Dear Friends of Second Church,

…My devotional book for Advent this year is Rev. Quinn Caldwell’s “All I Really Want: Readings for a Modern Christmas,” and he has a lovely reflection about Advent calendars…which has helped me to do a little reflecting of my own…

Grace and Emily are enjoying their “chocolate a day” Advent calendars, a gift from Grace’s magical godmother, Laurel.

Finding the correct number for the day seems like the hardest part, especially for Emily, because honestly, who cares about the technical difference between the number 1 and the number 11 when you are not even three years old, and there is chocolate on the other side of each little paper door?

But Grace is very dutiful about making sure she is only consuming the assigned chocolate for the day, and she always pauses politely to examine the little chocolate picture first.

“Look, Poppy…it’s a candle.” “Hey, it’s a…is that a ball or an apple?” She always wants to know.

When I was growing up, I found some windows in the Advent calendar more satisfying than others. I liked the ones that let you glimpse into a little room and imagine a whole little Christmas world. The tantalizing, big window that turned out to be nothing more than a picture of a big, steaming cup of hot chocolate or a teddy bear? Ho hum.

I didn’t realize it then, but those calendars were offering an important education about Advent. Because like those calendars, Advent is about discovery, and especially about discovering something holy and precious that might be very small: say, in a cup of hot chocolate, or a candle in the window, or an old bear pressed back into service for the season. Advent is about waiting and expectation, and about working through our own impulses to be disappointed when we don’t get exactly what we think we want–and about doing that working through so that we can discover the beauty of whatever it is we encounter.

Because focusing exclusively what we think we want is an inadequate way of living, and especially so for people who put their faith in a God who offers us more than we can ever ask or imagine.

I hope you will seek a renewed relationship to that God, our God, in these days before Christmas. Seeing the holiness of small things is a great way to start.

This time of year, if you go to the mall and the conditions are right, you can encounter one version of what the Christmas story is—and it’s done beautifully.

Years ago, right around now, I was in the Williams-Sonoma at the Westchester Mall, and I heard a young man turn to the young woman he was with and say, “Don’t you wish we could just have Christmas here? Right in the store? Sitting at that table? With those plates and those napkins and stuff?”

I found myself trying to picture that, actually. Or what it would be like if we could open one of the beautiful catalogues and just sort of climb in to the alluring and unhurried world they teach us to hunger for.

Because whether it’s the windows at the mall, or the pictures in a catalogue, there is a picture perfect quality to those places that tells one version of the Christmas story, and of our hopes for what Christmas might be.

There’s power in that story. Power in cheerfulness, and gathering, and giving—in pushing through the weariness and the dreariness and standing for something else—power in remembering how magical snow is when you aren’t worrying about anyone driving in it, power in being together with those we love.

The cheeriness of Christmas is a great comfort to some, and with good reason.

But it’s important to note that throughout history, the Church has used these weeks before Christmas to tell a very different kind of Christmas story – and to position Christmas differently in our lives.

And it’s fair to say that, in the imagination of the Church, there is more of an emotional arc to the season, and that the festivity comes only at the end.

But we know in our hearts that the story of Christmas doesn’t begin with Williams-Sonoma.

In fact, as the Church tells it, the story of Christmas doesn’t even begin in Bethlehem or Nazareth or with angelic hosts proclaiming, or with the Spirit whispering to Mary that she would be God’s favored one.

The vision of that group around the manger at the first Christmas party, that remarkable assembly of all kinds of people–rich and poor, Jews and gentiles, angels and humans and animals, brought together to worship the newborn king—that’s actually the culmination of a whole story, even as it is the beginning of another.

Mindful of that coming culmination, the Church begins to tell the story of Christmas well before that, by invoking the memory of a world grown weary with waiting for its deliverance.

We begin the season of Advent, the season of waiting for the One who is to come, by remembering the words of the prophet Isaiah—words that were originally written in Babylon, among a people in exile.

And the fact is, Isaiah’s people are weary.

