Today is the first Sunday of Advent, and I know it doesn’t feel like it. We don’t hang the greens until next week. We don’t yet have the brilliant, red poinsettias, or the luscious greenery, or the vibrant lights. We haven’t pulled out the purple stoles and paraments signaling the coming of royalty and the richness of God’s love. We don’t yet have the tall trees and even taller sense of the coming of a savior. We don’t yet have the singing of the angels. Today, we are simply shepherds waiting in the field, tending to the flocks in our care. We are simply the children of Bethlehem, lying on our backs, staring at the stars with a sense of anticipation that a special star is coming to enliven and brighten our way. We are simply people who are waiting, sensitive to the arrival of a special season: a season of hope, peace, joy, and love.
Today, as you can see, we have stripped the chancel bare of paraments. Ministers are not wearing any stoles. We have exited ordinary time, the time when the paraments are green and the time when we focus on the extraordinary grace that God gives us even among the ordinary times of the year. And although today officially begins Advent, we aren’t celebrating yet, like we do at Christmas. Today is a time of solemnity and reflection. Today is a day of eager expectation. Today is a day to anticipate, to lean into what it means to recognize Advent, the coming of God in a manger, in an ordinary feed trough, in an ordinary town, to an ordinary couple. Today, just as this room is laid bare and open and uncovered, we do the same with our hearts. We open our hearts to do the hard work of anticipation. We open our hearts to do the hard work of expectation. We open our hearts to do the hard work of justice. We open our hearts to do the hard work of hope, peace, joy, and love. We open our hearts, today, to do the hard work of Christmas.
And what is the work of Christmas? The work of Christmas is what happens when the angels stop singing, when the star stops shining, when the flocks need tending, and when the baby is no longer resting in a manger. The work of Christmas happens throughout the year when the candles have died down and the carols have stopped. Even today when we really just want Advent to begin and Christmas to come, when we are craving the spirit of goodwill to attend to our broken lives and this messed up world, even in all of this, there is work to be done. There is work to be done as we eagerly anticipate the coming of God, our Savior, as we await with expectation that God will make a home with us. We must attend to the work of Christmas.
Our guide this Advent season into the work of Christmas is the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman. Howard Thurman was born in 1899 and died in 1981. He was one of America’s greatest mystics and activists. He was an African-American theologian, a gifted educator and author, and a prominent civil rights leader. In fact, he was a mentor to many of the civil rights leaders of his era, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Thurman traveled extensively, leading Christian missions and meeting with prominent world figures such as Mahatma Gandhi. When Thurman asked Gandhi what message he should take back to the United States, Gandhi said he regretted not having made nonviolence more visible as a practice worldwide. Gandhi famously remarked, “It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.”
And it was indeed through Thurman that the message of nonviolence was delivered to the world. Thurman’s passion for peace and love was closely connected to the goodwill that happens during Christmastime. Thurman’s work as a civil rights leader led him to bring a Christmas spirit to the darkness of the world, a world that needed God’s peace the other 364 days of the year. And today, on this first day of Advent when we have stripped the altar bare, revealing our openness to Christ and welcoming of the Holy One, we know that Christmas does indeed begin in darkness, but ends with the coming light of the world.
One author says that “Thurman knew that Christmas always begins in darkness – the darkness of the womb, the darkness of human violence and oppression, the darkness of hopelessness. In Christmas, Thurman reminds us, a light shines even in the darkness, and this light will never be defeated. God’s light streams into the most unexpected places – a stable, among foreign magi from another religious tradition, and in the varieties of human culture and ethnicity. Just a little light can transform the darkness and help us anxious pilgrims find our way.”
Howard Thurman is that little light for us. And he is particularly appropriate to bring this message of hope and light that emerges out of the pain and darkness of the world. Born in the South, Thurman experienced the trauma of racism and rejection throughout his life. He often wrote about what it was like being a black man who faced discrimination and oppression. It’s written that “One autumn, a young Howard worked for a white store owner, raking leaves. After he raked the leaves into a pile, the store owner’s four-year-old daughter decided to play a game. Whenever she saw a brightly colored leaf, she scattered the whole pile to show it to Howard. Although she meant no harm, she did this several more times until Howard lost his patience and told her to stop. When she continued, he threatened to tell her father. Angered by his threat, the young girl jabbed him with a straight pin. When he cried out, the girl responded, ‘O Howard, that didn’t hurt you. You can’t feel.’”[1]
And so, Thurman knew that in the darkness of the world, we all need to continuously work hard to bring the hope and peace of Christmas to every person, each and every day… to help the world to feel. For us, in a polarized society filled with pain and hate, we need Christmas now more than ever. We all are anxious pilgrims, hoping to notice the shining star and follow faithfully to the stable of salvation, we need a guide to understand the work we have to do this Christmas to bring purpose to our own lives and to bring justice to this world, the peace and justice that the Christ of Christmas is calling us towards.
