Opening Lines

Isaiah 2.1-5

Matthew 24.36-44

Opening Lines

(God Bless Us Every One – I)

First Sunday of Advent

Let’s have a little literary fun this morning to start the season.  I’m going to give you the opening line to a well-known piece of literature, and ask you to tell me the title of the work.

“Call me Ishmael.”  (Moby Dick)

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  (A Tale of Two Cities)

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.  (The Bible)

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone 84 days now without

  taking a fish.”  (The Old Man and the Sea)

“It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13.”  (1984)

Sometimes an exercise like this is easier when it is done with poetry.  Let’s do a few poems, shall we?

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of

forgotten lore /while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping,

rapping at my chamber door.”  (The Raven)

“Whose woods these are, I think I know / His house is in the village though –” 

(Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening)

“Sing in me, O Muse, of the cunning hero, the wanderer, blown off course time and again after he plundered

    Troy’s sacred heights.”  (The Odyssey)

“Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me / the Carriage held but just Ourselves /

And immortality.”  (Because I Could Not Stop for Death)

“Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon

a table.”  (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.”  (Sonnet 116)

It is very often the case that the opening lines at the very beginning of a work foreshadow and even shape the theme of entire piece, whether it is poetry or prose.  And so as you and I stand at the very beginning of Advent, with Thanksgiving’s leftovers likely still chilling in the fridge and the entire expanse of the season of waiting and anticipation spread before us, what are the opening lines for us this Advent that will foreshadow and perhaps shape the entire season for us?

During Advent, Tara and I are taking our cue from another well-known piece of literature in order to examine Advent’s meaning for us.  Our opening lines are these:  

“Marley was dead, to begin with.  There is no doubt whatever about that.  The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.  Scrooge signed it.  And Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.  Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”

And these are the opening lines to...?   Of course, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.  The first lines are memorable ones, partly because they are so dark, and partly because we know the story so well we know we will not remain in darkness throughout – although, this being Dickens, it isn’t until we come nearly to the very end that of the story that we are allowed to glimpse the light.  So the dark tone in the opening lines really permeate the work in its near-entirety.

Now to be fair, it isn’t just Dickens who opens this season with notes of foreboding and darkness and yes, even death.  This morning’s lesson from Matthew paints a similarly dark and foreboding picture.  Where so much of the world, in its anticipation of that certain holiday come December 25 is all candy and confection and merriment and light, the church contrariwise begins in a dark place, with but one solitary candle to pierce the darkness of Advent and near mid-winter.  Matthew writes,

“For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man.  Then two will be in the field – one will be taken and one will be left.  Two will be grinding meal together - one will be taken and one will be left.  Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day the Lord is coming.”  

I guarantee you will not find these verses on the inside of any Hallmark Christmas card.  And it isn’t just that Matthew is having a bad day either.  Every first Sunday in Advent the church’s prescribed scripture lessons, or lectionary readings, have a similar theme.  The parallel reading from Mark’s gospel includes these verses:  “But in those days, after the suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.”  And Luke’s lesson for the start of Advent tells us “There will be signs in the sun, the moon and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.  People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world…”  It’s funny – most of the time folks in the church can be heard complaining that Christmas comes too soon, but after reading a few passages like these, we might be persuaded that it cannot come soon enough!

But perhaps there is the lesson in this:  before we can welcome the light, it is necessary to walk for little while in darkness.  It is not for nothing that Isaiah reminds us, in one of the passages most closely related to the birth of the messiah, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light - those who have lived in a land of deep darkness – on them light has shined.”

Early on in A Christmas Carol, a lonely soul, a poor shivering caroler stands outside the door of Scrooge and Marley – Scrooge being too stingy even to remove his dead partner’s name from the office door – singing the carol that will end our service this morning, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”  As Dickens tells us, the caroler, “…gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs, stooped down at Scrooge’s keyhole to regale him with a Christmas carol:  but at the first sound of, ‘God bless you, merry gentlemen!  May nothing you dismay!’ Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost.”

Sometimes it is necessary to walk for a little while in the cold, dank frost before we can know the light that will bring warmth and life to the world.

When I think of the cold and the frost I think of those people who have come together at Standing Rock in an attempt to preserve the sacred ground of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, bearing the bitter cold, soaked by water cannons in the freezing night.  I wonder what the good people of North Beverly would do if an energy company began to plow up the cemetery out there to plant a pipeline?  In a kind of parallel to Matthew’s dark prophecy, the Sioux also are inheritors of a dark legend, which tells of a giant, winding black snake that would one day rise and slither into the sacred lands to destroy the earth.  You can understand why the arrival of an oil pipeline might remind them of this ancient prophecy / giant winding black snake.  For the Sioux nation at Standing Rock, these are indeed cold dark days, both literally and metaphorically – which helps explain why people from around the country, including more than a few from our own United Church of Christ, have chosen to join them, bringing food and medicine and supplies and perhaps more than all this, a sense of respect and dignity for what the Sioux believe to be holy.

It was, of course, the ghost of Jacob Marley who came to warn old Ebenezer that, if he continued his life of avarice and the pursuit of profit at all costs – including the ruination of lives such as Bob Cratchit’s and Tiny Tim’s – then he himself was also doomed to ruin.  But it did not have to be like that; change was possible, though not guaranteed to be easy.  In fact Scrooge was required to come to grips with his past, his present and his future if there was to be any hope for him.

The season of Advent is only a few hours old this morning, and Christmas is still fully four weeks away – exactly four weeks from today.  Where are the places you and I need to walk together in order to be ready to greet the light of the world that is born to all people everywhere?  Where are the hungry, the cold, the frightened, the threatened, with whom we might stand, or whom we might feed and bring warmth, encouragement and hope?  And is there any resentment, any bitterness, any barrier to generosity within ourselves that might keep us from doing so?  If so, that’s all right – we have an entire season to walk through whatever dark places exist for us and come into the light.  The light itself is slow in coming.  One candle this week, two the next and so on – it isn’t much, but at the end it brings us to the brightness of a star that will reveal to us not just God with us, but also our own better selves.

But for now, it is enough to stand in a place that is illuminated only faintly.  The entire story is still waiting to be spread out before us.  Marley’s midnight visit to Scrooge is only a foreshadowing, a hint of both Scrooges- and Christmases-yet-to-come.  For him and for us, it is the start of a journey, the opening lines that both anticipate and shape the story of our own Advent preparation.  How will that story unfold?  For every person and for every Advent the story will be different, but what is certain beyond all doubt, is that it begins today.

Let us pray.