First Snowfall Sermon

Something happens at this time every year. The breath in our lungs seems thicker, the days weightier, we sleep more deep. I am never certain whether the thickness all around us, is filled with the Advent hopes and expectations of children for the coming of Christmas, or Autumn's decay thickening the world with spores, until the blanket of the first snowfall tucks everything in clean and bright for the long winter that is to come.

From Labor Day until Thanksgiving the world around us has been full and lush, the colors and smells almost too earthy. But in the last several days, color has drained out of life... in these days many of us wander into thoughts of life and death, as others seek to run away to Florida were he snow never comes.

We know the winter snow comes, cold, wet, icy, bitter, slippery, blinding, piled deep all around, but also, that white blanket of freshness laid over everything, clean, mystical, brilliant. We treasure the firs snowfall, confident that as long as winter may seem, there will come other seasons after the winter.

Solomon described life and death without faith, in this way:
Short and sorrowful is our life,
and there is no remedy when life comes to its end,
for no one has been known to return from Hades.
For we were born by mere chance, and
hereafter we shall be as though we had never been,
for the breath in our nostrils is smoke,
and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts;
when it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes,
and the spirit will dissolve like empty air.
Our name will be forgotten in time,
and no one will remember our works;
our lives will pass away like the traces of a cloud,
and be scattered like mist
that is chased by the rays of the sun
and overcome by its heat.
For our allotted time is the passing of a shadow,
and there is no return from our death,
because it is sealed up and no one turns back.
(Wisdom 2:1-5)

This is at the core of our moral and ethical debates over stem-cell research, over abortion, and euthenasia, and all discussions of the quality of life.
Was the moment of our birth, mere chance? Is what we imagine to be reason, a byproduct of the rhythmic beating of our hearts? Do we have a soul? If so, how is the soul activated?

Throughout time there has been conjecture about the location of the soul in the human body. Some have equated the Soul and Mind together, as two parts of understanding.
Others, that as the Mind performs Intellect in addition to controlling movement,
the Heart is the center of the Soul in addition to the pumping of the blood.
Still others have come to the conclusion, that while our minds deduce problems and our hearts rule relations, the Soul digests the left-over stuff of life, so the soul must be in the bowels.

Jeremiah eludes to the reality, that regardless of where the soul is in us, there is a soul...
And faith is not understanding or mastery of how to manipulate God or circumstance.
RATHER, Faith is knowing that God reveals all things, and does so for righteousness.

I have allowed Larry Weiss' presentation on the signs and symbols all around us to play upon my imagination. While the CROSS & CROWN above the pulpit may ave been chosen in an era expecting CHRISTIANS CONQUERING THE WORLD, a fresh revelation might be that all human societies, all governments and powers and authorities MUST CONSIDER THE Moral and Ethical and Spiritual ramifications of policies and decisions. We are not simply accidents occupying the moment, but rather MORAL & ETHICAL STEWARDS OF CREATION.

If the letters C&A are inscribed in the window as we go out, to represent Calvinism and Armenianism, referent to God having REVEALED WHAT IS PREDESTINED AND HUMANITY THEN HAVING FREE WILL TO ACT, the question is not preservation of all life, but a weighing of circumstance and righteousness. As humans pushing he envelope of human existence, we have a temptation to believe death is a disease to be conquered,aging and mortality things to be ignored as inconvenient and ugly. One reason for constantly remembering that we are mortal, for routinely naming that we are born and we die, is that we would treat every day as precious and rare.

If as human beings we try to ignore death by not giving death attention, the references to the Second Coming must truly terrorize us. The Second Coming is a part of Christian Faith we have intentionally ignored, akin to EVANGELISM, the ASCENSION, and explaining to our children about CIRCUMCISION. But, repeatedly in each of the Gospels, a significant portion of the teachings of Jesus, of the Letters of Paul and of the Book of Revelation, name the Second Coming of the Messiah. Do we drop this as inconvenient teaching? If we do not have a right to pick and choose what parts of faith we want to believe and what we would rather not see, then we must consider, what do we mean by HE WILL COME AGAIN TO JUDGE THE LIVING AND THE DEAD?

A significant part of the Church take the Scriptures literally to mean that there will come a day, when just as Mary gave birth in a stable, and Jesus died on the cross his lifeless form being laid in a stone tomb, he will come again, and we seek that resolution. Several have come to me with troubling concerns of a future day when graves will be opened and corpses raised. This is not using our faith, but only our fears. For the flesh is mortal, and just as we can unite in communion serving one another, forgiving each other being like the bells tat compliment and lay off one another, so our souls will harmonize in a spiritual communion.

Others have have used our minds to understand faith, that the REFERENCE to the SECOND COMING is the Resurrection we know of as Easter Morning. The question being when the first coming, which allows us to name that Advent is not a time for shopping and decorations, a time abandoned to faith in Santa Claus, but that the COMING OF THE CHRIST CHILD was a monumental unique even in history, where God gave a living gift of grace. Throughout human history people had killed to make a sacrifice, and here instead God's sacrifice was to make alive!

A THIRD and rich understanding of the SECOND COMING comes from Dick Neibuhr, who wrote a marvelous text that helped me recast my faith and understanding, a book called EXPERIENTIAL RELIGION. The point Niebuhr makes is that we do not come to acceptance of death easily, but over and over wrestling to understand that the person we trusted, who was our mentor, larger than life; WAS ALSO human and mortal, and died. So also with Faith in God, the point is not whether we were Baptized, or once confirmed or Faith, but whether OVER & OVER and Over Again, we came to believe and be convicted in new ways.

As we prepare for the first real snowfall...there have been flurries, but we know that the real first snowfall is coming, we remember other snows, of other winters, as we have matured. Each first snowfall comes like the very first, blanketing the earth, making all things fresh and new allowing us to witness life different than we had known. And, when the winter snows accumulate, as we as humans often fear, to remember that in our lives, as beautiful as the first snowfall, there are always other seasons yet to come.

On this first Sunday of Advent, I would lay before you a Spiritual discipline to pick up. In our Culture, January has become THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR, and as a new start we often make New Year's Resolutions, some of which rarely last a week. Like so, in Lent we accept a commitment to give up something for 40 days. As this is a recognition of the Second Coming, I would challenge and encourage you to begin afresh with your faith, to make a new and deeper commitment a new and deeper relationship with God, Christ and one another.