With their world, and with our own in mind this week, I’ve also been remembering the words of the famous Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who famously summed up so much of her own experience as a Mississippi sharecropper by saying, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Because that’s a fair approximation of how things stood for God’s people in the foreign city of Babylon, at the time when this morning’s passage from the prophet Isaiah was written.

They were sick and tired of being sick and tired.

By the time this morning’s reading from Isaiah was written, the people would have been captives in Babylon for 150 years. Jerusalem had been invaded, and essentially destroyed, and much of its population had been carried off into slavery.

But by this point, all that had happened a long, long time ago.

It was an important, and precarious time in their life as a people.

It was in these days when much of the Old Testament appears to have been written, or at least, written down, because it was in Babylon that it suddenly seemed very possible that the stories and the traditions of Israel could be lost forever.

Those stories were a source of identity and hope – and those stories were, in the end, almost the only thing they still had.

With that in mind, no wonder, then, why the story of Moses and the exodus from slavery in Egypt had become such a foundational story for Israel—that was one that they kept coming back to during those days in Babylon. That was one they needed to tell themselves again and again.

It was part of how they reminded themselves that their God was a liberating God – the God who had led their ancestors through the wilderness at least once before…and might again.

And yet, in this part of the Book of Isaiah, the people enslaved in Babylon have been telling each other that story for generations, and hope is running thin.

So indeed, they are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Have you ever been at the bedside of someone in the hospital where there are a lot of machines, and you can actually hear their heartbeat slowing down…the time between the beats getting longer and longer?

Maybe that’s how it was – this sense that it had been so long, and there had been no word from God, and that Israel’s heartbeat was slowing down, and that the silence between the beats was getting deeper and deeper….

But then something happens.

Because a new word gets through.

Isaiah offers words of comfort that God has given him to proclaim to the people.

“Have you not known? Have you not heard?” Isaiah asks. “Has it not been told to you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?”

“It is he who sits above the circle of the earth…who brings the princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.”

What he’s saying of course is, “Hear me, Babylon: our God brings your princes to naught….our God makes the rulers of the earth—here in Babylon, and there in Egypt, and everywhere else—God makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.”

Isaiah continues, “ ‘To whom will you compare me, or who is my equal?” says the Holy One. ‘Lift up your eyes on high and see.’”

Don’t believe who it is they say you are.

Don’t believe what it is they say is possible.

Don’t believe that the world you see is the only world there is, for you and for your children.

Lift up your eyes on high and see.

Much later, these are words that Jesus would have grown up with, and words that his contemporaries would have grown up with.

And so much of Jesus’ ministry was about affirming those same ancient promises, and about inviting people to find at last, in him, the source of strength and hope and identity as God’s people.

Jesus promises that, in him, they will find a way to hold onto the liberating truths that princes of the world were trying yet again to take away, first by discrediting them, and finally by making God’s people discard and forget them.

And that’s why it’s so important for us now, whatever our circumstances may be, and whatever our outlook on the world may be…whatever the future looks like to us—that’s why it’s so important that we begin to prepare for Christmas by remembering what it is to be weary.

Because the most corrosive thing for genuine faith is not grief, or despair, or even a great anger against God. Rather, it’s a kind of dull, unexpectant acceptance of the way things are, and of whom the world tells us we are.

That’s why it’s so important to remember, if perhaps we have forgotten, what it is to be sick and tired of being sick and tired.

So many of us don’t need any reminding.

So many of us are here at the brink of this season, wondering what good this Christmas could possibly hold.

There is so much personal grief, and so much worry that can cut even more deeply at this time of year.

And the world itself seems weary, too. Weary of its own divisions and its own bitter disagreements about justice and fairness and accountability, and about the persistence of challenges that just won’t go away.

I don’t know about your family, but mine is famous for epic political discussions around the Thanksgiving dinner table. By way of preparation, people bone up on the issues for weeks ahead of time.

This year we just didn’t have it in us.

But Christmas is a reminder, and Isaiah’s words this morning are a reminder, that God has made promises to the world, and that God intends to keep them.

