Christian hope comes in. That is where the watching comes in. We cannot hope if we see the world as just okay; and we fall asleep when we fail to exercise our hope. Our hope is two-sided. It articulates the truth about all that is good and all that is bad about this world, and that only God can, and will, set it right. Our hope is brought out in our preparations; be they for the celebration of our Savior’s birth, or the spiritual preparation to meet him in his second coming, a preparation that takes a lifetime. Our hope may be expressed in shouts of protest against the world as it is and shouts of joy for when things go God’s way. Our hope is in the gospel promises given to us season after season, year after year, and for those tangible things that bring us back to our senses, that stir us up, that we may keep watch for your son, and his coming in great glory. Amen.