Advent 2c.06                                                 December 10, 2006

“Every valley shall be exalted
        and every hill and mountain made low.”

One of the best parts of Handel’s Messiah is this phrase
        about exalting the valleys and leveling the hills
        so God can get to us and we can get to God.

Handel got these lyrics from John the Baptist
        who got them from 2nd Isaiah who got them
                 from the prophet Baruch.
Baruch was the first to say,
“God has ordered that . . . the everlasting hills be made low
        and the valleys filled up,
        to make level the ground,
        so Israel may walk safely in the glory of God.”

Of course, he isn’t talking about earth moving.
He doesn’t want to turn Colorado into Nebraska.
The hills and valleys he means aren’t outside us.
They are our spiritual in-scape, the topography of our hearts.

Hills are obviously challenges, obstacles in our path.
But the valleys aren’t so obvious.
So Baruch explains the valleys.

They are the low points in our lives,
        the failures, the shame, the depression, the loneliness.
He promises God will lift us up from those valleys
        if we let him.

Then to explain how we let God lift us up,
        how we give God permission to heal us,
        Baruch shifts to a different metaphor.

                – a metaphor of changing clothes.

He says to take off the black veil of mourning
        and put on your best party dress.
“Take off the garment of sorrow and affliction,” he writes,

        “and put on forever the beauty of the glory of God.”
We prepare the Lord’s way
        by taking off the garment of sorrow and affliction.

Usually, we think of preparing for Christ by giving up our sins.
But these prophets all say something quite different here.
They say we get ready for Christ,
         by giving up our habitual misery.
We give up our glasses of gloom, our pessimistic perspective.

Unfortunately, we can’t avoid some hardships.
So, Baruch doesn’t say to give up “sorrow and affliction.”
He says to give up “the garment” of sorrow and affliction.
That means our identification with sorrow

         – our definition of ourselves in terms of our suffering,
                  our failings, and our shame.

Most of us have a perverse tendency to get attached
         to feeling an old familiar way, even if it’s morose

         – to thinking of ourselves an old familiar way
                  even if it’s pitiful.

We may think of ourselves as someone people don’t like.
We may think of ourselves as the loser, the lonely one,
         the responsible one, the martyr,
                  or the one people take for granted.
So ask yourself, this Advent, what tragic roles
         you may habitually play,
         because these roles are the garment of sorrow.

If we dress for sorrow and affliction,
         then sorrow and affliction is what the world will serve us.
The habit of suffering clouds our perception,
                  until all our new experiences look
                          just like the old ones.
We view the world through sad-colored glasses.

Ironically, there is no season like this season
         to make the old tapes replay in our heads,
         to make us act in old self-defeating ways,
         to make us see the wold in all its trapped
                  patterns of pain.
Maybe it’s families gathering.
Maybe it’s a cultural conspiracy.
I don’t know why it happens.
But you can take this to the family therapy bank:
         Every December people regress and it ain’t pretty.

The good news is that this is the best possible time
         to watch the gloomy game
                  and practice not playing.

A wise friend once said to me,

         “I was marred at 13 and a mother at 14.
         My son was a drug addict,
                  and my first husband beat me.
         If I choose to live in that I can.
         But I’d rather get on to something else.”

She did. She went back to college at 40, graduated,
         then joined Volunteers In Service To America
                  helping prevent kids from dropping out
                          of school as she had done.
Instead of living in her victimhood and failure,
         she got on with life.

Now is the time to “leave the gloomy haunts of sadness,”
         as the hymn says.
Advent is the time because this isn’t just pop psychology.
It isn’t advice for a good attitude.
There’s far, far more at stake here than mental health.

This about is the birth of Christ.
That’s what we are here on this earth to do,
         to give birth to Christ, to incarnate Christ,
                  to be the light for this darkened world.
The 14th Century mystic Meister Eckhart said,

         “We are all meant to be mothers of God,
                  because God is always needing to be born.”
I say: If we aren’t giving birth to the Christ,
         we’re wasting our time here.

In Advent, we create a place in our hearts for Christ.
We empty out, make room, push things aside.
We let go of old ways,
         and clear a space to let Christ be Christ in us.

We shape our soul to be like the Blessed Virgin Mary,
         so we too can be Theotokos, God-bearers.
In her poem “The Pool of God,” Sr. Jessica Powers wrote:

         “There was nothing in the Virgin’s soul
         that belonged to the Virgin –
         no word, no thought, no image, no intent.
         She was a pure, transparent pool reflecting
         God, only God. . .

         I pray to hollow out my earth and be
         filled with these waters of transparency. . .
         Oh, to become a pure pool like the Virgin,
         water that lost the semblances of water
         and was a sky like God.”

We hollow out our earth, become transparent,
        first by letting go of our habitual suffering.
We clear out the pain and it makes a space inside us.

Spaciousness, brothers and sisters –
        we are to cultivate spaciousness,
        that Christ may enter us and fill our spaciousness.

There are many ways to create spaciousness.
We can clear out our cluttered homes
        by giving away possessions.
We can clear out our calendars,
        by doing fewer things.
That’s all comparatively easy
        because it’s comparatively superficial
                 and ultimately ineffectual.
If we don’t create spaciousness in our souls first,
        our homes and calendars will just fill back up
                 with new things and new activities.

The work starts with clearing a space in the soul,
        by giving up our real treasures,
        our convictions that we are fatally flawed,
        our shame, our guilt, our self-recriminations.
“Take off the garment of sorrow and affliction,” Baruch says,

        “and put on forever the beauty of the glory of God.”
Then we will become Christ
        for a world that desperately needs Christ.

Read the newspaper.
Look at the incidence of child abuse in Macon.
Look at the homeless and the lonely.
Look at the driven ambitious people
        losing their souls in the marketplace.

The world needs Christ.
And if we don’t show Christ to the world,
        who will?
We cannot afford to indulge self-pity or despair.

We are called to joy,
       and if we dare to live in joy,
       then we will shine forth the holy light
       that the darkness cannot overcome.

                                                       Amen.