And so, our guiding light will be Howard Thurman, a North star and shining light for goodwill and peace. Thurman crafted a roadmap for us this Advent season, a poem titled “The Work of Christmas,” that we will use on our Advent journey to becoming Christmas people.
Here is that poem again:
When the song of the angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flocks,
the work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people,
to make music in the heart.
And so, each Sunday in Advent, we will do the work of Christmas. We will focus on a section of Thurman’s poem and how peace, nonviolence, and justice is the work we need to do each and every day, all 365 days of the year, not just at Christmastime. And today, especially, Thurman beckons us to be sensitive to the work of the spirit in our midst. We are called to see a landscape laid bare, a blank canvas, where we can paint a picture of the coming of Christ and gaze upon the power of a radical savior. It is in the darkness, the loneliness, the utter hurt of the world where we find the heart of God. This blank canvas is where Thurman painted a picture of justice for all of God’s people. Remember that Thurman said, “When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins.”
The work of Christmas begins. The greens haven’t been hung and we haven’t decked the halls. Today, we simply hope to draw your attention to people in need and to righting wrongs and to stopping injustices. That is the work of Christmas and the work that Dr. Thurman calls us to. We are called to a simple story of a baby in a manger. And it is that story that gives us the strength to do the work of God each and every day, and to show that all people are beloved and that everyone has worth. It is going to be our jobs this Advent season to make sure that we are sensitive to the work of Christ being born in a stable and dying on a cross. It is that work of Christ that we must bring to a world in need.
Before we can bring the work of Christmas to the world, we must find it in our own lives as well. Many of us will face our first Christmas alone without a loved one. Or perhaps we will be with a loved one who has Alzheimer’s, knowing that this Christmas won’t be remembered. Others of us feel so broken on the inside that the work of Christmas might simply be to gift ourselves with super glue to try and put the pieces of our lives back together again. We might have trauma for being singled out by a power-hungry world for being the wrong color, loving the wrong person, having more sadness than joy, or being too poor to fit in. It is in this pain and heartbreak that God whispers to us that Christmas is waiting to be born, that love will always win and justice will always prevail all 365 days of the year! In our hearts and in this hurting world, the work of Christmas is now!
I know that Christmas feels as if it is only a day. As if it is a short-lived season. The packages will be unwrapped, the trees will be taken down, the food will be eaten, and we will all get back to business as usual. Even today, on this first Sunday of Advent we feel that Christmas is a distant hope and a far-off reality. But we forget that in God’s realm, Christmas is, in fact, every day. Christmas is the norm – “and that our consumerism, apathy, neglect of the vulnerable, and greed-inspired economics are the exceptions.” The work of Christmas should be done at all times with all kinds of people. As Thurman asserts, “Christmas came to working-poor shepherds, a family having to migrate to satisfy a dictator’s need for riches despite a mother’s pregnancy, infants murdered by a local ruler in his quest to destroy the Holy Child and his way of peace.”[2] The work of Christmas is to bring the good news to those with their backs against the wall and suffering under the weight of oppression. The work of Christmas begins with us and it begins today.
I’d like to end with another poem by Thurman that speaks to the world in which the work of Christmas is needed and into which the Savior comes. He says:
“Where refugees seek deliverance that never comes,
And the heart consumes itself, if it would live,
Where little children age before their time,
And life wears down the edges of mind,
Where the old person sits with mind grown cold,
While bones and sinew, blood and cell, go slowly down to death,
Where fear companions each day’s life,
And Perfect Love seems long delayed.
CHRISTMAS IS WAITING TO BE BORN;
In you, in me, in all humankind.”
Friends, Christmas is waiting to be born in each of us, through each of us, and among all the people of the world. As we eagerly wait with expectation for the justice and peace of God to find a dwelling place with us, may we honor this sacred space of waiting while also beginning to do the work of Christmas. Christmas is waiting to be born, in you, in me, in all humankind.
Amen.
[1] Bruce Epperly, The Work of Christmas: The Twelve Days of Christmas, 22
[2] Bruce Epperly, The Work of Christmas: The Twelve Days of Christmas, 74