Sermon from 5 December 2006 (Tuesday of Advent I)

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Readings: Isaiah 25:6-9, Psalm 23, Matthew 15:29-39

Advent has become one of the most overlooked church seasons of the year in contemporary culture. Our mass media and marketing society has no time to anticipate, to contemplate the great mysteries of spiritual life, to wait with bated breath for a glorious arrival. About the closest we come in today's society is the release of the PlayStation 3 or the Nintendo Wii - the two most coveted Christmas gifts of what has become the gift buying season between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Christmas displays started popping up the day after Halloween - still two church seasons removed from Christmas. And by the Monday after Thanksgiving, anyone who was anyone had made it out to put up their Christmas lights and their inflatable Santas and Frostys.

Christmas songs, proclaiming that Christmas has already come, sing gaily in stores and malls of packages in red and green, bright shining Christmas trees, and all the toys and goodies that are owed to us because of the gifting season.

Lest this begin to sound of bah' humbug, let me just say that I LOVE Christmas. But I also Love the season of Advent, in which I find myself invited back into the anticipation of the awesome mystery of Christ's coming.

As we move through the beginning of Advent, we find our selves, in our readings, enmeshed in the advent of the Kingdom of God. Indeed, we find in today's readings some great examples both of the spirit of advent in anticipation, expectation, faith, and hope, and also two perfect examples of the signs that the kingdom has come near.

Isaiah's words today reflect the hope of the world. A great feast to which all the peoples of the world are invited to have their fill of decadent foods and fine wines. A feast at which the stain of sin has been removed, the burial shroud of death has been destroyed, sadness and despair have been wiped away. This will be the coming of the kingdom of God and the long anticipated arrival of God among us.

The Psalmist's words of faith resonate with Isaiah in the spiritual bond between us and our Lord, who provides for our every spiritual need, sustaining us, giving us peace and comfort, and anointing us as children of God such that nothing can ever separate us from the Love of God.

In our Gospel today, we have the fulfilling of these hopes, both spiritual and physical. The two sure signs of the coming of God's kingdom are abundance of God's grace in physical and spiritual wellbeing, and physical nourishment beyond our capacity to want.

Jesus heals all manor of physical and spiritual illness, and then when the crowd's spiritual needs have been cared for and their bodies have been made whole, he provides them a feast in their tranquility, providing them with such abundance that seven baskets full were collected from their leftovers.

This is the coming of the kingdom. But it is a kingdom that is always at hand, always coming, always near, always anticipated, yet is also always yet to come.

As Christ's hands and heart in the world, it is up to us to continue Christ's work to bring about the kingdom of God... to continue that hope and faith of the world for the time when we can all sit down to the banquet and feast together - with none being left out.

Fuego and I are struggling this year as we decide to limit our gift buying to TWO gifts per person on our list. What we have decided is that one gift will be the traditional fun and exciting gift that we have come to associate with Christmas. The other will be a gift out of the Episcopal Relief and Development catalogue, giving mosquito netting, livestock, sustainable crop resources, funding for medical treatment and providing of a clean water source and sanitation education to needy families and villages in the two-thirds world.

The Millennium Development Goals have brought to our attention the fact that we can make a very palpable difference in the world. As part of our prayerful anticipation of the coming of God's kingdom through the birth of Christ, we have come to a place where we can no longer ignore our responsibility to bring the abundance of God's kingdom to those who have never experienced a day of abundance in their lives.

While the rest of the world still waits with bated breath for the promised feast, we, as Americans, already have so much abundance that within a week of both Thanksgiving and Christmas, we as a nation will throw away enough food that we could have fed ALL of the world's hungry along with us for those two festal meals.

There is a sense in which all the hullabaloo of Christmas marketing serves to highlight the anticipation - mirroring Advent in a secular looking forward to another massively consumptive consumer holiday - but the atmosphere of careless spending and frivolity is also easy to get caught up in and can take us away from contemplating the most important gift ever given to the world, our Lord Jesus Christ.

This Advent, let us prepare the way for the coming of God's kingdom by doing our own small part in making this the Advent of the whole world.

Amen.