It would be nice if we all could be blameless. That is, no guilt, no regrets, no shame, no need for forgiveness, having done nothing wrong, to be accepted not because of what we did or didn’t do, but simply because of who we are. No demerits, no scars, no time to serve, no penalty to pay, a clean slate. Blameless.

In his book Sighing for Eden, William Willimon shares this little story: “Someone once asked Carlyle Marney, “Where is the Garden of Eden?” Marney replied, “Two-fifteen Elm Street, Knoxville, Tennessee.”

“You’re lying,” the person said. “It’s supposed to be someplace in Asia.”

“Well, you couldn’t prove it by me,” Marney said. “For there, on Elm Street, when I was but a boy, I stole a quarter out of my Mama’s purse and went down to the store and bought some candy and I ate it and then I was so ashamed that I came back and hid in the closet. It was there that she found me and asked, “Where are you? Why are you hiding? What have you done?”

The first time I can remember that I was not blameless is similar to Carlyle Marney’s story. It happened in Spartanburg, SC, when I was seven, and standing in the grocery line with my Dad, who always did the shopping, I slipped some bubble gum into my pocket. When I went home, I ran and hid behind a bush, and as I began to chew hat gum, I suddenly knew that I had done wrong.

One of the deepest longings in the human psyche is the longing for the age of innocence. We think back to our childhood, when life seemed simpler, and we nostalgically recall the good ole days of playful innocence and acceptance. Most of us, perhaps when we are having a bad day, wouldn’t mind going back there. Or, perhaps we imagine a time in the world when everyone and every creature had found a way to live together in harmony and peace, the wolf and the lamb, the sworn enemies, the ancient foes, the offender and the offended. Most of us, on any given day, want to believe that’s really what God intended all along, everyone just getting along.

We know, because we have looked in the mirror, however, that such a vision is a long shot in our day, the thought of my being blameless; the odds may seem about a million to one, this vision of innocence flooding the world. But still, can there be anything wrong with hoping?

This is the season for hoping. It is Advent again. That may not mean a whole lot to some of you. The calendar says it’s almost December; the weather station says that the winter winds have begun to howl; and everyone knows that soon, in another 31 days, another year will pass upon this planet called earth, our home. But really, if you believe in miracles, the time is something more than what the calendar says it is. There is another way to mark time’s passage. There is always God’s calendar, the Lord’s timing, a new season that is neither winter, spring, summer, nor fall. And if we could but suspend our disbelief for even a little while, we could, perhaps, come to believe that God’s time doesn’t march to any clock of our own making. That God is going to do what God is going to do, when all is said and done.

Advent is the name given to this time we have been given. Advent, quite simply, is a season of preparing the heart to make room for the coming of Jesus. We are to dust off the filth and dirt from our lives; we are to get cleaned up so that we can look our best when Jesus visits the earth once more; we are to polish our souls as best we can, so that when we look into the mirror, we see, not ourselves, but the Christ in us. Or as Paul puts it to the Thessalonians, “may God so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all his saints.”

What might it mean to be blameless?

First, we have to believe. We have to have faith. Paul says in this passage: “Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith.” It is not an easy thing, by any stretch of the imagination, to have faith, to believe, especially when it seems that everything must have its proof now adays. Although we dare not say it aloud, subconsciously, we may look to receive gifts as the proof of another’s love during this season of the year, or we want proof that another can be trusted with some secret that deep down, we know needs to be shared with someone else. It can be hard simply to take the love of someone else for us on faith, without any strings attached, without passing judgment.

On the other hand, believing or having faith is not something as special and difficult or even unnatural as we often suppose. Believing means that what we listen to, we listen to as God’s speech. What moves us is not just our own concern, but precisely God’s concern. What causes me to worry, that is God’s worry. What gives me joy is God’s joy. What I hope for is God’s hope. In other words, in all that I am, I am only a party to that which God thinks and does. In all that I do it is not I, but rather God who is important. Just imagine if God came first in everything. What if we were willing to suffer, be angry, love and rejoice with God, instead of always wanting to make everything our own private affair as if we lived alone upon this planet called earth, our home?

God’s thoughts are in us and over us. Yet, we must learn to believe, believe that everything depends upon the God who stands behind us and beside us and before us. We must surrender trying to be self-made individuals. God wants to do everything through us and with us and for us and never without us. But it is only God’s power within us that can bring us to believe. Do you believe that Jesus is coming again?