And Christmas seeks to remind us, also, that you and I can live in the light of those promises even now, and build a world that waits expectantly for the day when at last, they will be fulfilled.

Just when we think we don’t have it in us, Isaiah shoots back that it’s in there, somewhere. That person God knows is in there, somewhere. That conscience God hears is in there, somewhere. That people God needs to help create the future—they’re in us, somewhere.

We may not be there yet, you and I. We may be many Christmases into our journey and still waiting. Or maybe life has made us question the truths we used to believe with such innocence and trust, and here we find ourselves, unsure of what Christmas or Christ ought to mean for us now.

And so we begin this season—we begin preparing for Christmas—by remembering what it is to wait for a new word, a fresh communication from God.

For some of us, that might be a stretch. For others, it may take no great effort at all.

But Christmas begins with learning to hope and dream again, because out of the capacity to hope and to dream come the capacity to work and to pray.

In learning to hope and dream again, we learn what it is to live into the promises of God, and to make a place for Jesus in our hearts once again.

In remembering what it is to be sick and tired, a new word gets through, and we begin to reclaim what it might be to be healed and renewed.

We learn what it is to set out for Bethlehem, seeking tidings of great joy, at the feet of the word at last made flesh.

Lift your eyes on high and see.

We’re in the thick of our annual Stewardship season at church, and so far, so good—the letters are out, the committee has worked well and diligently, the stewardship moment was rock solid…and we had the cherub choir sing (even Scrooge’s heart would have melted).   The pledge cards are arriving, and we’re getting there.

We’re feeling that combination of cautious optimism and…what?…maybe it’s “optimal caution.”

O.k., so I just made that term up.

But I think of “optimal caution” as something like “cautious optimism for the ‘glass half empty’ set.”

In that vein, maybe it’s just the sense that we’ve reduced the missteps, whether those were typos in the mailings (honestly, how many English majors can one congregation have?), forgetting to follow up personally (some people don’t know how to say that while they still love the church, their circumstances have changed), or speaking of the year ahead like a disaster to be averted rather than an unfolding promise to be claimed (never ask the Buildings and Grounds people to write the Stewardship letter. “Asbestos” actually means “no pledges” in Koine Greek. You can look it up).

Of course, pastors can make plenty of missteps at this time of year, too.

A colleague of mine once crafted a warm, newsy, personal note to go alongside the stewardship letter to a member she hadn’t seen since last December…only to find out that the woman had died in Florida that spring, and that her living daughter was not so pleased with the chipper, utterly well-intentioned “How’ve you been?!” message her mother had received from her erstwhile pastor.  Needless to say, that was the end of that, and losing the pledge was the least of it.

So…everyone on our committee is pretty sure we haven’t done any of those things. Now we just wait.

But it’s hard.

It’s hard because it does feel like a referendum on how things are going, even when you know it’s not that simple.

It’s hard because you feel like you’re not just fundraising for an organization, but actually for the Kingdom of God, and that Jesus might be kind of bummed about your numbers even if nobody else is.

It’s hard because we want the church to be an enormous come-as-you-are party, and we work hard to make it just that, only to glimpse the shame and anxiety that can surround people’s relationship with money in ways that only Stewardship season can seem to reveal, and to encounter their painful suspicion that our eleven months of extravagant welcome are really just another sales pitch.

It’s hard because the world’s needs are so great, and that we want people to be generous and responsive to whatever God places on their heart and conscience, even if that means we come later—and yet, the harder we have to make due, the less we’ll be able to do the things that only a church can.

It’s hard because, at the same time, to acknowledge all this can seem as self-serving as asking for capital improvements to the Parsonage, and so many pastors feel as if they don’t dare try.

Maybe it’s no wonder, then, that so many of us learn to come into Stewardship season, optimally cautious, rather than cautiously optimistic.

Maybe that’s the biggest misstep of all.

There was a touching story making the rounds at the beginning of last week about a woman who was injured during the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013.

