Mostly Silence

In matters of the heart, when it comes to what deeply counts for the soul, Advent is mostly a season of Silence.  Oh, there is much background noise, grey noise. 

Like the traffic outside my hotel room in New York City at night – easily tuned out.  A minor distraction.

Sometimes the news breaks through, but only a story which leads us into the deep silence of an unspoken prayer, maybe deep longing, perhaps a regret. This is the holy silence of Advent.  If we truly are attuned to it.

I came home this last Sunday to a story of homelessness among college students.[1]  I wasn’t aware of how many of our impoverished students are living in their cars in order to afford an education.  In order to do better than their parents’ generation.

“Living in their cars, for God’s sake?” I thought.  Is this the best we all can do for these students working sometimes two jobs and at night typing up their assignments at night in a van.

It was a story of a group of students unable to afford campus housing finding community in a campus parking lot, G11, at Cal Poly Humboldt in Northern California.  Finding community until the school ordered them off campus.

The president of the college refused to meet with any of them, closing off any possible discussion of alternative solutions.  “Just be gone – we don’t care where,” was the official message.

With this, my Advent silence was filled with deep shame.   That we, the richest nation in the world, this is how we treat the “least of us?”  Shame and sadness overcame me.   The angel of Annunciation must be weeping.  Our hearts are nowhere prepared to receive the Prince of Peace.  “Love Divine” is far.  With the author of Isaiah in today’s reading, our lives are rent with sorrow and longing.

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence—as when[2] fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name know to your adversaries, so that nations might tremble at your presence!”

Silence.  Waiting.

And in the meantime, we have much to answer for.  We’ve made hash of our priorities and a mess of the planet.

The other day at our common meal at Pilgrim Place, our friend Helen Dwyer read for the noon meditation a poem by another of our Pilgrims, Renny Golden, of her hometown Chicago and its river.  It is a tale of the deep stain we humans have left across the land.^[3]

We’ve come with shovels, dynamite, and bulldozers.  We’ve polluted with run-off oil from our streets, plastic bags and who-knows-what-else.  We’ve dammed and drained until the fish are gone, and only a fool would now eat any pulled from the muck.

And from that river, it could be mostly any river in America, silence.  And in our hearts, in our soul of souls, a silent yearning for what might have been.  What once was.  And if we have any humanity left at all – deep silence within.

“I spoke to the Chicago River today the way

I talk to God. Not begging. Grateful

as Potawatomi mothers dipping water gourds

“in dawn light, a nod to thank the river.

Who, what were you, I asked the river,

when you were tribal, pure, a companion?

“Silence, like God’s, not even a whisper.

We came with muskets, then shovels, then dynamite.

I asked forgiveness. The dog we kids let out

“near traffic. Its hind legs crippled.

This mutt river wounded with sewage,

oil, crop poison. Same sorrow.

Advent is of two messages – judgement, the need of repentance and the promise of restoration.  The babe in the manger grows up, and, if we’re fortunate, so do we in our spirituality.

The words of Isaiah, the promise of End Time Reckoning – this is far beyond nasal chipmunks singing happy Winterfest songs.

In this life not every participant gets a gold medal just for showing up.  To the degree we despoil God’s creation, we are all losers.  There may be no do-overs.  In the damage we do to one another, we are all losers.  With tears of repentance and forgiveness, sometimes a do-over.

The ersatz spirituality of shopping mall speakers blaired across aisles stacked with Christmas specials is no substitute for the biblical Advent message folks will hopefully hear in many of our churches.  If they have chosen wisely.

In his book, What is Vital in Religion, Harry Emmerson Fosdick relates the story of one man who has seen it all, one for whom the platitudes of an easy faith are an insult to the conscience and to the integrity of experience.  I fear this fellow speaks for much of modernity:

“I don’t know what I believe, but I don’t believe all this God is love stuff.  I have been in two world wars.  I have been unemployed eighteen months on end.  I have seen the Missus die of cancer.  Now I am waiting for the atom bombs to fall.  All that stuff about Jesus is no help.” [4]

The wanton slaughter of Palestinian civilians – women, children, the elderly — picks up pace again this morning.  An eerie silence from piles of rubble until we hear the shrieks of horror and sirens.

Truly, the dark night of the soul.  Silence shrouds our fears, the misery we nightly witness.  Repentance is the only authentic response possible.  The beginning of any authentic Advent journey.

These past weeks a friend, a former pastor of Downey First Christian Church, asked me to write a review for his recently published book, Acres of Oak.[5]   The title is taken from a quip by the senior pastor of a church he briefly served as an associate, Pilgrim Congregational Church in Pomona, referring to the rows of empty pews in many of our churches.  In his book, Pastor Rich narrates his story of his entering the ordained ministry and the congregations he has served, 

Pilgrim Church is a very large edifice with a good number of Sunday school rooms, all built with the expectation that when the kids left the Sunday school door, they would enter the sanctuary door.  Instead, they just migrated out the door, and shortly after, their parents followed.[6]

In his pilgrimage he has seen the mainline church become a mere vestige of what it once was in its former glory days.  One congregation he served in San Gabriel, Mayflower Congregational, founded by three breakaway splinter groups grew to over 900 in the 1960s.  Then with amazing rapidity the bottom fell out.

By the 1980s the membership had dropped some 600 members.   In 1984 the church had a remnant of only 52 pledging units.  Acres of oak, indeed.  And high maintenance demands. The world seems to presently have little need of what we once offered.

Even seemingly healthy mega evangelical churches are being rent asunder by conflicting loyalties – to the Former Guy, or to our Lord Jesus Christ.  Their youth leaving in droves over this conflict.

These are tough times. Our world, like that of Herrod, is in great anguish.  The birth pangs of what we cannot yet fathom. 

Expectancy mixed with dread fills the silence of our souls as we scan the morning papers over coffee.  No easy answers.  Certainly not from happy Jesus music or holiday extravaganzas.

This Advent, at St. Francis, we will gather once more, read the ancient texts, await fulfillment in the silence of passing days. Or maybe join in plaintive hymn: “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here…”  And we will work for a better tomorrow for the “least of these.” 

But we sing our hymns together in solidarity; and in that I find hope.  Hope as small and as powerful as in a tiny baby laid in a manger.  Amen.

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[1] Debbie Truong, “Living in their Cars to Afford College,” Los Angeles Times, November 27, 2023

[2] Isaiah 64:1-2, NRSV.

[3] Renny Golden, The Music of Her Rivers (Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2019), 77.

[4] Harry Emmerson Fosdick, What is Vital in Religion (New York: Harpers Brothers, 1955), 1.

[5] Richard Kurrasch, Acres of Oak: A Pastor Rethinks Church in the 21^st Century (Chicago: Windy City Publishers, 2023).

[6] Op. cit., 61-62.

December 3, 2023
Advent 1

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18;
“What the River Said;” Mark 13:24-37

“Mostly Silence”