Awaiting the Birth of the Divine

I observe some Unitarian Universalist-tinged version of Advent every winter. I observe it in my home–usually lighting the candles and reading from texts both ancient and contemporary– because my parents observed it in my childhood home with the lighting of candles and readings from texts both ancient and contemporary. (And, after all, I’m a minister. I’m all about poetry and ritual and candles) I observe it in the churches I serve not because it was observed in my childhood church (it wasn't), but rather because I know that many Unitarian Universalists are spiritually fed by ritual, even if they aren’t ministers. And probably some few of those UU for whom such a statement is off putting, respond in a primal way nevertheless to the ancient and enduring act of kindling a flame. With the power of that simple gesture in mind, Advent is, if nothing else, an opportunity to light candles.

So then, tradition and and desire for more candles drive me to arrange greenery and purple and pink calendars in my home and our sanctuary December after December. But I’ve become aware, this year, that I have another motivation for inviting us into Advent each year. You’ve heard me say that holidays from Easter to All Souls, from Passover to Juneteenth, from Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Years to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day give us discrete seasons to practice rituals of joy and sorrow, liberation, gratitude and hope, fresh beginnings and the work of justice making. They give our underused and sometimes atrophied spiritual and emotional muscles a workout so that when times of rejoicing and grieving, giving thanks and embodying hope arise without advance notice any month or day of the year, we’ll be in fine form to respond almost without thought.

So too Advent. These four weeks leading up to Christmas invite us to practice expectant waiting and expectant preparation. As our opening words reminded us this morning, so much of life is waiting. It is good to have a time of deliberated and faithful practice of waiting well, with more purpose than resentment. Christians prepare and wait for the birth of God into the world in human form as the infant Jesus. And Unitarian Universalists, with our penchant for embracing spiritually sound disciplines from many faiths and adapting them to fit our theology–we might undertake a practice of waiting and preparing for the birth of the Divine, the Holy, Mystery, Wonder–even God, perhaps, into the world.

One of the plotlines of the second Star Trek movie, The Wrath of Khan, centers on Project Genesis, an experiment several years in the making, that, it is hoped, will, through a process I no longer remember and never understood and it's all fiction anyway, make it possible for life to be created where there had been no life. An utterly lifeless planet–not a single, slightest hint of life anywhere–a barren, in the truest sense of the word, planet is subjected to the process, and seas full of microscopic life begin to form and eventually plants and so on, not surprisingly in the same order we know life to have arisen on our planet.

When, at the end of the movie, Captain Spock sacrifices his one life for the survival of the many, his dead body is placed in a capsule and jettisoned from the Starship Enterprise, bound for that once desolate place now teeming with burgeoning life. Kirk vows to return someday and as viewers of the third Star Trek movie The Search for Spock know, the magic of Project Genesis does in fact, create life where there was no life in the body of Spock, as well as in the plants and animals that emerge from inert rock to inhabit that world. That part of the story doesn't come into today's sermon.

Our planet, the world we inhabit, though in peril, is not lifeless, not utterly desolate. But I know for many of us it does seem utterly barren of holiness. So often when we search for some hint of magic, of miracle, of divinity, something worthy of awe, wonder, and reverence what we encounter instead is concrete, abandoned buildings, suspect business practices, profit-driven corporate cruel, warfare, microplastics, air quality alerts, reports of another species feared extinct, hunger, casual disregard for the suffering of anyone who might be consider other–all things we might consider the opposite of God-stuff, all the things that might seem to signal the absence of holiness, certainly nothing worthy our adoration or reverence. Still my Unitarian Universalist faith has taught me my entire life, that what others would look toward heaven for, we must seek and will find here, in this earthly realm. So I'm grateful for Advent’s invitation to prepare for the birth of holiness.

But it is a curious kind of waiting and expectation that Advent teaches. Jesus was already born into the world, more than two thousand years ago–a historical fact, whatever theology we may or may not lay over it. So, strictly speaking, God already manifested Godself in human form. No need for preparation. No need for waiting. But Christians will tell us that Jesus’ incarnation isn’t a one and done sort of phenomenon. He came and, they teach, he will come again at the end of time. Advent is a reminder that they must ever be prepared and preparing for that second coming. And, I expect, they also observe Advent because it is human nature to forget that Jesus was born–or more accurately, to forget to live as though he was born, taught a message of radical love and preference for the least among us–and lived what he taught.

As Unitarian Universalists we might be less concerned on a daily basis with the life of Jesus and the theology of Christianity, but for us, too, Advent might be understood as a time of preparing for something that has already come into our world. Our first reading this morning suggested that all that the ancients saw, and heard, all that they experienced and recognized as holy, as miracles, as God-stuff in the world, we see and hear, too.

