Third Sunday of Advent – Year C – Bill Harkins
The Collect of the Day:
Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and forever. Amen.
The Epistle: Philippians 4:4-7
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
In the Name of the God of Creation who loves us all, Amen. Good morning, and welcome to Holy Family on this third Sunday of Advent. In Paul’s letter to the Philippians appointed for today, we witness as a lovely thank you note from jail morphs into a teachable moment to a congregation in conflict. Paul was never one to let an opportunity to instruct his fledgling congregations pass by. So he tells them “stand firm, rejoice, pray and do not be afraid to ask for what you need; be grateful, and show gentleness. “Do not be anxious,” he reminds them, “the peace that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” As hopeful as they are, these can be difficult words to hear, especially in light of recent world events and the fear, anxiety, and suspicion they engender. I’m sure some in Philippi were shaking their heads, too. And yet, his letter is not unmindful of the realities of suffering and conflict. Indeed, we know that Paul was in jail when he wrote it, and a visitor brought him news of conflict amidst the congregation back in Philippi, which must have seemed to Paul so very far away. Political and religious polarities were everywhere then, too. The readers of the letter were experiencing persecution and had begun to disagree and argue among themselves.
Out of context, the exhortations of Paul connote an unrealistic attitude toward life, a Pollyanna religion that ignores the harsh realities of being human and perhaps a more realistic call for a stoic like serenity. But as my erstwhile New Testament colleague and friend Charlie Cousar has said, “Paul’s call for gratitude and peace emerge from and are directed to what some would call the dark side of human experience.” And yet, they end in hope. To that end we might ask of the text some tough theological questions: How, exactly, is the Lord near as Paul assures us? Is God coming soon, or is God already present – or both? How can we possibly not worry? Is prayer the antidote to worry? And what, exactly, does it mean to have the peace which passes all understanding? How do we know it when we see it, or more to the point, how can we find it? Can we cultivate this, and is it the same as happiness? William Alexander Percy, in his hauntingly lovely Episcopal hymn, says “The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod; yet let us pray for but one thing — the marvelous peace of God.” And John the Baptist, who cannot be cleaned up and sanitized for any family Christmas card, gives us a dose of prophetic tough love in today’s Gospel that is anything but peaceful yet ends in hope. What might these paradoxical messages mean, especially during this season of hopeful anticipation?
Well, I may have dug a theological hole out of which I cannot extricate myself, but let’s find out. I actually find Paul’s message to the Philippians to be, in part, a meditation on the relationship between gratitude and the kind of peace to which he refers, and with which our dismissal blessing sends us out each week. We pray that we might embody that peace which passes understanding, to serve others as the Body of Christ in the world, respecting the dignity of every human being. The mystic Meister Eckhart once said that if the only prayer we pray is one of gratitude that would be enough. I believe there is a clear, compelling correlation between gratitude and the kind of peace for which Paul asks us to pray. I believe that what theologians might call transcendence—or a kind of otherworldly peace which we can experience here, and now—is deeply connected to gratitude—or to what Paul in this passage is calling “thanksgiving.”
Recently, one of my favorite authors, the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, died of cancer. He was 80 years old. In a remarkable series of brief essays published in the New York Times, he shared coming to terms with the end of life, and his deepening sense of gratitude. Sacks has been described as a Copernicus of the mind and a Dante of medicine who turned the case study into a poetic form, and this was demonstrated through his writing over the course of his long and fully lived life. He managed to embody Donald Winnicott’s autobiographical prayer: “O God, my prayer is that I will be fully alive when I die.” The essays have now been published in a lovely volume entitled, simply and appropriately, “Gratitude.” In the first essay he writes:
At nearly 80…I feel glad to be alive… I am grateful that I have experienced many things — some wonderful, some horrible — and that I have been able to write… to receive innumerable letters from friends, colleagues and readers, and to enjoy what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “an intercourse with the world.” I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at 80 as I was at 20; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done.
And here, he writes in a way that echoes the tone of Paul’s wonderful and mysteriously complex letter to the Philippians:
Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life. On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.