Rebekah DiMartino is her name, and she was not even 10 feet from one of the two bombs that detonated at the finish line, along with her seven year old son and her boyfriend, now her husband.

All three sustained injuries, but Rebecca’s were the worst. Since that day, she has had seventeen surgeries to repair damage to her left leg, which was hit in several places.

Her life has been about so much more than those surgeries, of course, and she has been quick to say that her life has been full of much joy along with the ongoing challenges of treatments and recoveries.

Nevertheless, not long ago, with other treatments and likely surgeries looming ahead of her, Rebecca DiMartino made a courageous decision that was, in the end, only hers to make: she decided to have her left leg amputated.

She did so very much with her eyes open – she knows that learning to walk again, and to live with a prosthesis – is not anyone’s idea of taking the easy way.

But she realized that this radical act was, in the end, an important part of putting the bombing behind her. And so she resolved to do it.

That ought to be enough story right there.

But there is more. Because she decided to write her left leg a note of farewell, which she posted on her facebook page.

Here is some of what she wrote:

“Hey it’s me.

I’m sure it won’t come as a shock to you when I say that we’ve grown apart. The love that we once had has dwindled, and this relationship has become a real burden on my life. We have been through a lot together. We have seen a lot of places, done a lot of things, and you have helped me through some of the toughest steps thus far. I promise to always treasure that. And I’m not saying this isn’t hard for me. It is. But as tough as it may be, I feel like our time together has come to an end.”

And then a bit later, she continues, “I love you. I really do. But I think I need to start on the next leg of my journey. So with that said, I have enclosed a gift certificate that I hope you will use. Go get yourself one last pedicure on me and enjoy it because tomorrow…I will be cutting you out of my life for good.”

Last Monday, that is exactly what she did.

Now, it is not everyone’s impulse to make such a moment public – I get that.

But, you know, I find it remarkable whenever someone takes what life throws at them and finds a way to move forward with grace, and even humor, and so I am grateful to know about it.

It’s an amazing story.

It reminds me, also, that adversity doesn’t always bring that out in people.

Adversity can have a way of making our lives shrink – sometimes to the point that who we are withers into little more than symptoms, or procedures, or the pains of today.

Nobody wants it to be that way, of course. And yet, it takes a particular kind of will to make sure that it does not.

It takes the ability to remember that our story is part of something much, much larger than our pain, or our prognosis, or even ourselves.

That can be hard to remember. But it’s so important that we do.

There’s a story of the violinist Yitzhak Perlman, who once broke a string in the middle of a concert, and yet pressed on, anyway, performing his part by playing entirely on the remaining three strings—a remarkable achievement.

At the end of the concert, he was asked why he had chosen to do that, rather than just stop the concert and replace the broken string.

Perlman shrugged.

“Our job is to make music with what remains,” he said.

How remarkable it is to encounter someone like Perlman, or like Rebekah DiMartino: a person who has found a way to make music with what remains.

Adversity does not have to become the whole story.

Maybe that’s what faith is, too.

Not a set of beliefs – or anyway, not all that many – so much as a kind of deep trust in the power of a story that’s much bigger than we are at any given moment.

Faith is a story that says that what’s happening today—now—is not the final word on anything—that the only thing that’s really an unshakeable given in this world is not death, or even taxes, but the creating, liberating, and sustaining love of God.

That’s a lot to take in.

But faith says that the real story is just that: the creating, liberating, and sustaining love of God.

And the point is that if you can see that…even just a bit, or even only now and then…but if you can see that, then maybe it is not so impossible to understand that our job is to make music with what remains.

And joyful music at that.

That’s what it is to be faithful.

To me, this is some of what Jesus is driving at in this morning’s parable.

He tells his disciples this story we’ve just heard about three servants, given different amounts of silver to manage for their master, who has gone on an extended journey.

Now, understand that a “talent” was a lot of money – even one talent was much more than many people would have accrued in a lifetime of hard work.

It isn’t entirely clear just how much we are talking here: some say that one talent might have been as much as twenty years’ worth of day labor.

But even if it wasn’t that much, it was still a lot of money.

