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The Second Sunday of Advent

"Advent Hope"

The Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams

A new student at Carolina was having a very difficult time adjusting to the social and academic demands of college life. He felt scared and awkward and alienated. He did not want to be here, and he kept to himself as much as he could. Discovering our chapel, he spent long hours just sitting before God. For weeks and months, anytime he could come and find the chapel empty, he would gratefully sink into its sacred solitude, leaving only if someone else should enter. His isolation and alienation were made bearable only by the comfort he found in the chapel. Out of the strength that refuge brought him, he gradually began to adjust to college life and to find his way. That was over forty years ago.

Upon graduating from the University in the late sixties, Clifton Daniel entered Virginia Seminary and was ordained a priest. Ten years ago he became Bishop of the Diocese of East Carolina. Ten days ago as preacher in our chapel for the concluding Eucharist of the Province Four Bishops annual meeting, Bishop Daniel looked back on that difficult time in his early student days. He reflected to those of us present that the hours spent in our chapel probably saved his life. Somehow the grace and the strength he eventually absorbed there, formed the seeds of his calling to ordained ministry and enabled him to respond to his life’s vocation.

I tell you that story not only because I think it is critical for all of us to know how important is the ministry of the Chapel of the Cross and how significantly through the decades and continuing on, people’s lives have been changed by their encounters with our sacred spaces, our liturgy, our many and varied ministries. So often, as is the case with Bishop Daniel, these changed lives also have far reaching effects on still other lives; all of which grew out of the faithfulness and the vision and the stewardship of parishioners of the Chapel of the Cross, whose mantle you now carry.

But more importantly on this Second Sunday of Advent, I tell you this story because it is very much an Advent story. It is a story of waiting and hoping and needing a Savior. It is a story of trying to be attentive to God in the midst of brokenness and with the deep realization that we cannot save ourselves. For all of us could be the young student, Clifton Daniel.

We may not think we are. We may think we are more self-sufficient than that, more able to cope with what life throws us, more able to adjust to difficult circumstances. And of course there is truth to that perception. God has given us many strengths, many resources to bring to life’s challenges and struggles.

But Advent is a time to reflect on our need for God, on our relative powerlessness, on our dependence on God’s power and grace. In the face of difficult relationships, of addictions, of past failures, of significant losses, of the power of war and of poverty and of drought, of our limitations, of the inevitability of death, of being (in the words of next Sunday’s well known Advent collect) “sorely hindered by our sins,” we are unable to save ourselves. We can, like an ill-adjusted student, only look to God with expectancy and hope.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II, felt this same helplessness. He wrote in a later published letter: “Life in a prison cell reminds me a great deal of Advent. One waits and hopes and putters around. But in the end, what we do is of little consequence. The door is shut, and it can only be opened from the outside.” Whether we envision ourselves locked in a prison cell or voluntarily sequestered in the chapel, the metaphor is the same: we await God’s saving and liberating power. “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear.” “How long, O Lord, how long?” we ask in our alienation and powerlessness, but with Advent hope.

For Advent, while facing reality truthfully and humbly, is not a time of despair. It is not a season for self-indulgently wallowing in our difficulties and looking forward to a bleak future. It is instead an opportunity to face the reality of our lives honestly and to believe in God’s power and love and forgiveness. It is a time to realign our hope.

For neither is Advent a period of passivity or abandoning all initiative. We do not simply throw our hands in the air and give up on life’s daily battles and abandon all such good works as God has prepared for us to walk in. No, Advent hope is active. While it is focused on God and not on ourselves, it also makes room for God to act. It requires us to be attentive and to be patient and to watch. Advent hope mobilizes us and refocuses us. It calls us away from mere reliance on ourselves and to look to God for our salvation and our strength. It would have us seek out sacred space, like the lost student, and to let God find us and nourish us and call us to believe and to respond and to serve others. Advent hope wells up within us in, sometimes a distant, but clearly irrepressible joy, “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel [God with us] shall come to thee, O Israel.”

© 2007: Chapel of the Cross