I have loved it here in this bubble. Nathan and I will mark 20 years of marriage in just 2.5 weeks. We haven’t spent this kind of time together ever. Our son turned 15 this past week, and we celebrated in the park with friends yesterday. Our daughter turned 12 in January, and we marked her birthday the same way. It’s a new normal, but it’s not altogether the worst normal for my little family. (I recognize not everyone has had the experience we’ve had, so I’m fully aware of the privilege in every word I’m saying.)

One of the things we did during the year at home was watch all of the Marvel movies from Captain America to Spiderman: Far From Home to WandaVision to this weekend’s premier of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Mostly, I want you to know how thorough our deep dive into the Marvel Comic Universe has been. Without nerding out and going into great detail, I’ll just say there was a moment in one scene where the antagonist makes 50% of the universe disappear with a single snap. He has these stones and a special glove…it’s complicated…but he snaps and 50% of Earth and everywhere else just crumbles into dust and vanishes.

Good guys rally, they come up with a plan, it involves some kind of quantum wormhole transport thing…and they are able to snap again and bring everyone back. But this second snap happens five years later. And even though they can somehow time travel, they can’t un-do the passage of those 5 years. So everyone returns to a world that has been changed. A world that has grieved. They refer to this time as The Blip.

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I knew a day would come that I’d thought and I’d read and I’d considered and I’d pondered but by 9:30 a.m. on Sunday morning, I still had no written words. Well, today is that day. If I trusted myself enough to be fully extemporaneous, I may not have even tried to sit in a darkened corner of the house with my first cup of coffee and put thoughts to paper. But I need the paper to focus the thoughts and trust the words, so here we are. Something of a “Dear Diary” as homily today.

I was on back-to-back zoom calls on Wednesday, January 6, when Congress was meeting to certify the electoral votes for the 2020 presidential election. For the more than two decades Nathan and I have been a couple, we have been PBS people. That’s our go-to for any kind of significant news or election coverage.

But on this day, I just went all in and turned on MSNBC. I wanted the echo chamber. I wanted the 24/7 coverage. I wanted the chyron to follow and the talking heads that would give over-the-top reactions instead of the calm, well-reasoned from Judy and David and Mark. And I wanted something I could follow on mute while I went about my day.

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Last week gave us poetry, this week gives us prophecy

Last week gave us light shining in darkness, this week gives us a voice crying out in the wilderness

If it’s clarity on the meaning of life we’re after, well, I’m not sure we’re quite there yet. But if we’re paying attention and looking for clues on what the Way of this Christ-child waiting to be born is about, then there’s much to add to our observations today.

And once again, we aren’t heading into the seats of power or even the great temples of worship. We travel to the wilderness

to the bizarre man in camel’s hair eating locusts and honey

We witness the people traveling to see him, to confess their sins, to be baptized in the water by him

What was this ritual cleansing?

From what and into what are they being baptized?

What’s going on out there in the wilderness?

Why this guy? Why now? Why this story? Why all the way out there?

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This is how Frederick Buechner describes this first Season of our new year in the Church. Advent is that moment when “The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens.”

In a time when we want answers, Advent gives us metaphors.

This is how our story begins

While it is still dark

While the world is still in chaos

While our lives feel precarious

While the governments and rulers of this world seem in shambles

While the world itself may as well just come to an end because you’re not sure how much more bad news you can take

This is the moment into which a word comes

to be on the watch

to stay awake

because something is happening

something is coming

that changes everything

that is bigger than the rulers and the governments and our little lives and the whole world itself

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If you have had enough of this year and are waiting for it to be over, I have good news for you today: this is the final Sunday of the Liturgical Calendar. That means this week is the final week of the church year and a new one begins next Sunday with the first Sunday of Advent.

Much like the Jewish sabbath begins as the sun sets, the church year begins in darkness as we sit together waiting for the Christ to be born into the world. It’s poetic. It’s well-timed, and it means we can say we’re counting down the final 6 days of this year together instead of 6 weeks. :)

Today is known as Christ the King Sunday and invites all of the royal language and royal music into our worship. The more I encounter the Christ, the less comfortable I am with this King language as the Jesus Path seemingly stands in such opposition to the ways of Kings and Emperors and earthly rulers. After all, it is during Jesus’ crucifixion, at the hands of those earthly rulers, that a crown of thorns is placed on his head and he is mocked for his king-like-status among his followers.

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Who is weary?

Show of hands, who is tired and worn down at this point in 2020?

It’s November 15, friends. It may still be 80 degrees outside and feel like early summer, but we’re halfway through the month of November. We have just six more Sundays left in this year!

I keep hoping the time is right to gather some of us back together for worship in-person, and then the COVID numbers start rising up again. Are you weary from the uncertainty and unpredictability of 2020?

Here’s just SOME of what we’ve collectively faced and felt and discussed this year:

• Australian bushfires

• Prince Harry and Megan Markle quit the royal family

• COVID-19 was announced in Wuhan, China

• The UK withdrew from the EU

• Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna died in a helicopter crash

• Donald Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives and acquitted by the Senate

• COVID-19 reached the United States and lockdowns began

• Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced they had COVID-19

• COVID-19 viciously made its way through Lambeth House, home to many of our dear friends and ravaged Louisiana, especially among communities of color

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