“The Calling You Cannot Miss”

A homily for the fourth Sunday of Advent

22 December 2024

Last week, Father Mark spoke about the thorniness of hope and how hoping in the present is an action of Christian resistance that creates, with the Spirit, the futures we long for. If last week was about examining what we are to do and how we are transfigured through the act of hope, then this week is about identity–how we participate with God in creating the world we long to see. When God became bodied among us in Mary, God ushered in a new order that no longer depended on the sacrifices and offerings people were accustomed to. That’s what the passage from the Letter to the Hebrews is about. The author cites Psalm 40:6-8 to express how Christ’s life born of a human body becomes the sacrifice, the burnt offering God desires.   God is doing something new by involving human bodies in the kingdom’s work. When God arrives in Mary’s body in the form of Christ through the Holy Spirit, God insists that bodies are the systems through which the world of the kingdom will be built. God articulates God’s dependence upon us human creatures when God says: humanity is how I wish to become recognizable in the world. Critically, though, before God takes this action, God chooses to get the consent of the actors involved. Namely, the lesson to the Hebrews reflects Christ giving his consent to God so that God could carry out God’s will. Later, we witness Mary, despite her initial and understandable skepticism about what this all might mean, also consenting to God carrying out God’s will even though she doesn’t fully understand it. 

God chooses to depend on the consent of humans to make the kingdom visible in the world. This means that God can only act creatively to bring the world God longs to see to light in collaboration with our human longing to say yes. So what we desire is of great consequence to God because, in the incarnation, God says: I will bring this new order of Christian witness to love, justice, and mercy to bear through your bodies. Our desires matter to God because God cannot get the kingdom to bear through us without our active consent; our longings must indicate that we desire to bear the good news in us. So today, on this fourth Sunday in Advent, when the Christ-child is closer than a handbreadth, we ask ourselves and each other: what do we long for? And how does what we long for participate in bringing the good news? 

While these appear to be simple questions, they do not have simple answers. The challenges are two-fold. First, sometimes it is hard to know what we long for most. Have you ever had the experience of someone asking you with exasperated urgency: What do you want?!! On the surface, there is nothing wrong with this question, but I find it so profoundly frustrating because, in the tone of the one who asks, it is a hint of condescension, implying that they can’t believe that I wouldn’t just know what I want. The trouble is that we do not always know what we want, and even if we manage to figure that out, what we want does not always match what we long for. And we meet God in what we long for. When I wake on a Wednesday morning, still dark and frigid, I might want to sleep and stay tucked under my quilt rather than walk to the morning Eucharist at Martin’s. If someone asked me then and there, I might even tell them that is what I want, but the spiritual practice of Advent is one of awareness. A practice of consciously bringing the tensions of what we want and what we long for before God-with-Us. It is about bringing all these things together and asking: Will you help me move toward what I long for? To ask this is vulnerable because self-disclosure requires trust, which requires releasing our grip over our longings. I wonder if we are afraid to ask questions like this because we know that the asking begins the unfolding of the answer. The kingdom is unfurling when God asks us to make our longings known so that God can be known through us. And we are not always sure what this might mean. One of my favorite stanzas is from the poem “All” by Jorie Graham and it reads: 

You cannot not unfurl

endlessly, entirely, till it is the yes of blossom, that end

not end – what does that sound sound like

deep in its own time, where it roots us out

Completed till it is done. But it is not done.

The kingdom is not done, and Advent reminds us of this. God is already unfolding the kingdom of good news in us. It unfurls more and more each time these questions contact the root of our longings.  Because they are at the root of our longings, God is, and where God is, the kingdom is already unfolding. So it turns out that it is significant to say, “”See, I have come to do your will,”” to God. Indeed, if Christ and the psalmist, the apostles, and the saints all said this, it matters to us. It also seems essential to re-articulate our desire to do God’s will,  which we find in today’s epistle to the Hebrews.

Of course, Mary models this most profoundly in her yes to God, a yes which she says in the darkness of unknowing in the seat of fear. She says to God “See? I have come to do your will” and to this, God says “”Yes.”” Still, we are left to reckon with the webbing of our desires: do we really desire to do God’s will? Many of us do, but most would like to know more about this before we say yes. But the kingdom is surprising and mysterious on purpose. When we ask God again and again: what is your will? The answer is not the point; the asking is. Advent is about asking what we long for most sincerely and trusting that our desire to do God’s will please God. We won’t always know what we long for most. That is why we have the Holy Spirit, the Church, and the Scriptures; they are bodies of discernment. We will not often know the intricacies of the will of God, but that does not mean we won’t recognize when it is at work and when it is not. 

