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Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's November 27, 2005 Sunday worship service. What to Expect When You’re Expecting Isaiah 64:1-9; Mark 13:24-37 Bethel 11/27/05 Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD All December long, children look forward to opening gifts. What can they expect to receive this Christmas? Parents expecting the birth of a child go through nine months of eager anticipation – perhaps also nine months of mixed emotions. What can they expect? Will it be a boy or a girl? Will the pregnancy go well? Will the mother feel sick? Will there be complications? Will the baby be healthy? For many reasons, it is the season of great expectations. Children and adults alike are anxious for Christmas to hurry up and get here. I think what caused me the most anxiety as a child, however, was the annual refrain of the old children’s song, “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town.” “Oh, you better watch out/ you better not cry/ you better not pout, I’m telling you why: Santa Claus is comin’ to town!” There was promise in that song, but also warning: “He sees you when you’re sleepin’, / he knows when you’re awake,/ He knows if you’ve been bad or good,/ so be good for goodness sake.” The message of the song, obviously written by a parent skilled in the art of motivation by fear, was very clear to me: Get excited! But also . . . shape up! I remember that song from my growing up years in rural South Carolina. We lived in the manse across the road from the Glenn Springs Presbyterian Church, a small membership congregation outside of Spartanburg where I shared a bedroom with my three brothers in the converted attic of that manse – an attic converted to a bedroom jkust before we arrived since the manse only previously had two bedrooms for our family of eight.. The experience in that Presbyterian church in the mid-1960s was a decidedly low church affair – I never heard the word “Advent” or “liturgical calendar” mentioned – no family coming forward to light candles on an advent wreath, no hanging of the greens, not even a Christmas Eve communion service. But what I do remember is that we did get a lot of messages that God was always watching everything you did – in other words, Christmas was a time of fun and hope, but it was also a season, like all other seasons, when “you better watch out!” In retrospect, I now realize that the song, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” fit pretty well with our Calvinist heritage in the South – what with our Blue Laws, conservative values, suspicion of Catholics, and the certainty that evangelical Protestantism was the only sure way to Jesus. But, particularly, the idea that stayed with me was that someone – namely God – was always watching to be sure you behaved yourself. And just to be sure we’d never do anything to displease God, you always had to be careful not to have too much fun, which included, especially, no card playing (except for Old Maids), no listening to rock and roll music, absolutely no dancing, and on Sundays, neither TV watching nor any kind of store shopping, either of which I came to believe, just might be the “unpardonable sin,” second only to drinking beer which undoubtedly would cause one to be tossed into the innermost ring of hell’s fiery furnace. I can still recall the time my older brother and I slipped up into our attic bedroom one Sunday afternoon, I was about 8 or 9 years old, and fired up the third-hand Magnavox black & white TV that had been relegated to the attic. In those days, the minister and his family always got the leftovers when a family in the church got tired of the “snow” or broken “vertical hold” on their old TV screen and bought a new one. I think, at one point we had three or four TVs that graced our attic bedroom. That Sunday, with the volume turned down real low, we caught, or tried to catch, because this was the TV with the vertical hold that didn’t hold, a few minutes of Johnny Unitas marching the Colts downfield in a playoff game – even now I vaguely think I saw Don Maynard’s feet in bounds as he caught a sideline pass – before a combination of guilt, the fear of being caught on a Sunday doing what we were doing, but especially probably, that broken vertical hold caused us to abandon the enterprise altogether. Even hunkered down in the attic on a Sunday afternoon, in front of that old TV and trying to adjust your eyes to follow what was happening in the game as the picture flipped round and round and round every half second, I still remember the feeling that the eyes of God, who I imagined as a rather stern and joyless old man sitting on his heavenly throne, whose dark, penetrating eyes, I just knew, were zeroed in on me. Guilty. Perhaps the most overt theological statement on what I then felt was contained in the Westminster Confession of Faith. It was written in the 17th century but still the normative theological summary of Protestant faith for many Presbyterians in the 1960s, The central idea in that long, almost legalistic-sounding confession was that God’s sovereignty – God’s all-knowing providence and scrupulous control over everything – was what held the world together. And if God, as I was taught, watched over the lilies of the field and even the little sparrows, he probably was up in heaven making a list of everything I did, whether good or bad. So, you better watch out! Somehow, whether I was taught this or just made the assumption, somehow, in my child’s mind, anyway, I began to link God’s scrupulous observance of my every move with the fear that I would be caught red-handed when Jesus returned. “Take heed,” the Bible says, “watch, for you do not know when the time will come.” The best visual illustration of the fearsome guilt and necessity for dutiful obedience I then felt is the design for a church banner