I hear all that the ancients heard./…I see all that the seers see.

…Nothing is far that once was near./Nothing is hid that once was clear./Nothing was God that is not here.

It’s all here in our world, surrounding us (and suffusing us), waiting for us to but see and hear and recognize as the wonders of nature, the miracle of human love and compassion, the divine spark within each of our companions upon the earth. So, we don’t observe Advent to practice waiting and preparing for the birth of the divine–though a week ago I would have told you that is precisely why we might observe Advent.

No, 13th century mystic St. Angela of Foligno (full-lean-yo) declared, “The world is pregnant with God.” And our responsive reading today invited us to embrace a traditional trope that says even as God was born in human form on earth, multiple unlikely events unfolded–predator and prey lying down together, whispered prediction of revolution, roses blooming in the snow–events that might signal divinity is at loose in the world. I say yes, to the saint and to the poet. Yes, the world is always pregnant with God. And not just that night, the purported occasion of Jesus’s birth but every night and morning and afternoon God is born into the world, and always, always, always, already full of God and God stuff,

We’re not waiting and preparing for the day to arrive when some sort of celestial experimental scientist sends down a beam of divinity to infuse this utterly mundane world with holiness, with God-stuff ala the Genesis Project of The Wrath of Khan. Rather, Advent can be for us a season of preparing and practicing for the day when our mere and nobly mortal senses apprehend that Creation is already everywhere divine. And waiting for the day when that apprehension is second nature to us.

I believe it is true, as Robert Francis asserted, that we see and hear all that the ancients saw and heard--that is, divinity swirling and manifest throughout all creation. You can't convince me that we didn't hear the voice of divinity arguing before the Supreme Court of the United States this week, emanating from the body of Chase Strangio, the first-ever openly trans attorney to argue before the Supreme Court, and the echo of that holiness was heard across our land and around the world and will reecho for years to come for all who have the ears to recognize it.

You can't convince me that we didn't see the embodiment of divinity in this room week and a half ago when Moslem, Jewish, and Chrisitian faith leaders stepped into this pulpit to read their respective holy scriptures; and a Lutheran pastor lead a prayer written by a UU pastor; and a Roman Catholic rector offered a benediction just moments after an ordained female Protestant minister had just preached a message of Thanksgiving; and those gathered in the pews gave $700 to support the work of Union Mission.

You can’t convince me that divinity didn’t fill the halls of COP29 in Azerbaijan last month. Or accompany Olympic delegations to Paris last summer. Or dwell within casual laborers waiting to be chosen for a day’s work every day this week.

You can’t convince me that it isn’t divinity that elicits our awe at the ebb and flow of the tides; our wonder when medical skill and the human will to live preserve life and restore health when death had seemed all but certain; our amusement when we observe interplay between species and recognize ourselves in those interaction; our contentment and tears of joy when beholding the faces and hearing the voices and clasping the hands of those human beings or animal companions we hold most dear and loved in all the world.

Still, though our world is everywhere already divine, it was hard for me to come up with these few examples. There are layers and layers of brokenness and corruption hiding and obscuring what should glow unmistakably, sing in clarion tones. Indeed, today’s second reading poignantly reminded us how hard we have to look sometimes, how carefully we have to listen, how persistent we have to be in our search. We sometimes, often, must spelunk for evidence of the holy in our midst, and it is sometimes, often, faint, far away, fuzzy as though transmitted through Mr. Microphone. And, and, and, when we finally recognize it it is as wondrous as a favorite song heard from the open window of a passing car or a jazz band playing in our very soul. The difficulty of the task makes practice imperative; it doesn’t diminish the blessing.

Our closing hymn promises that Love is on its way–as a guest, as a star, as a rose, and in a verse that didn’t make it into our hymnal, as a bird. But those are already here–guests, stars, roses, birds, and most of all Love, filling our existence with holiness. In the days of this Advent season that still before us, may we practice recognizing the Divinity already born into the world in the guests we welcome into our homes and the guests into our church and guests we welcome into our country, in the star that shines in the story of the Nativity and the stars shine that wherever we see the night sky, in the roses that bloom in our gardens and the roses that bloom in parks, in the birds that nest in trees in our yards and birds unseen that sing as they pass by on their way. And in the Love larger than any human embrace that is nevertheless transmitted through every tender, noncoercive human embrace. The Love that holds us and will not let us go.

And so may we be prepared and in good form, that when we encounter the brokenness, corruption, devastation of the world–as we will again and again–we are each time a bit more practiced at apprehending the beauty, the wonder, the holiness amidst it all. And may the blessing of these small fragments of divinity be that they call us, each day, further into the work of healing the world. Amen.