When I was a child, I used to constantly worry I would miss the big thing, the actual thing I was meant to do in my life. I was terrified if I didn’t keep watch, I would somehow miss my calling. As a performer, I was surrounded by phenomenal musicians. I would watch them with their instruments and be in awe because I knew they knew in their gut, like mine, that they were musicians. This is their calling. What of mine? Because while I could sing and loved to make music with others, I knew it wasn’t my deepest longing. I worried I would never come to know what my deepest longing was and would somehow miss what I was most meant to do in the world. I would ask again and again, “God, what will you have me do?” And, of course, while I was anxious about missing my calling, time continued to unfold, and I was doing things. Things like what? Singing Anglican music and jazz, cooking with grandmothers, reading and writing, acolyting and serving in Church, cultivating yeast and patches of earth, hosting Sunday suppers, and listening deeply to the world. And now I see how all these things are part of my calling to the holy orders. The calling has always been present, even when I haven’t heard it. Callings keep calling, even when we can’t listen to them. They are impossible to miss. You only miss what’s calling you by not being conscious of it. What we are doing tells us something about what’s calling us and where we stand in relation to it. Advent draws us into that consciousness by asking us to reflect on what we are doing and how what we are doing speaks to who we are longing to become. Advent asks us to return to these questions: What am I to do? And who am I meant to be?

Sometimes, the only way we figure out what we long for in our gut is when something pulls against it, lays it bare, or puts it at risk. Suddenly, the longing becomes apparent in those moments because we know how much there is to risk losing if we name it. Mary is afraid because she is seen. God sees her longing more clearly than she sees it herself, and being seen is terrifying because there is no going back. Advent is about saying yes to God seeing us and reckoning with all the uncomfortable feelings that arise when we see God seeing us. 

Do we long to do the will of God even if we do not know precisely what that means? Even if, as last week’s Gospel lesson suggested, it will likely cost us something, and if, as this week’s Gospel indicates, the form of God’s will among us will catch us by surprise? Neither Mary nor Elizabeth expected to be pregnant, and despite their astonishment, they recognized God when God arrived, and they said: God, I don’t know what this means, but I trust you enough to say yes anyway. 

To trust God with our longings is a risk. Tradition and experience suggest that God will most often surprise us. Faithfulness rarely aligns with our expectations of what God wants. The reading from the Letter to the Hebrews demonstrates this. We think God wants sin offerings and perfect sacrifices. We believe God wants us to present ourselves as ordered and perfect, but God does not long for our best performance of obedience. God wants us to hear God. This is what obedience is about: hearing God truly and giving God messy. Yes, we can keep listening in the present. This is about sharing our yes that is still unsure, afraid, and still discerning if the Incarnate Word made flesh is Good News. What comes before this reading of Mary’s Magnificat is what the angel says to her in the scene prior. The angel says: “Mary, do not be afraid!” This implies Mary did not immediately recognize that the good news of the angel was good news. Indeed, the scriptures say she was “”troubled in her spirit”” (Luke 1:29). And still, something in her gut knew God when God came, and in her unknowing, she trusted God with her longings and said yes anyway. What would happen if we entrusted our longings to God, having faith that God understands them more clearly than we ever could? The act of trust is the beginning of us becoming the change we long to see in the world. In this ordinary act of surrender already, the kingdom is unfurling.

It is terrifying to trust, but think of how much God must have trusted Mary to carry their only child into the world? If God trusted us this much, maybe we can trust God to take care of our longings. It takes time to sit with questions about the ultimate things like judgment, death, heaven, and hell.  Yes, these are actually the traditional markers of the weeks of Advent! Pondering how judgment, death, heaven, and hell relate to the incarnation of Christ as God-with-Us imbues the season with a different meaning, doesn’t doesn’t it?  Traditionally, Advent is about approaching these last four things in ourselves and with the gathered community and asking: what are we to do, and who are we to be in these times? The gift of participating in a liturgical calendar is that year after year, it grounds us, the Church, in a cyclical vision of time. Time, as Rev. Mark has spoken these last weeks, is not linear in the kingdom. It is circular. Maybe it is something like a carousel, as Joni Mitchell might say. Advent gives us time to reflect. It is not about escaping into the nostalgia of the past or skipping ahead to the celebration of the incarnation in Christmas. Instead, Advent gives credence to the difficulty of waiting with these questions about the nature of our longings without the consolation of quick answers. God’s presence and activity are constant in our lives; our spiritual task is to attune to the reality of God already at work within us, not to strain to create it for ourselves. In Advent, we remember that holiness is already here. Holiness is already working itself out through the Spirit before we are conscious. The liturgical rhythm of Advent gives us time to descend into the knowledge of the Spirit within us, an orientation that draws us resolutely into the present. Advent suspends us between the inhale of waiting and the exhale of arriving at the next notch of unfurling. In Advent, we learn to regulate our breath in the dark. To breathe when hoping feels too much of a risk. To breathe when we can’t see what God is and can only perceive God’s movement in our periphery. 

Candlelight seems appropriate for Advent. It’s suitable in most seasons if you ask me. Candlelight feels fitting for the work of sitting with our longings because the dim light of the candle hems us into the radius around us. It draws us into the immediate, the present. The flicker of a candle only offers so much illumination and warmth. Its purpose is to draw us close while we ask: what is there to see from this place?

God, who chose to take on flesh with all its vulnerability, finitude, and risk, help us ask what you would have us do to be the change we long to see in the world. Help us to trust that our desire to ask this question pleases you. Help us keep asking and listening as we await your coming again in glory. 

Amen.