Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 3:1-6

Like last week we talk about anticipation today as a way of understanding the season of Advent.  Today we focus on urgent anticipation.

We cram a lot of events into Advent.  It’s kind of set up that way.  We don’t have much choice.  We can’t have a Christmas party in April.  There is a saying: “Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.” But in Advent it feels like everything is happening at the same time. So, friends, in the season of Advent, time gets sort of crunched or squeezed together. The moments count more it seems.  They count in a good way, but also in a bad way.  The lights and the colors and the sounds of the season make joy even more joyful, but they also make suffering and loneliness even more sad.  Time is lived more deeply during Advent.  Arnold Bennet says: ”Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions… No one can take it from you. It is not something that can be stolen. And no one receives either more or less than you receive. Moreover, you cannot draw on its future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you. You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness — the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends — depends on that. If one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, one does muddle one’s whole life indefinitely. We shall never have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.  An interesting way of thinking about time isn’t it.  Bennet talks about time as if it is in our hands.  The poet Carl Sandburg writes something similar:  “Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.”

Last week one of my many cousins in The Netherlands sent me a copy of my genealogy, at least the part of my father’s side.  I mentioned to you before that my grandfather was from the Roosevelt’s old hamlet in Zeeland.  It turns out that going back at least nine generations and probably way further. My father’s ancestors came from the same cluster of villages on two islands that sit away from the North Sea and were always in danger of flooding.    The Netherlands is arguable the most densely populated country in Europe, but these villages are still tiny. And when you zoom in on Google Earth you see that the farmland is small too.  Now we have seen already that time can speed up and certainly I felt I was speeding to time as I was reading the birth, marriage and death dates of an ever widening band of  peasant and fisherman ancestors.  Time became packed together, folded and crunched together as I scrolled down the list, unaware of what these people whose DNA I carry had celebrated and suffered.  But there was another thing I found. Time is also connected. We already saw that when we talked about the movie “Cloud Atlas” earlier.   The time of our ancestors and ours are inextricably linked.  Their hopes and dreams and thoughts have impacted ours and they still do so.  Their limitations have become our opportunities.  Our Bible passages from the lectionary today remind us how at Advent time is connected. We fast forward  from the time of Malachi and all the other Old Testament prophets who saw visions and dreamed dreams to the time of John the Baptist who cries in the wilderness.  Malachi 3: 1 says:”I am going to send my messenger and he will clear the way before me.” Fast forward hundreds of years and there is John clearing the way for the Messiah.  Time is connected through prophecy. Old and New Testament, ancient time of oppression and Roman time of oppression are brought together in Advent.   Really, friends, it is God’s right to play with time, to make it come together.  Time is really something we have invented anyway.  It’s all relative.  Time is just a way you and I keep order in our lives, what we use to keep commitments and to make sure we are all here once a week.  Let us remember thought what we learned today: that time speeds up at Advent and that one and another are connected.  Advent is not an ordinary time.   Time is precious at Advent.  Meaning is poured into a few weeks. Everything is felt more keenly. Both joy and despair.  Let us remember that when we look at the people around us.  Let us thank God for making Advent possible.