And so when the first servant is given five talents to manage, that’s a lot of trust; and when his stewardship yields five more, that’s a big accomplishment. And when the next servant is given two and manages to earn another two, that’s still very impressive.

But it comes to the third servant, and when it does, it becomes clear that the whole parable is really about him.

Given one talent to take care of, the third servant responds by going and burying it in the ground, figuring, perhaps, that the cost of losing it through bad investment is much greater than the potential benefit of adding to it.

No emerging markets for this guy. He’s a liquidity man. Prudent to a fault.

And that’s just it. Because it turns out that he is at fault.

The master returns, and instead of rewarding the third servant, he rejects him angrily for failing to do something with his talent—for failing to invest his talent in some way, even cautiously, and for neglecting its growth.

The third servant has allowed his life to remain small, and cautious, and in every sense of the word, he has decided it is o.k. if he does nothing with his talent.

And the point of the parable is that it’s not o.k.

It’s not o.k., specifically, because it’s not faithful.

He’s forgotten, or maybe he’s never known what it is to be faithful.

Faith is remembering that we are part of a larger story.

It’s about remembering that the worries and risks, and even the failures that we experience are not the final word about us.

To be faithful is to remember that, despite appearances to the contrary, and despite the expectations of the world at large, we are free to keep looking for a way forward.

To be faithful is to keep looking for a way to put our talent to good use because we understand the story we are actually in, which is God’s story.

For example, if Rebekah DiMartino had never been the same after the Boston bombing—if she had never been herself again—who would have blamed her? Who would have seen her as more than just a tragic figure, a woman whose life story was ruined by people and events that were not her fault?

But even as her life was changed forever by what happened on that day in Boston, she has found a way forward, a way to make music with what remains, a way to see that her story was much larger and much richer and much grander than the story of her challenges would ever admit.

She had to break up with her old story in order to live fully into a new and greater one.

She had to offer her talent in the service of a future that she can’t quite see.

I don’t know if she is a person of faith, but there is nothing more faithful than that.

She did what that third servant could not or would not do, which is trust in that larger story.

That’s what faith is.

It’s good to remember that.

Maybe especially so on a Sunday when we talk about stewardship, and you and I are asked to think about what this church means in our lives and about the impact it will be poised to make in the coming year.

In it’s own way, maybe that’s also putting our talent in the service of a future that we can’t quite see.

But more to the point, it’s important to remember that what happens here is that people are reminded that there is more to them and more to life than just what their challenges and heartbreaks will admit.

What happens here is that you and I work together to tell a different kind of story…a story about the creating, liberating, and sustaining love of God, and of the coming Kingdom that emerges as the story of that love unfolds throughout Creation.

What happens here is that lives are changed, and hope is made a little more real, and the future becomes a little more inviting, and our shortcomings, and the world’s injustices are a little less acceptable to us than they used to be.

This morning’s story reminds us that the way things are is no place to stand pat, and that to bury our talent is against God’s will—and not in some sort of judgmental sense, but against God’s will in the sense that to stand pat is against God’s deepest hopes for us, God’s dream for us, God’s purpose for us.

Because our talent is our way into the grand story. It’s our way of being part of the adventure God is writing in the world, and that it is all far too wonderful to miss, and we should not.

The only reason for this place to exist is that it makes a difference in people’s lives.

And it makes that difference because of the powerful story we stand for.

If you have ever needed that story, not thought it was nice, or interesting, or a great excuse for a beautiful building and some beautiful music that helps people relax—no, none of that—if you have ever needed that story, then you know how important it is that we are here to tell it.

Because people do need this story.

Our friends and neighbors need it.

The people we love the most and don’t quite know how to help need it. You and I need it.

Won’t you help us tell it? Won’t you offer some of your talent to its telling? Because that’s what stewardship is.

The violinist Yitzhak Perlman said, “Our job is to make music with what remains.”

But Jesus says that when your talents and mine are offered in the service of God’s story, we help to build a world in which, one day, all that remains will be something like music.