Sssssssshhhhhh . . .(the moment when)

ALL IS PROMISE

 (Your God) will rejoice over you with gladness . . .

He will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival . . .

(Zephaniah 3:17)

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the First Sunday of Advent, December 3, 2006

(Volume 1 Number 22)

First United Methodist Church, 605 West Sixth, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

The words, All Is Promise, are inspired by an editorial of Paul Greenberg who, describing his experience at a concert, wrote, “My favorite part of any performance is the warm-up, just as the best part of any meal can be the appetizers.  Slowly the crowd gathers . . . one by one, the members of the orchestra take their places on the stage and begin to tune their instruments, filling the great hall with free, discordant sounds not yet regimented into ordinary music.  All is Promise.”

All is Promise.  The image behind those words as Greenberg used them, an orchestra preparing for a concert, seems to me a wonderful analogy for Advent, this four week period of the church’s liturgical calendar in which we “warm up” for Christmas.  These four weeks of Advent prepare us for the Christmas festival, these the appetizers of the festival meal.  We use different symbols, to be sure, the four purple candles of the outer rim of the Advent wreath as prelude to the white Christ Candle, but the meaning is identical, signifying the gradual movement toward that moment when All Is Promise. 

You’ve all been there to hear an orchestra tune up.  Were I to ask you to close you eyes, you could hear in your mind those discordant sounds of the many and various instruments.  No matter whether you’ve come to hear Bach or Beethoven or Mozart or Phantom of the Opera, or even should you find yourself at the high school auditorium to hear your high school band – the warm-up is the same, an auditory tangle of competing sounds from instruments we all know will soon be working together.  But not yet.  For now, they exist only as a scattering of sound.  With a little imagination, you can ride the ebb and flow of the tides of sound.  Try it.  Can you hear it? 

When the time draws close, the conductor signals for silence with the tapping of the baton on his music stand.  One by one the musicians heed the conductor’s call.  As the noise ceases and the silence grows, those gathered sense the nearness.  Sounds of Sssssshhhhhhh silence the last conversations of even those who had been energetically engaged in conversation, oblivious to the stage preparations (unaware that this, too, can be part of the musical experience?).  At last, everyone’s attention drawn into the silence, stillness, like a morning mist, emerges in the great hall.  All Is Promise.  

Sssssshhhhh is a wonderful sound, the response to which seems wired into the human brain.  Perhaps this was the first sound of soothing your mom made when you were fussy, when as an infant your whinings were free and discordant.  We even speak of a child about to cry as “tuning up.”  “Oh my, get ready, Little Becky is tuning up.”  Ssssshhhh, mom counters her child’s rising frenzy.  Wonderful, calming, soothing sound.

Sssssshhhhhh.   And now, as silence envelopes the Great Hall, the conductor faces his orchestra, back to the auditorium, and his arms are raised.  At that moment when All Is Promise, with an almost imperceptible raising and dipping of his arms, it begins.

Today is the first Sunday of our liturgical year.  The church’s first grand festival, the birth of the Messiah, is soon to be celebrated.  But first, these Four Sundays of Advent are a time for the church to gather its spiritual resources, to ready itself for the festival. 

But more than that.  Can it not be said that these four weeks serve to remind us that, throughout the Old Testament, God, too, was tuning up for this grand redemptive event, the Incarnation?  That’s why I chose Zephaniah’s words.  I find them amazing, startling even, for here we see God as the grand Conductor, we might even say that God is the performer.  Yes, in the Old Testament, God’s instruments are warming up. 

Imagine the entire Old Testament as God tuning up for this grand festival of divine love and redemption.  The prophets.  The priesthood, the temple in Jerusalem and its sacrifices.  The Torah and its story, its laws.  In a different analogy with the same meaning, Paul tells the Galatian Christians that the Law was the “schoolmaster” to bring us to Christ.  The New Testament book of Hebrews opens, “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.”

Many and various ways.  Many and various instruments, acting independently, like the warm-up at a concert, almost competing, before they are brought into harmony, to their primary purpose.  Free and discordant sounds that ultimately don’t make sense, until they are gathered together, focused on this divine festival of redemption through Christ. 

So it is that this first Sunday of the church’s liturgical calendar begins the re-setting of our souls to the rhythm of the biblical narrative, re-tuning us to the message now entering a new cycle.  Coming out of the Old Testament toward Bethlehem, the many and various sounds of the Old Testament are ending their warm-up, and we are beginning to hear the tapping of the baton.  As we go through this season we will more clearly hear the gradual Sssssssshhhhhhhh, bringing into harmony all three sections of the Hebrew Bible, the law and the prophets and the writings.

One day soon, Christmas Eve, we will gather in joyful anticipation.  Our warm up will have reached its objective.  We will be hushed on that Christmas Eve night when All is Promise.  We mark that moment by singing Silent Night.  Pausing in the stillness, at that moment it is as if the Universe’s conductor is raising his arms, and with an almost imperceptible raising to heaven and dipping to earth, the Word become Flesh.  

At that moment all the instruments of our Christmas preparations are now an amalgam, a blend gathered toward one glorious purpose, the celebration of the Nativity.  God’s concert of divine love will have begun – its first movement heard at Bethlehem, as God angels sing in the Shepherd’s Fields of Bethlehem, “Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth, peace, goodwill toward men.” 

Christmas is a busy season.  Our pace quickens, and it’s possible to develop holiday fatigue.  Decorations.  Shopping.  Parties.  It can add up to too much.  D. M. Dooling wrote “We have too much of what is not enough.”  

What a commentary on this warm-up period leading up to Christmas!  Too much of what is not enough.  What a commentary on the Old Testament law – the rituals, the sacrifices, the prophets were too much of what is not enough. 

Hebrews 10 makes this point emphatically. Year after year after year the priests offer, again and again the same offerings which can never take away sin.  The sacrifices of the law are too much of what can never be enough, for as Hebrews says, “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin.”  The Son of God is the answer to this dilemma.  “But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God . . . with a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.”  At last, it is enough.

Remember Greenberg’s editorial with which I began?  “My favorite part of any concert is the warm-up.”  I think I can say the same of this grand festival of grace – the warm-up is vital to the experience itself.  I am thankful that our tradition doesn’t allow us to rush into Christmas, that we must light the candles one by one by one, in order to mark the gradually increasing glow.  May that glow also increase in our hearts, to the glory of the child of Bethlehem.