meant to accompany the Westminster Confession. You may not know, but we have 10 historic confessions of faith in our denomination, and the Book of confessions, as every elder here knows, has a colorful banner at the end of this part of our denomination’s constitution, illuminating each confession. (By the way, if you ever go to the First Presbyterian Church in Oak Ridge, you can see these banners all around their sanctuary, adding a very important historic and theological dimension to the experience of worship.) When I first saw these banners in print, I immediately knew which Confession had most shaped me in my youth. The centerpiece of the banner for the Westminster Confession features a triangle, symbol of the Trinity, but within the triangle, there is a single eyeball staring out at the viewer. I kid you not, it’s really a bit eery when you see it for the first time. God’s eye is always watching! Now, honestly, I doubt the belief that God’s eye was fixed on me or the fear of not being ready when Jesus returned did much to dampen my excitement about getting presents come Christmas time, but that was the religious culture that shaped much of my faith experience. I was a little bit gratified, recently, to learn that many of you grew up in a similar culture. At this summer’s church picnic, I was talking with Jerry Morris (I can’t recall how we started talking about this), but Jerry said he always, as a child, tried to avoid being left alone with _so and so, I can’t recall her name, but I do recall it was a she, because the scripture said, “No one knows the hour; but one will be taken and the other left behind,” and she was such a good Christian he just knew he would be the one left behind! Moral of the story: be sure and hang out with a worse sinner than you, if you want to be assured you won’t be the one left behind. Maybe Jerry Morris would be a good candidate! At least once annually, the church calendar asks us to pause to grapple with the promise of Christ’s return, in language that often borders on the foreboding and the ominous: Mark’s gospel says, quoting from the Hebrew prophets, “ the sun will be darkened . . . and the stars will be falling from heaven and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” Whether you’re a child or an adult, it’s supposed to be a scary picture. Each year, the Gospel reading on the first Sunday of Advent represents our warning shot across the bow of the ship of the Church, exhorting us to be alert, to watch, to be ready, to prepare ourselves. “Therefore, keep awake,” the text says, “for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.” While there might be some scriptural ambiguity about what to expect and when to expect it, the message of the day is that the lack of specific knowledge excuses no Christian from the responsibility to live as if the end were just around the corner. Now, I know that of all things, a dash of spiritual anxiety and gospel apprehension are rather rogue ingredients in these days of commercial festivity and crass consumerism. Yet, we cannot be content with a sweet and gentle gospel delineated solely by candles and carols and good food, by reciprocated acts of kindness, and by general feelings of goodwill for all. The gospel, after all, announce accountability and judgment. And, how could it not, since the first coming was hardly the romanticized joy ride for Mary and Joseph that our culture makes it out to be? but rather, we remember, they met with the closed door of an inn and they watched divinity’s birth into a dank, dark, smelly stable at a time when the civilized world could have cared less. For us, a day of reckoning can be a sobering truth when we’re accustomed to prancing through the days of December to the beat of Deck the Halls and our “fa la las -- with hardly a worry that the eye of God just might be watching. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German martyr who opposed Hitler and the Holocaust, realized that Advent’s incarnation and divine judgment had to go together, for one without the other meant that both were void of meaning.. “Even though this thought [of judgment] may appear to us to be so unlike Christmas, it is original Christianity and is to be taken extremely seriously, writes Bonhoeffer. “When we hear Jesus knocking, our conscience first of all pricks us: Are we rightly prepared? Is our heart capable of becoming God’s dwelling place? We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and God’s coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God’s coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim on us. The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has a conscience.” (‘Watch for the Light, December 21) Maybe, if nothing else, we might find ourselves, in these days of Advent, searching the sky for his face. After all, we are expecting, aren’t we? In his sermon, “The Face in the Sky,” Frederic Beuchner puts it this way: “Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of [humanity]. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there, too. And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and recreate the human heart because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is most strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully. (Frederic Beuchner, The Hungering Dark, “ The Face in the Sky,” p.14) December, with its call to getting and spending, will put its hand on our shoulder and lay claim to our time as no other month of the year can do. The hard part, I think, is being able to tune the ear just enough, so that the sound of the distant thunder of God’s approach can be heard, just enough so that the alarm and anger of Advent are allowed to seep into our souls, so that the soul of each soul here is sought after and begins to seek the holy one as we have never sought him before.
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