Adapted from a sermon preached at St. Mark’s, Baltimore on Christ the King Sunday, 2022.
A wise teacher once told me
that every transition in life, no matter how joyful,
also contains loss.
Getting married brings so much joy,
but can bring loss of independence.
Having a child brings joy as well,
but can bring the loss of certain dreams, certain goals.
Moving to a new job or a new house or new stage in life…
every transition that we might celebrate
means letting go of something too.
“Nothing is just one thing,”
another wise teacher once said to me.
Beginnings are tangled up with endings,
and endings with beginnings.
*
We’re standing right on that hinge of beginnings and endings today,
Next week is the first Sunday of Advent:
a season of preparation and anticipation
as we wait for Christ to break into this world.
And so today, we are in that muddled place
where beginnings are endings
and endings are beginning.
Where there is joy but also loss.
The readings from this time of year
reflect that jumble of beginnings and endings.
Last Sunday we heard Jesus casually remark that one day
the imposing structure of the temple
would be reduced to rubble —
would crumble and be blown away like dust.
Next week the themes are much the same:
the fear and apocalyptic uncertainty of all that is ending.
And today’s readings are laced with beginnings:
the anticipation of a new king who is coming
and at the same time,
endings:
the shadow of the cross on which he will be crucified.
Paul writes to the community in Collossae of Jesus, who
is the image of God, the firstborn of all creation,
who holds together all things
and who is the firstborn from the dead
who brings peace through the blood of the cross.
Creation, birth, beginnings, crosses, death and endings,
all of it seems wrapped up in the beginning-ending we encounter today.
And then, we have Zechariah.
Here, amid the ruin and rubble of the temple,
beneath the shadow of the cross and the prophesy of a shepherd king
from the line of David.
Zechariah has been silent for nine long months.
In the temple, an angel told he and his wife Elizabeth
that they would have a son, even though they were getting along in years.
And now, he holds that child.
Just eight days old.
His tongue is set free,
and he sings a song.
It is poetry drawn from the scraps and pieces
of scripture he heard as a child.
Bits of the song Hannah sang generations before him
woven with a Jewish blessing he recited daily.
He sings of the ways God has rescued the Jewish people
through the ages.
And then he sings of something new that God is doing.
A fulfillment of what Jeremiah prophesied all those years ago
A new king,
from the house of David.
By the tender mercy of our God,
Zechariah sings,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
A new dawn is breaking.
The night is over.
A child just eight days old will be the one to prepare the way for this new savior.
His name will be John.
Who would have thought,
in the shadows of Elizabeth and Zechariah’s lives,
when everything seemed to be ending,
that a new dawn would break?
A new child,
a new star,
a new light,
a new morning.
*
In 1940, Europe was crumbing.
Cities turned to rubble.
That same year, T.S. Eliot published the second of his Four Quartets.
The poem, East Coker is about many things,
but it is definitely about time, life and death.
“In my beginning is my end,”
the poem begins.
“…In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras (air-ess) woven with a silent motto.”
The poem was titled for the small village where Eliot’s ancestors lived for 200 years
before one of them set sail for America, where Eliot was born and raised.
Later, his ashes would be interred at the small anglican church there.
It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to live in 1940,
as the fabric of Europe frayed and shredded with violence, fascism, and antisemitism.
In a letter that year, Eliot wrote,
"We can have very little hope of contributing to any immediate social change; and we are more disposed to see our hope in modest and local beginnings, than in transforming the whole world at once... We must keep alive aspirations which can remain valid throughout the longest and darkest period of universal calamity and degradation.”
Aspirations that can remain valid.
Looking to the light at the beginning of each new day.
Seeing each new child as a sign of hope.
Remembering that, though we are getting on in years,
God isn’t quite done with us yet.
*
One commentator I read pointed out that the word for “dawn”
used by Zechariah
has a double meaning.
The Greek here is anatolé,
which means “rising of the sun.”
But it also means “to sprout or germinate.”
What a fascinating double meaning.
That the breaking of light on a new day
and the breaking of a seed through the crust of the soil
would share a name.
What is happening here,
and is what God is doing?
And how can something so miraculous
as God taking on human form
be captured by something so ordinary.
Dawn breaks every morning.
And every Spring seeds push out from their shells to find the light.
And yet these common occurrences,
when we stop for a moment to consider them,
each feel like their own kind of miracle.
*
The first time I ever grew plants from seed I was living for a year
in the Netherlands in my early twenties.
It had been a beautiful year but a hard one,
and as the winter waned I found I needed some sign
that new things could happen.
I bought a little plastic tray and some seeds,
and germinated them in a tiny room on the top floor where the hot water heater was housed.
This little room had a window with plenty of light.
It was where all the students I lived with hung their clothes to dry,
because it was so warm in there.
Every day I checked those seeds, even when it was far too early for them
to push up through the soil.
But the day I saw their fragile heads poking up…
it seemed like nothing short of a miracle.
Like the dawn breaking for the first time.
Like the cry of an infant whose birth seemed impossible.
“In my beginning is my end”
Eliot wrote as the bombs began to fall in London.
He goes on:
“Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.”
*
And so where do we see our hope?
As Eliot asks — where are our modest and local beginnings?
Our own aspirations that can remain valid,
even as the bombs fall.
We too, are living inside an ending.
Walking alongside a temple that will one day be dust.
Living inside a nation that is tearing to shreds.
Watching acts of hatred and violence that are unfathomable.
Dwelling on this planet that sits on the brink of destruction,
destruction at our own hands.
Are we, too, in a “period of universal calamity and degradation?”
I believe we are.
And yet there is always dawn.
There is always the silent pushing of seed heads through soil.
There is always the new infant’s cry.
Always the silence that breaks forth into voice, into song.
And we find that we are standing at the ending
and the beginning
at the very same time.