The following is a sermon preached by the Rev. Rob Giesselmann at Christ Church, Sausalito, on the 2nd Sunday of Advent, 2007.
 

Advent is such a charming season.  We light candles progressively, one, two, three, four, week after week, to mark time while we wait.  And we open the little doors of an Advent calendar, in anticipation of the birth of a baby. Even the lengthening nighttime is oddly charming.  Advent assumes the cloak of symbol, representing the complex of dark and light, yen and yang.  Darkness becomes poetry during this romantic season of serum blue or royal purple.
 

But, shouldn’t there be an edge to Advent?  Or has the certainty of a baby to be born yet again this year blunted Advent’s edge?  It is, after all, a fait accompli, a done deal.  We know a baby will be born, in a manger, with hay and wood serving as a humble roof over his head, under a starlit sky, angels will sing, and bovine offer praise.

The other day, my kids jokingly lamented the fact that their Advent calendars don’t offer treats.  Theirs tell the story of Mary and Joseph and the baby. No chocolate behind Door No. 3, like their friends’ calendars.
 
That’s my kind of Advent.  A chocolate season, offered as a drug to dull the senses, to keep one from feeling the strain of a true Advent acutely.

But a chocolate Advent is no Advent at all. An Advent that doesn’t startle you is no Advent at all. 

Enter John the desert-man Baptist. He wakes you up! Hey you! He shouts, as he wags his bony and underfed finger at you. Prepare the way. You want a Savior? You want a Savior? You can’t handle a Savior!

You jolt upright, suddenly awake, you look at this John the Baptist, and you protest.  “I’m ready!  Why just yesterday I double-clicked Amazon.com to order the robot dog for my niece, and latest David Baldacci novel for my brother.”

But unholy and untenable John takes a step toward you and spits through his beard, “No!  You want a Savior? Mean it. Do something about it. Get ready; Change!”

Personally, I don’t like John the Baptist; he messes with my head, tells me stuff I don’t want to hear.  When John walks into a house, I slink out the back door.

The real John is too much, more than I can handle. And if John isn’t too much for you, well, to be honest, you’re just not listening.  Because John is there, telling you, just like me, that the old ways won’t cut it anymore.  Last year’s Christmas isn’t this year’s Christmas.  “Prepare the Way.” Shouts the voice in your wilderness.

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Each week, a group of protestors pickets the federal building in downtown San Francisco, to protest the war in Iraq. On Thursday of this week, our own bishop, Marc Andrus, joined the protest.

First, Bishop Marc celebrated a Eucharist in front of the federal building to memorialize those who have died as a result of the war. I’m all for that –– I’m deeply disturbed at the immense loss of life in Iraq, the hopelessness of it all. 

But then, after the Eucharist, Marc walked to the front door, laid down, and blocked the front door. Against the law. The Bishop knew he was breaking the law; he intended to break the law. He intended to get arrested, to draw attention to the cause. 

Federal authorities did, in fact, arrest Marc, and Episcopalians have been talking about him at Christmas parties all weekend! Positive and negative.

I don’t like it, but Bishop Marc became John the Baptist, with his finger in my face, offensive in every way, proclaiming, “Prepare.”

Preparation for Marc means peace.

Bishop Marc was proclaiming peace, and he chose arrest so people would listen. Peace. But is peace really a message that delivers? 

I’m guessing we all favor peace. Regardless of your position on the war in Iraq, we all want peace. We all want the nightmare to end, and to go on with our lives like before.

So who could disparage a bishop who protests in favor of peace?  And yet, what the Bishop did, the protest and the arrest, feels like more than just a simple claim for peace.

To me, it feels like the protest for a claim I find untenable:  immediate and full withdrawal of all troops from Iraq.  I –– and this is me –– believe immediate and full withdrawal from a conflict we created would be irresponsible.

Because the protest feels like the Bishop is taking that position, I chose not to attend the rally, though I, like the other clergy in the diocese, was invited.

Now Bishop Marc has not stated he’s in favor of full and immediate withdrawal. And just because the protest feels like a protest for full and immediate withdrawal doesn’t mean that it was. I am guessing here – but the Bishop is a man of peace, and I’m guessing, he protested to awaken a sleepy world to peace. 

Which is different than staking a political claim. Separate the claim for peace from the politics of peace. Peace. Period. Not a method of attaining the peace. Just peace.

To promote peace, the Bishop simply stole a page from the Ghandi playbook of passive nonresistance. If I’m right, then the Bishop really believes that “peace is the Church’s business.”

Jesus is the Prince of Peace, by the way, and the baby we await during Advent, the one we so readily welcome on Christmas morning, is peace in bodily form:

“For behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people, for unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord … And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

The prince of peace, born for peace, and regardless of your desire for protest or disdain of protest, can we as a church take any other position?

But, like I said, we all want peace, don’t we?  But Bishop Marc as John the Baptist is still wagging his offensive, bony finger in my face, compelling me to search my soul, look deeper, you child of God.

The question, you see, isn’t whether you want peace –– of-course you want peace.  The question is, “how badly do you want peace?”

Do you long with Advent passion for peace.  Advent, you see, is not about desiring a sweet baby in a manger, it is about a deep longing, a thirst as the parched throat in the desert for water.  Advent is about a primal longing, a need deep inside you for something only God can provide, and if God doesn’t provide it, you won’t get it. 

Longing for peace is more than a superficial desire that hostilities cease.  Do you long with Advent passion for peace, for the Prince of Peace?

Or do you want an easy and superficial peace, a peace that is no more than chocolate hidden behind the panels of an Advent calendar?  Peace, real peace –– for peace’s sake? Or peace for my own selfish sake? 

And, there is a second point to the Advent-peace concept. Do we want peace because we nostalgically long for a pre-9/11 world, a simpler world we could control? A world for us, and about us, one in which we ignore the needs of the rest of the world?

Or do we want a different kind of peace, a holy peace, God’s peace, a constructive peace? Peace in Iraq would mean we could constructively address the other problems of the world? A lasting peace in Iraq would free our resources to focus diplomatically and economically on global warming, or the slaughter in Darfur, or the burgeoning HIV/Aids epidemic in Africa?

Peace for a better or wealthier or easier life for ourselves is no peace, it is an empty shell of peace. Peace to do good –– now that is real peace.
               
I don’t like the fact that my Bishop made a fool of himself in the public arena, but then I always slink out the back door when John the Baptist walks in the front.

But one thing about John –– he challenges me and my motives, he probes and checks and questions, until I examine more deeply my own soul. 

Advent is about waiting, and longing –– not just for a trite baby in a manger –– but for tangible peace from the Prince of peace.  That peace might just be the peace I don’t want.

And that is why John is pointing directly at me, compelling me to search my own heart, as he asks me, “What is it you really want?”