Sermon – November 28, 2010

Drama, from Beginning to End

Sermon

preached By Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli -

November 28, 2010

Isaiah 2:1-5; Matthew 24:36-44

Today marks the beginning of the

season of Advent, the four weeks of preparation for the festival of

God’s Incarnation in Jesus—commonly known as Christmas.  In our lives,

these weeks are full of activity—social calendars are full, shopping and

baking and wrapping and decorating and travel planning soak up much of

our time, not to mention extra mission and service projects.  But

traditionally, our spiritual tradition during this time encourages us to

wait and to watch.  It is an active waiting for sure, real

anticipation—but what are we anticipating?  The most obvious answer is

the birth of Christ, the renewal of hope through recounting the ancient

tale of Christ coming into the world in flesh.  But, as our Gospel text

reminds us today, we are also anticipating Christ’s coming into the

world again, that future hope for the time when the fullness of

God’s vision will come to fruition.  We are encouraged to keep awake so

that we will be ready to greet and share in that new day when it comes.

In essence, the season of Advent tells the beginning and the

ending of the Christian story.  We find ourselves living somewhere in

the middle.  And of course, the Christian story is itself part of a

longer drama that stretches back to the very beginning when light shone

for the first time and all creation was fresh and new.

The story we tell and of which

we are a part is the story of God’s loving and saving activity

throughout history.  When we gather for worship, all that we do is

patterned on that story.  Just as the Israelites were called and formed

by God’s initiative, we acknowledge that our presence here is in

response to God’s grace, God’s initiative to call each one of us and

bring us together into community.  In our worship we journey together

through encounter with God in the Hebrew Scriptures, which themselves

set the stage for the next act in Jesus Christ.  That part of the drama

is the high point—the big production number at the end of the first act,

with reading the Gospel—the good news of God’s saving love made manifest

through Jesus Christ—and making the Word incarnate through the preached

word that, in various ways, calls us to follow Jesus.  When the curtain

rises on the second act, the Holy Spirit continues the work of Christ by

empowering the gathered people to respond in faith, confession,

intercession, and acts of commitment, just as the Holy Spirit fell upon

the first disciples of Jesus at Pentecost.  Part of our Spirit-empowered

response is to give thanks and to remember God’s mighty acts in Jesus

Christ through Baptism and Holy Communion.  We are then sent forth,

commissioned in the power of the triune God to be the Body of Christ in

the world, giving ourselves to others, just as the first disciples were

commissioned to go into the world and share the good news.  All of this

is held within the context of God’s promise for the future—the promise

to bring the story to its final, perfect conclusion in peace, unity, and

love.  Do you see the movement of our worship through in-gathering,

revelation, call, response, and sending?  This is the story of our

faith, a journey we take and a story we tell together each Sunday as we

gather in worship.

Christian worship is dramatic—it

is a drama in which we all participate.  Christian philosopher Søren

Kierkegaard uses the image of the theater to describe Christian worship,

pointing out that a dramatic production has actors who perform,

prompters who help the actors do their job well, and an audience who

watches and listens.  When you think about worship, who would you name

as the “audience?”  Often folks will assume that the actors are the

clergy, musicians, and worship leaders, the prompter is the Holy Spirit,

and the audience is the gathered congregation.  In this scenario, the

worship leaders are there to perform for the audience, the

congregation.  Kierkegaard challenges this by suggesting that the actors

are the congregation—you!—the prompters are the clergy and musicians,

and the audience?  The audience is God.  We offer our worship, our

journey through salvation history each and every week, our praise and

our prayer, our response and commitment—to God.  The stage is set, the

movement of the drama is clear, and each of us has a role to play as we

offer ourselves to the God whom we worship.

Just think about this for a

minute:  God—even right now—leaning forward from the divine seat in

anticipation of what we will do next, the spotlight shining on us as we

offer our prayers and our gifts, as we sing and ponder together, as we

struggle with questions of life and faith and relationship, as we risk

ourselves through honest sharing, as we try for a handful of minutes to

be present to things of ultimate concern, to be present to ourselves

and to remember God and God’s mercies.  Just imagine that—God waiting

and watching in anticipation as we worship…

It is kind of a funny

image—because God already knows the story we are telling—God was there!

