Advent 1A Sermon, Nov 27, 2022

As many of you heard last week, I love Advent. I love Advent for two reasons. First, Advent is the

start of the new liturgical year, and this year we head into what is called Year A, so the readings

we will hear over the next year are a little more familiar and a little more fun to read. It is

particularly poignant this year, as this is the first Advent in about eight years that I will engage in

the process of being made new.

Eight years ago, when I left the Church, I was angry, hurt and very unclear about what my future would hold. After a year plus of hard work, it became clear that whatever work I did put in to transforming my personal life and atoning for the things I did would not be enough. So I felt betrayed. I continued to work, but I lost track of the liturgical year. I lost track of the joy I feel when approaching these kinds of liminal moments in our lives.

The second reason I love Advent is because it gives me a moment, four weeks actually, to explore this hair-brained idea I have about how God, Jesus and the Spirit all work. In 2006 I read a book called “Emergence” by Steven Johnston. The book changed my life, and it changed my theology and understanding of how God is at work among us. My hair-brained idea is that we should be more like slime mold. 

Advent is a unique season in our Church year. It is a time of waiting, a time when we are listening to stories about a city on a hill that will come to pass. It is a time where we are promised many things that speak to what is to come. A time when war will be no more.

Advent is a time when Jesus is not here, among us. God is breaking in during Advent, God is trying to make the world new. Prophets are all around us, justice is being deeply desired and promises are heard across our liturgies. But the key is Advent is a time of waiting, anticipating the arrival of Jesus. All we have as Christians in this moment, is God and the Spirit.

That is the first premise you have to accept in my hair-brained Advent idea. That we are, at the moment, during this season, without Jesus Christ, the central tenet of Christianity. The second premise has to do with the idea that we do not have a central tenet, or a central mother cell, or neuron or thing that drives all other things around us. Let me explain.

Scientists have studied different kinds of systems that use simple and small components to build higher level intelligence. Ants, termites, brain neurons, structures in cities and neighborhoods across the globe. Essentially, organisms that have no brain or organization and how they come together to create a more intelligent organism.

Say you are walking in a forest and you come across this red, orange-ish slimy goo lying on a log, or in the midst of some leaves, seemingly sitting still in a mass on the forest floor. If you were to come back later, it might be gone, or it might be in a different place, if the weather were to cool down and get rainy, it might disappear. We might think it has been eaten by an animal, or moved, but actually it has done something no one figured out until the late sixties.

Slime mold has perplexed biologists for decades, and it took a physicist and a mathematician, not a biologist, to figure out what it was doing. Steven Johnson, in his book Emergence writes, “The slime mold spends much of its life as thousands of distinct single celled units, each moving separately from its other comrades. Under the right conditions, those myriad cells will coalesce again into a single, larger organism, which begins its crawl across the garden floor…  When the weather turns cooler and the mold enjoys a large food supply, “it” becomes a “they”.”

The problem for biologists for years was wondering what caused the slime mold cells to come together. They believed there was a mother cell responsible for all the others to come together, the problem was, biologists everywhere could not find a mother cell anywhere.  

A physicist and a mathematician combined efforts to study this phenomenon and asked the question, what if there was no mother cell? What if these single celled organisms came together of their own accord? No biologist to this point had ever asked this question being so enamored of the mother cell theory. This turned the world of biology on its head, and there has been a tremendous amount of progression in a field called the Science of Emergence since. 

During Advent, Christ is absent from the world, there is only God in these few weeks leading up to Christmas. What if Advent could be that time where we discover our own ability to self organize, where we discover the gifts, skills and talents God has given us are adequate enough to build a transformative, passionate and world changing community? How can we create a community that does not wait for the mother cell to send out a signal, but rather a community that is able to determine the resources we have now, the needs that are all around us now and how to best address and effectively meet those needs as they exist?

I wish you could see yourselves through my eyes. You all, I believe, have been living this system forming phenomenon for the past three months. When I arrived very little was happening, COVID, yes, but there was a lot of scuttlebutt and very little mission.

Then, something happened, we started communicating with one another more clearly. I got asked about a gathering here and there, and said, I can’t organize it, since my time is so limited. Within days, that gathering happened. The selection committee started asking questions, and speaking about what they heard from you all, and suddenly ideas started bubbling out of the woodwork. A food basket showed up. Plants were planted, rooms were cleaned. Now we have a tree for mittens, a bunch of hangers for coats and Chip had the audacity to start to reach out and connect to local Domestic Abuse shelters to see what they need. 

Since about the middle of October, I have watched an energy percolate and bubble up here that is exciting and has left me wondering about the conditions it takes to bring together disparate individuals into a community, how an “it” becomes a “they”. How an individual follower of Jesus becomes a vital part of a beloved community of faith. And let me tell you, what happens next I can’t wait to see.

Jesus is not the single mother cell sending out the signal to tell us what to do, but rather Christ is the trail we leave in our wake, the trail that tells others to follow, that tells others: this way to joy, justice and peace. It is the same with God, God is not just a personal God that we can all define in whatever way we choose, God is not far away from us striking stray cells with bolts of lightning to get them on track. God is a living God who is out in the world teaching, preaching and healing, whether we are with God or not.  

Our challenge is to stop, and recognize that God has given us gifts and passions and skills that are immensely transformative and effective in healing the world and bringing righteousness to places of injustice. God has given us all what we need to participate with God in this new creation that is being shaped and formed.

Paul says in the Epistle today, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” It’s interesting that he says that, put on Jesus, not follow Jesus, not wait for Jesus, not look for Jesus, but put on Jesus, we join ourselves to a growing body that brings light to the darkness, that wakes us from sleep, that brings justice and righteousness to the poor and the oppressed. We do not follow, we do not lead, we simply walk together and live because we have put on our Lord Jesus Christ and because the light shining forth lets us “live honorably as in the day”.

There is nothing more we need, there is nothing more we can desire, we have it all. How do we communicate then, with those around us, the passions and the skills we have. How do we even come to understand what skills and talents we actually have? How can we organize and come together and, in the same way God is creating a new heaven and earth, create a new Church, and not just a new building, but a new community, a community that has confidence in its ability to participate with God, a community that has put on Christ and lives fully into the justice and righteousness that God is calling us to live into.

Our minds right now might be wired to respond only to what we are told and what we are supposed to believe. I have heard many times in the past few months, “That is how we have always done it.” as if directed solely by what has gone before. Every time we come together and then go apart into the world, we are changed, we are made new. Hopefully, each time we come back together, we have experienced the power of God in some way that will help us all break out of the rigid ideas of the way it is supposed to be and move us into the wild creation that belongs to God and gives us all new hope for what God has in store. Hopefully we can come back together and be, as in the case of slime mold, a powerful “they” doing God’s work all around us.