Feel the gift

3 Advent B 2008
(Isaiah 61: 1-4, 8-11; Canticle 15; 1 Thess 5: 16-24; John 1: 6-8, 19-28)


Sometimes we just can’t believe in a gift.

My oldest brother Hank was born in 1939 and came of age during World War II. Times were hard even though there was work for my father. The babies kept coming, and fear in the news went hand-in-hand with ration cards and shortages.

For Christmas each kid got to ask for one special gift. One year Hank’s wish was for a real leather football. That was a big deal on my father’s salary. Christmas Eve came and Hank, about age 7, was in bad shape. It took several tries to get Hank to sleep. Finally Mom and Dad had some space to get things arranged in the living room. In the midst of exhausted Christmas prep, my parents heard a sound. Looking up, they saw what they described as a pale ghost of a 7 year old boy, staring and swaying, sound asleep, muttering something about a football. In desperation Mom and Dad let him feel the football through the wrapping paper. Only then could they coax Hank back into bed.

As I recall Hank had no memory of waking up and feeling that football on Christmas Day. But I guess when he was asleep and lost in his anxiety, feeling was believing.

Feeling is believing today. Today we wake up from our anxiety and doubt. Today on 3 Advent we reach out to touch that which is truly real.

Roses can be touched. Joy can be touched. Beneath the paper-thin veneer of our lives today we feel the solid shape of the gift to be given to us, the Christ, the gift who is already here.

Isaiah sung about it. The promised one is here among us, and he is here to release prisoners, speak good news to the poor, to lift up any who are bowed down. He is coming, but in God’s topsy-turvy way of doing things he is already here. He is here, in Sacrament and Word, in our flesh and lives. He is here when we give him our hands and minds to allow him to do his liberating, healing work. The poor and the captives and the mourners and those who cry out are not forgotten. They are heard, we are heard, and salvation is at work in our midst.

Mary sung about it, in that wonderful startling song where she repeats Isaiah’s promises and makes them deeper and more immediate. As she sung her song she felt the solid life of Jesus within her, moving, awakening, here and yet to come.

And John the Wild Man brings it. Today again we meet John, the Wild Man of the desert. He speaks in the old way that God always spoke, through the lips and the lives of wild men and wild women who stormed out of the desert with their faces and eyes aflame. He speaks of one who is to come. He will himself be the living Bath that will strip away our old life and give us a Life that is always new. Today we welcome the Wild Man of God, because he tells us that the promises of God are wild and untamed, and to follow the way of the Gospel is to live a wild life free in the very wind of God.

Is this life possible and real? Or is it just Advent poetry spoken by one of the more eccentric Episcopal clergy in town? Try and see. Feel the gift beneath the thin paper of what we think of as our lives. Feel the new life awakening in our own flesh and in our midst.

Today claim the gift that is given us by God.