How The Light Gets In

Sara Warfield, 2nd Week of Advent

Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist December 4, 2016

I love Advent. After an almost interminable Ordinary Time, we suddenly but quietly, it seems to me, pull out the blues and purples, and we enter into the darkness. With intention. With quiet anticipation.

In this part of the world, Advent comes as we approach literally our shortest days of the year, and I know a lot of us have felt as though a different kind of darkness has descended since November 8 th . It feels like the beginning of a very long night indeed. I’ve been stumbling through these weeks, not sure how to find my bearings. Groping around, wondering how to move forward. I feel so lost. So like a child lost at the grocery store, I’ve just stopped, stayed in the same place, and watched for someone I recognize.

In stopping, though, I’ve started to notice something about this long night. In this long night, it’s hard to really see one another. When it’s dark, we can only make out the obvious features. We hear a Spanish accent, or an Evangelical quoting scripture from the King James Bible. We notice the woman in a hijab, or the man under a blanket on the sidewalk. We see black skin, or a red cap that reads Make America Great Again.

When it’s dark, we use this limited information instinctively to do one thing: to determine if that person is a threat. And I say that with no judgment. That’s just how we were built. The oldest part of our brain, the part of our brain that evolved first, just wants us to survive and so constantly scans the environment for threats. It’s sensitive. It’s reactive. It’s fight or flight. Like a wild animal.

There were some animals in our readings today. The prophet Isaiah imagines an ideal world, or in our tradition’s language, a kingdom come, where:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
   the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
   and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
   their young shall lie down together;
   and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

Isaiah lived in a time of a long night. His land was under attack. The Assyrians had become the dominant power in the region, wolves who posed a constant threat to Israel’s survival. Those who could fight had a weapon by their side. And for those who couldn’t fight, I imagine a sort of restless fear. The two options were aggression or suspicion. Everyone was afraid, lambs bunkered down, hoping somehow to withstand the stronger force.

But Isaiah imagines a different way of being. A kingdom to come where lambs can be lambs and wolves can be wolves, and they can live together in peace.

But as we sit in our own long night, we wonder, how? How is this possible? In all of our differences, in all of the ways we feel threatened by one another, in all of the ways we seek to dominate each other. How?

Most mornings, I listen to music on my bart ride to the city. I’ve been listening to a contemporary Advent song, a millennial hymn, you might say. The song, by The Brilliance, is called “May You Find a Light” and the verse that has stuck with me says:

There are weary travelers
Searching everywhere you go
Strangers who are searching
Longing deeply to be known

Who of us is not longing deeply to be known? Who of us has not sought out our tribe? People who look like us. Love like us. Create like us. Believe like us. We look for similarities, for affinities, points of connection to join us together in community. I think it’s why a lot of us are here this morning. These communities help us to feel like we are known, like we are seen, and they make us feel safe. We find our wolf groups, our lamb groups, our lion groups, our bear groups, our ox groups. And in those groups, we can rest. I’m glad we have these places to go.

I want you to love the lamb you are. The wolf you are. The bear you are. The ox you are. But becoming who we are, and loving who we are, only gets us part of the way to Isaiah’s vision of peace, or what we call the kingdom to come.

The one we wait for during this season of Advent calls us to widen our field of knowing, to expand who we see as our neighbors, who we deem worthy of our love and care. There is only one thing I know of that connects every single one of us. One thing that every one of us shares. We have all suffered. To have this flesh, this human experience, means to suffer.

Isn’t that the power of this season? God comes down to inhabit this flesh. This earth. This mess. Emmanuel, God with us, God inhabiting our brokenness. Through Jesus, God suffers with us. Through Jesus, we are known.

Most of you know that I spend my days serving as a street chaplain. I spend much of that time with the men and women who come for sacred sleep through the Gubbio Project, both here and at St. Boniface Catholic Church in the Tenderloin. Most of what I do is check in on folks. “How are you doing today?” When I’m here, I hang out in the courtyard and shoot the breeze with the regulars out there.

There’s one man I see most times I’m here. He’s always well dressed. He always smiles and gives me a hug and tells me that his favorite aunt’s name is Sara. I always ask him how he’s doing, and he always says he’s doing well. This past week, though, when I asked him how he’s doing, he looked down. I smelled alcohol on his breath, and he said with a sad smile, “they took me to detox last night, but…” and he trailed off. From there, a story poured out. How he hasn’t talked to his children in five years. How he missed their graduation because of his drinking. How he was clean for ten years but then he wasn’t. I drink by myself, he kept saying. I just need to go somewhere and get clean by myself.

I put my arm around him and felt something right here in my chest. I recognized his desire to be alone, how I don’t want anyone to see me when I’m falling apart. And I named that suffering out loud. “I know when I want to hide that I’m feeling ashamed,” I said. His head dropped, and he started to cry. I held him and tried to keep back the tears in my eyes.

To be a chaplain means to encounter people in their suffering, and to be willing to know them in all the ways that life has cracked them open. But in order to do that, I have to open myself to the ways my life has cracked me open. How I grew up with a pastor who told me that if I just had enough faith, I wouldn’t have asthma attacks. Who preached that gay people are going to hell, and so I always thought of myself as a condemned outsider.

I know that these cracks cause me to lash out in fear sometimes. To see others as threats. To retreat to the comfort of my tribe and never leave. I also know that the ways I have been broken have helped me connect to others who also think of themselves as condemned outsiders.

And together we have experienced healing.

I don’t know how life has cracked you open. I don’t know the loss you’ve experienced. I don’t know who has caused you harm or how. I don’t know your addictions, your fears. And I don’t know how you try to cover up those cracks. Maybe you avoid conflict. Or maybe you create it. Maybe you hide the cracks by always putting on a smile. Maybe you give, give, give until you have nothing left for yourself.

What I do know is that we all have brokenness of some sort, and it gives us a shared language through which we might connect, a way to be with one another through all of our differences.

An awesome man named Leonard once sung, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. In this Advent season, we wait for Jesus to break in through the cracks of this

world, and the cracks in us, to bring light.