God knows the beginning of the story, the callings and the prophecies,

the betrayals and triumphs of faith, the revelations and responses; God

knows the movements of the drama by heart.  So maybe God is like someone

who loves the play and keeps showing up to see it again and again—to see

how the actors will interpret it and embody it, to see if this time we

might not just “call it in” but rather participate in the great

unfolding story from the inside out.  You know the kind of performance I

mean—you’ve all been moved by performers who have so completely thrown

themselves into their performance that whatever they express is clearly

connected to something deep-down real and true.  What if God is

expectantly waiting for that from us and applauding when it happens?

The only thing that I would add

to this metaphor is that God is never a passive, dead audience.  God is

always active—or, as Christian theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas

suggests, God is “an eternally performing God.”[i]

So to say that God is our audience as we worship is not to say that God

is the divine critic, looking to judge every misstep or wandering mind

in order to post some scathing review.  Rather, God is actively

participating with us, making our own participation possible and

infusing our worship with holy possibility.

Part of the prophecy from Isaiah

today envisions a day when people will stream to God so that God’s ways

will be learned and God’s paths walked.  This is what we do as we gather

in worship to tell, to live, to perform the story of God’s saving love.

We hear of God’s ways, we practice walking in God’s paths—as a community

of faith.  And really, all our worship is a rehearsal for our living in

the world once we are sent out.  What we do here shapes and forms us in

God’s ways, gives us an opportunity to practice walking God’s paths, to

practice living the story, to see what it’s like to make the journey of

faith again and again—it’s a dress rehearsal for our continuing

performance of the faith once we are sent out.  I’m reminded of a song I

learned as a youth:  “God, teach me how to pray.  Yes, and teach me how

to live.  Make them one and the same, to the glory of your name.”

Worship provides the space to learn how to pray and to live and to

practice making them one.  Another way to say this is that worship is

where we rehearse being truly human, just as Jesus Christ became truly

human.

Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan

Williams, says this:  “The drama at the core of our humanity is about

our reluctance to be human; and the gift that the Church offers is the

resource and courage to step into Jesus’ world and begin the business of

being human afresh—again and again, because our reluctance keeps coming

back.  But if we do take such a step, the look of the country changes:

strangers are less threatening, it becomes possible to live more with

our own failure and humiliation, and we may even be able to have a faint

idea of what it means to claim that human life is created for joyful

sharing in God’s life.  And more—we become ambassadors for this new

world, seeking wherever we are to let men and women know that violence

and death do not have the last word where humanity is concerned.”[ii]

Our God is a performing, active

God who has invited us to join in the performance that is God’s own life

or, as Williams puts it, “human life is created for joyful sharing in

God’s life.”  When we come together in worship, we are reminded of that;

we are reminded of who we are; we are reminded of the story—God’s

story—and that each one of us plays a part in the great unfolding drama

that began with the first creative word spoken by God, continued with

the word of God spoken through the law and the prophets, and took its

most surprising turn with the Word become flesh, Jesus Christ—who has

come and will come again into the world.  Each and every one of us is an

actor in that larger story.  This means that your life has infinite

meaning, infinite possibility.  In this lies hope, not only for your own

life, but for the life of the world.  The invitation is to become “human

afresh” again and again.  Just as we celebrate God’s own becoming human

at Christmas, we are called and empowered and formed through worship to

become a little more human so that more of Christ is made manifest in

our homes, our workplaces, our communities, our world.  In this

in-between time of waiting and watching,

worship provides us the place to live in active anticipation—eyes

open, awake and aware—of what God will do next.  The promise is that God

is eagerly, actively waiting and watching to see how you and I will

share (perform?) in the great unfolding drama.  The grand finale is a

world more human, a world of peace, joy, and hope.  It’s the role of a

lifetime…