If you believe, then, that is the first step toward being blameless, toward being set free from the sin of not believing and saved from the coming judgment. Will your faith be restored, will your faith find a way, in this season of looking for the Savior, in the midst of your search to behold him face-to-face?

The second step of this Advent season is to learn to share the gift of believing, the faith that we have received, with one another. Or as Paul writes to the Thessalonians, “And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you.”

The meaning of Advent and Christmas is the coming down of God’s love. The only reason we can love one another is because God first loved us. This love alone revolutionizes our lives and all of our loves. Only God’s love can bring about the transformation of the world. Everyone seems to speak so casually of love these days: the TV, the movies, the magazines, the mall. Love, the word, is so over-used, but yet, it remains remarkably, immensely powerful.

In the end, it is the only word we have to describe what we should be doing, for the sake of Christ. And so, what will we do with it this season? And will we do enough so that we will be blameless at the coming of Christ?

Here’s a poem called “Love Alone.”

The child we seek
doesn’t need our gold.
On love, on love alone
he will build his kingdom.
His pierced hand will hold no scepter,
his haloed head will wear no crown;
his might will not be built
on your toil.
Swifter than lightning
he will soon walk among us.
He will bring us new life
and receive our death,
and the keys to his city
belong to the poor. (Gian Carlo Menotti)

Today’s Advent is a time of promise, a promise that love divine can transform our hearts and even our world and even our poverty, if only, as Paul says, we could learn to abound in love for one another.

A favorite writer of mine says that, “in the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbor, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling . . . On the contrary, he is tell us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end, even if it means sometimes just leaving them alone. Thus in Jesus’ terms we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them. In fact liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest friends” (F. Beuchner, Wishful Thinking, 54.)

Working for the well-being of others is one thing, but working for our own well-being is really something else. But if we want to be blameless at the coming of Christ, then third, we will have to work on being holy. Paul writes to the Thessalonians: “And may the Lord so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.”

I’m afraid that we sing a lot more about holiness than we practice it in our lives. In fact, mention the world holy and, this time of year, we might think of “Silent Night, Holy Night, or even the “O Holy Night” music that will soon enough be sung on that holiest of nights around the world, “the stars brightly shining, upon the night of our dear Saviour’s birth.” Or, if it is not in the music of Christmas, we admire “holiness” as a really admirably good trait held by a few special, holy people. But, in the end, we probably do little consciously to cultivate or grow holiness within our own souls. Being pure and unspotted by the world, is one way to put it; or another is simply to be made clean, washed by the blood of the lamb, as many of the old, evangelical hymns put it.

But what can it mean to have our “hearts strengthened in holiness?” Perhaps it should mean, as Richard Foster has said, that we are to “cultivate holy dependency. Holy dependency means that you are utterly and completely dependent on God for anything significant to happen. There is inward travail that the evil will weaken [within] and that the good will rise up. You look forward to God acting and moving and teaching and wooing and winning [in your life]. The work [of holiness is finally] God’s and not yours.” (Richard Foster, Celebrations of Discipline, 172)

This Advent season we remember one who was holy and who was wholy dependent on God. A mere teenager was Mary, the mother of Jesus, who in response to the angel Gabriel’s appearance to her and the annunciation, asked, “but how can this be?” How can I bear and bring forth and birth into this world, Christ the baby, the Savior, the peacemaker, Emmanuel, God with us?

And isn’t that the question also for each of us. How can we birth the holiness of the holy one in our lives, which is the way, that is through us, that God has chosen to be born yet again into our unholy world?

Part of a Christmas meditation goes like this: “For the miracle of God comes not only from above; it also comes through us; it is also dwelling in us. It has been given to every person, and it lies in every soul as something divine, and it waits. Calling, it waits for the hour when the soul shall open itself, having found its God and its home. When this is so, the soul will not keep its wealth to itself, but will let it flow out into the world. Wherever love proceeds from us and becomes truth, the time is fulfilled. Then the divine life floods through our human relationships and all our works. Then everything that is lonely and scattered and seeking for the way of God shall be bound together by divine power. Then, of human effort and of the divine miracle, shall the world be born in which Christmas is fulfilled as reality” (Eberhard Arnold, January 1, Watch for the Light)

In the end, our being blameless, as we are supposed to be at the coming of Christ, is both a result of human effort but, even more, the gift of divine miracle.

And so, may the Lord strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.”

So let it be. Amen.