The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Advent 1, Year A
It is good and right that on this first Sunday of Advent that we get to admire these new banners! A new church year, and new banners to bring our attention to our faith.
Art is beautiful, for its own sake. Art draws our eyes to lines, colors, and contrasts. With just a few lines we have an image that means something. A figure of a person, the outlines of robes and symbols, the beauty of a name in letters.
And in the Church, we celebrate this beauty. God not only makes things good, God makes things beautiful. When we gaze up at the stars at night or the clouds by day, we see goodness and beauty. When we turn our attention downwards, to the earth beneath us, we see the beauty of plants, of leaves going through changing colors and slowly decaying into the compounds and molecules that make them. And the beauty of sound – not just music, but the crunch of those same leaves, the sound of rain, the sound of a beloved pet snoring as they nap.
We live in a beautiful world that God has made.
And what beauty we tend to miss. Our eyes register that “Oh, this thing is beautiful” and then let it fade into the background. Our ears hear a beautiful sound, and soon it becomes background noise. Our attention spans, as they shorten, miss more and more. As we live in a more digital world where a new exciting thing is available to our fingertips every second, we stop letting boredom become a doorway to curiosity.
As we celebrate these new banners, I really want us to soak in their beauty, and not let them just become a backdrop lost in the background. They have beautiful design and craftsman ship. And they bring to mind beautiful souls in our history: wonderful people we call saints.
We have the depiction of the Virgin of Guadalupe. A bold choice not to go with a standard depiction of Biblical Mary of Nazareth, mother of Jesus. But in this season of hope, remembering how revolutionary it was to depict the mother of Christ our Lord as an Indigenous Mexican woman dressed in traditional regalia. It should nudge us to consider two things: how the light complexioned, light hair, blue eyed Mary is also a depiction of Mary different from how she historically would have looked as a Mediterranean Jewish woman; and also think of just as we should see ourselves in the lives of the saints, we should see the saints living and looking like us. The saints are not distant, far-off heroes sitting on a pedestal. Part of what makes Christianity so radical is that we see in human diversity a gift of God. The feast of Pentecost does not merge everyone into one language, one culture – it brings together different cultures in mutual understanding. Thus, it is right that Mary should reflect many cultures.
And on the other side of the banner, we have the prophetic saint Isaiah. In his midst is what might be familiar as the “All Seeing Eye” – but it has roots in Christian iconography as a way of depicting God without doing the whole “Old Bearded Man” thing, which has done grievous damage to how our culture thinks we think about “God the Father”. Isaiah the prophet had a vision in the Temple, seeing the glory of God. For us Christians, we read Isaiah’s prophecy and we see the life of Jesus: promises of hope, acknowledgement of his suffering, and the glorious vision of a kingdom where all shall feast on God’s holy mountain and only peace will be known.
And on our banner we have beloved St Nicholas of Myra, that beloved patron of generosity to the poor, kindness to children, and protection of sailors. In a season of generosity, he is an ongoing example. And St Luke the Evangelist who gives us so much of the story of Jesus’ birth that we will in a few short weeks read and remember and rejoice.
St Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist – when Mary finds out she is pregnant with the Messiah, she rushes to her cousin Elizabeth who is also pregnant. This joyful meeting of two women to support each other, to rejoice in God’s blessings and God’s promises to all people! And it is the occasion of this visitation to Elizabeth that Mary sings out her song we call the Magnificat.
St Lucy, blessed martyr who brings light in the midst of darkness. And also I knew that if St Lucy were not to appear on the Advent banner, there would be two people in this congregation who would be raising their eyebrow at me while reminding me that they know where I live. (I jest!) But Lucy, or Lucia, even when they tried to take her sight she could still see the glorious love of Christ.
But saints are not in ages past, there are hundreds of thousands still! As we get closer to our day, we begin to find saints we read about in our history books where we can find their birthdates, their childhoods, their education and early years. William Wilberforce, who campaigned to end slavery in the British Empire and also helped form the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. While an imperfect person (like the rest of us), William Wilberforce reminds us that the promise of the Kingdom of God is freedom for all people.
And Howard Thurman’s prophetic voice on the Gospel’s call for freedom in America, confronting one of America’s founding sins, racism and contempt. Howard Thurman offers all of us his mystic voice that invites us to see Christ truly present in the least and the lost, Jesus in the form of all those who have been disinherited from the promises of our society. His prayerful writing spoke to luminaries of the Civil Rights movement with its Christ-centered focus on the dignity of every single human being.
And Frances Perkins, first female member of the president’s cabinet – and a faithful Episcopalian. She worked hard as the Secretary of Labor under FDR to care for the working class, to ensure that labor protections were enforced, and that workers got a fair wage for their labor. It was her faith that led her to work for the dignity of every human being.
And Pauli Murray, another of the Episcopal Church’s own. A brilliant lawyer who laid the legal framework for challenging Jim Crow laws with her research into discriminatory laws. An advocate for the ordination of women to all orders of ministry, recognizing that God’s call does not limit itself to one gender. Pauli was the first African-American woman ordained to the priesthood in 1977. And a thoughtful, prayerful person who wondered about their own experience of gender – Pauli reflected on what her gender meant to her, how fluid her experience of gender was, how she might call herself “Non-binary” today. But above it all, she knew that God’s love for her encompassed the complete person she was.
We see beauty in each of these lives – a beauty that reflects the goodness and love of our blessed Creator. A beauty that we can also see in ourselves, and in one another. When we train our eyes to see God’s beauty in one another, then we see the glimpses of the Kingdom of God already present in our midst. God’s beauty is one that brings our hearts and minds to contemplate God’s goodness and how abundantly God pours out blessings on all that he has created. As we admire these banners for Advent, and as we see new ones in seasons to come, may we contemplate not just the beauty that they bring to this holy sanctuary where we worship God; may they also invite us to see the holiness God brings to our lives, and to the beauty of every moment God has created. Amen.