Life is cyclical. At least it is in many ways. Generation begets generation. Seasons change. The moon waxes and wanes. The planets spin. Sound and light both travel in waves, which are cycles of their own specific kind. Economists tell us that markets are cyclical. Engines run in cycles. Wheels rotate cyclically. Weather is cyclical. Our brain-waves run in cycles. Harmony is expressed in terms of cycles. The electromagnetic spectrum is a spectrum of cycles. Life, in many ways, is cyclical. We begin in the womb (which has its own cycles), then after birth we go through identifiable cycles of infancy, toddler-ship, adolescence, adulthood, middle-age, old-age, and death.
Life is cyclical. And cycles are reassuring because they allow for some predictability. “From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near,” Jesus said. Life is cyclical.
Curiously, the symbol for infinity, sometimes called the lemniscate, the sort-of figure-eight on its side, looks a lot like the curve of a wave to me, which expresses a cycle, although I think this is a misleading expression of eternity, which I don’t think is an endlessly repeating cycle, forever folding back on itself, and leading nowhere but back to its own beginning point.
Advent is the beginning of a cycle. And because it is an annual cycle, it can feel a bit like that small, and self-repeating symbol, turning back on itself again and again. Every year, the church returns to the same spot, to take up the same patterns, go through the same motions, tell the same story, act out the same drama, reiterate the same promises, express the same fears, correct the same failings, and turn her head and her heart toward the same hope. Again. And again. And again. And since the church purports to inhabit the domain of eternity, it could be easy to conclude that one of the church’s dirty little secrets is that this is it: that we are destined to repeat this loop for ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, as Handel might put it.
The church has been doing this for a long time. I have been doing this for a long time. Some of you have been doing it for even longer. Again and again. Over and over. Life is cyclical. And except for the exciting shift from violet to blue vestments, once every 175 years or so, we can expect to keep doing the same thing for a long, long time.
Strangely, this cycle that begins with Advent is one that both leads us somewhere, and inevitably returns us back here to the same place, again. In fact, Jesus’ message to his disciples here is contradictory. First, he tells them to learn from the predictability of the cycles of the fig tree. Then he immediately tells them that “about that day or hour no one knows…. Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.”
These lessons seem incompatible with one another. My guess about the reason for this contradiction is that, there in Jerusalem, not far from his own Passion, Death, and Resurrection, Jesus was extraordinarily aware of the nearness of eternity, and unusually attuned to the thinness of the membranes that separate time and space, when these dimensions fold in on themselves, and he could sense with exceptional sensitivity, that everything is always happening everywhere. And his proximity to that profound and singular moment of self-offering allowed him to speak in and through and about both the specific reality of that moment, which happened once and for all, but which is always happening everywhere. That’s a bit of a mouthful, but I am trying to speak about things about which I cannot know. We can only grope.
Life is cyclical, like a wave that you can graph, as it goes up and down with speed, amplitude, and frequency. Interestingly, the thing that moves in a mechanical cycle is called the disturbance. If you shake a string to get it to move up and down in a cycle that goes from left to right, say. It’s not the string, so much, that is moving from left to right, as it is the disturbance that’s moving, and that causes the cycle to happen.
A duck floating on the water moves up and down with a wave, but not forward or backwards, because it’s not the water that’s moving laterally, it’s the disturbance moving through the water.
If Advent is the beginning of a cycle, it’s the disturbance that sets this cycle in motion. So, what is the disturbance? Of course, Jesus is the disturbance of this cycle to which we keep returning.
Most of the definitions of “disturbance” carry negative connotations. An “interruption,” “disruption,” “breakdown,” “interference.” One dictionary definition uses non-judgmental terms for a disruption in the weather, saying it’s “a local variation from normal or average… conditions.” I think Jesus might be comfortable with that, depending on how you define “local.”
I suppose that Advent could be all of these things. It could be just a variation from normal or average conditions, as we adjust our perspectives to try to be awake and aware of what God is doing in the world. But, come to think of it, if what is God is doing in the world we live in - a world that seems to cycle through calamity and war with terrific regularity and ease - if what God is doing happens to be an interruption, disruption, breakdown, and interference of all that, wouldn’t such disturbance be rather welcome?
As we begin this cycle of our life, and perhaps of God’s life, again. Perhaps we are being called to be attentive to the disturbance. Many people believe that one of the great reasons to come to church is for calm and reassurance, but I think one of the most important reasons we come to church is for disturbance. Jesus comes to us to be a new disturbance, and to disrupt, interrupt, break down, and interfere with all the other cycles of our lives.
And because it is so easy for all those other cycles to the ones that govern our lives - the seasons, the marketplace, our own own lifecycle - it is a good thing that the church returns to this cycle that begins with Advent, year after year, to introduce again that disturbance to every other aspect of our lives; to introduce us to Jesus again and again, in a cycle that is completely predictable, and yet, which always, we pray, leads us closer to something we have never been so close to before, which is the heart of God, and his kingdom.
It is one of the paradoxes of faith that we know this cycle, and yet, we don’t know for sure where it will lead us this year, or next. But here we sit, like so many ducks, bobbing in the waves, not because these waves will carry us anywhere, but because from here we can feel the disturbance as it moves beneath us, and over us, and through us, and we brace ourselves, knowing that we have been here before, and wondering what will happen next!
Preached by Fr. Sean E. Mullen
3 December 2023
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