Such intensity of aliveness, Dr. Sacks observes, requires a deliberate distancing from the existentially inessential things with which we fill our daily lives — petty arguments, the stark polarities of politics, the news, which so often seems to repeat itself. With his characteristic mastery of nuance, he points to a crucial distinction:
This is not indifference but a kind of Holy detachment — I still care deeply…I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the young doctor who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.
In these lovely essays Sacks, like the Apostle Paul, demonstrates deep self- awareness, an appreciation for his own shadow—that is, for the parts of himself he would rather remain unconscious and hidden—which now he has integrated into a healthy and whole self. Writing as he does from the prison of his own suffering and impending death, he reaches beyond the walls of that imprisonment to a peace—a kind of transcendence—and evinces hope borne of gratitude. He also demonstrates, as does Paul’s letter to the Philippians, what Ignatian spirituality refers to as “Holy Indifference,” or a kind of clarity about what is most important without trying to manage the outcome. Theologian Richard Rohr calls this capacity for gratitude, amidst ambiguity and suffering, a significant developmental achievement. And so it is. Ultimately it is the birthplace of Paul’s peace that passes all understanding. Rohr writes: The study of neuroscience and brain development indicates that we are wired for transcendence, for the ever bigger picture, but it is all highly dependent on being exposed to living models and personal nurturance as we move from one stage to the next. Rohr says that we all need living models and we can cultivate gratitude. And this cultivation can literally rewire our brains. I suspect this is what sustained Paul in his prison cell. He discovered, in gratitude amidst suffering, an aliveness that no prison cell could contain. I find two of these living models in Paul, and Oliver Sacks! Richard Rohr reminds us that this is a good argument for some form of church community—for what we are celebrating and cultivating right here, in this season of Koinonia.
We all need living role models of gratitude. How important we are for one another! To gather enlightened, transformed, loving people together, Rohr says, is essential, so they influence and transform one another. Beyond models, we also need nurturing: mothering and fathering, loving, and partnering at the critical transitional stages of our lives. ”Hopefully,” Rohr writes, “life and God bring new opportunities–through experiences of great suffering and great love–to “rewire” our brains.” Paul knew, and demonstrated in his letters from prison, that we need one another in community, and we need opportunities for gratitude. Some of you have heard me talk of my maternal grandmother, whose farm was a sanctuary for me in so many ways, and who taught me to cook. My football buddies teased me about knowing my way around the kitchen. But I said to them, “You don’t get it. When I imagine God feeding us, I see my grandmother.” I’m not sure this helped my cause with them. But the last time I ever saw her she insisted we bake her pound cakes together. Two weeks later she was gone. And I still love to cook. Forgive me the Eucharistic overtones, but her recipe for pound cake was a gift of hope, and gratitude, and a heavenly slice of transcendence. The gifts that emerged from her kitchen were an extended love letter to God. They came from her own suffering and were an Incarnational embodiment of the outward and visible signs of gratitude. Mary Oliver says in one of her lovely poems, “Someone once gave me a boxful of darkness. It took me years to realize that this, too, was a gift.” Paul is saying the same thing, as is Oliver Sacks, as was my grandmother, who did not have an easy life. Each is telling us that out of human suffering, and the prisons we so often create for ourselves and one another, hope abides, and transcendence—the peace that passes all understanding—is born. It does not come from us, but we can experience it, and we can cultivate it, and give it away. William Alexander Percy was right. The peace of God is no peace like we understand in earthly terms, because it is not of this earth. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it, as we are reminded in John’s lovely prelude to his Gospel. In what remains of this Advent season, I invite each of us to write our own letter, perhaps out of our own awareness of struggle or suffering or our own human limitations—perhaps in spite of something that would imprison us—and find in it—out of it, rather some hope, and thankfulness, and send it out into the world, perhaps to someone in particular, perhaps simply a letter to God that no one else ever sees. In so doing we will cultivate the light of gratitude, and hope, and nothing can overcome that light. Not if, as Paul suggests, we stand firm, rejoice, pray, and are not afraid to ask for what we need; if we are grateful, and show gentleness. “Do not be anxious,” he reminds us, “the peace that passes all understanding will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” I am in gratitude for this community and for each of you, Amen.