Sermon #65 (27th November 2022 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)
I wonder what comes to mind, for you, when you hear the phrase ‘Be Prepared’? Personally, it makes me think firstly of the boy scouts (and the girl scouts). Baden-Powell, the founder of the scouts, wrote over a hundred years ago that to Be Prepared means ‘you are always in a state of readiness in mind and body to do your duty.’ And more recent versions of the scouting handbook unpack this for the modern day by saying the idea was that ‘Scouts should prepare themselves to become productive citizens and strong leaders and to bring joy to other people. He wanted each Scout to be ready in mind and body and to meet with a strong heart whatever challenges await him.’
That’s a pretty noble aspiration, isn’t it? To be ready in mind and body to ‘meet with a strong heart’ whatever might await us? And many of the writings you find about this Advent season will feature the phrase ‘prepare your heart’ – while doing my homework this service I found dozens of Advent devotionals with that phrase in the title – But what does it really mean to ‘prepare your heart’? What exactly are we meant to be preparing for at this time of year? And how might we go about it?
Well, it’s not the preparation of, say, the ‘doomsday preppers’ and survivalists, those people who are fanatically preparing for (or perhaps precipitating) the imminent collapse of society by stockpiling weapons, ammunition, and jars of preserved vegetables and tinned meat in their outhouses and under their beds. Though I’m not really in a position to judge on the latter point because I panic-bought a lot of tins of corned beef in late 2019 when a no-deal Brexit looked like it was on the cards (it took a while to eat our way through the stockpile).
This sort of behaviour is preparing for the worst – and of course it has its place – if you’re of an anxious disposition one way to soothe your fears about the future can be to put certain mitigations in place. An example: for my whole life people have commented on, and occasionally rolled their eyes at, the heavy rucksack I won’t leave the house without (mum was the same; her handbag was humungous). But if you’re ever in need of a plaster, a painkiller, a needle and thread, a charger, a lighter, or a snack, the odds are pretty good that a rummage in my rucksack (or mum’s giant handbag) will turn one up. We can, at least occasionally, anticipate some of what life might throw at us, and make contingency plans. Being prepared in this sense – being ready for emergencies, large and small, by thinking through various possible eventualities – that is perfectly prudent. I’m the last person who’s going to knock it.
But. The sort of preparation we are called to do in this Advent season is, in a way, the polar opposite of this. Instead of preparing for the worst, at this time of year, we are called prepare for the best.
This next point might sound like a bit of a random tangent but bear with me. It’ll all join up in the end… I suspect many of you are familiar with the (now famous) psychology experiment which has come to be known as ‘The Invisible Gorilla’. Participants in this study were asked to watch a video in which two basketball teams, one wearing white and one wearing black, passed the ball to each other. The participants are told to count how many times the players in white shirts pass the ball (so they’ve been primed to have a narrow focus on this in particular). Mid-way through the video, a gorilla walks through the game, stands in the middle, pounds his chest, then exits. He’s on screen for ten full seconds. And afterwards the participants are asked “did you see the gorilla?” More than half of the participants never saw the gorilla at all. The experiment is meant to show “inattentional blindness”. We don’t see what we’re not looking for (even when it’s a massive gorilla staring us in the face).
In the season of Advent, when we are encouraged to ‘prepare our heart’, what might that mean? Well, I reckon (at least in part), it’s about consciously redirecting our attention towards the most important things in life, be ready, so they don’t just pass us by (you know, like an invisible gorilla). When times are tough, as they undoubtedly are right now for so many people the world over, we can find ourselves grimly fixated on life’s challenges and disappointments, and simply unable to notice the good that’s still present in our everyday lives, alongside all the hardship and struggle. But what would the world look like if we were to ‘prepare our hearts’ to attune to life’s goodness?
Think of our first hymn today ‘People, Look East’, with its imagery of looking to the horizon in a hopeful spirit for what’s coming – love, light, beauty – and making a place ready for its arrival. Or Richard S. Gilbert ‘holding out the chalice of our being to be filled with the graces of life that abound’. Or Mary Oliver’s image of ‘making the house ready for the Lord’ (only, as she hints, the Lord comes to her in the form of mice and squirrels, dogs and cats, sparrows and foxes, and she welcomes them all). These are all metaphors of receptivity and openness – to love, light, and beauty – ‘come in, come in’. In this sense, to ‘be prepared’ is to anticipate, expect, get ready, and ‘look east’ to the horizon – for whatever unexpected arrivals might visit your life next – with a hopeful and receptive heart.
There are some words from Daphne Rose Kingma printed on the front of the order of service which speak to this (the full service text is also on the website). She said: ‘To be available to the mystery means you are open, expectant, waiting — continually poised on tiptoe, prepared to be illumined.’
Or to return to the more conventionally Christian framing of the season that I shared at the start of the service, in the words of Mark Burrows (which I realise might be a bit challenging for some of us), this is a time when ‘we ready ourselves for Christ’s birth in us… the coming of God in our lives, here and now… in the realities of our daily lives. God longs to be born among us in our world – and in your life.’ Even if you find that language a bit tricky, I encourage you to do a bit of inner translation work, and make your own meaning of it. God – or love, light, goodness, beauty, truth, if you prefer – God (in all God’s forms) is already present and at work in our lives. During Advent we are called to see it and be it. To notice where God is emerging in our everyday lives and be ready to join in with all this Godding too.
As the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart says, in the other quote on the front of the order of service (again, it’s all online too): ‘Above all else, then; be prepared at all times for the gifts of God and be ready always for new ones. For God is a thousand times more ready to give than we are to receive.’
It’s not a metaphor that Eckhart would have recognised but you might even think of yourself as a radio antenna or satellite dish tuned in to God – or love, light, goodness, beauty, truth – in the everyday. And in that spirit I want to issue a little challenge – an Advent project for you to join in with, if you fancy – I’m calling it an ‘Advent Treasure Hunt’. Those of you who are present in-person can find a little yellow slip in your order of service and I’m happy to email it out to anyone who’s watching at home but essentially it’s just a little list of dates from now until Christmas. Every day this Advent (starting today!) I encourage you to look out (‘look east’!) for moments when God is breaking through in your life – what I’ve written on here is ‘moments of love, kindness, beauty, truth, peace, insight, mystery’ but feel free to adapt it to suit the particulars of your own theology – and each day make a note on this page, or in a journal, or on your phone. If you want to take this further, maybe take a photo or even a video to represent your daily treasures or ‘God-moments’ throughout the month. And if a bunch of us keep it up perhaps we can share some of our reflections and photos with a follow-up congregational service early in the New Year. Sharing all the treasures we’ve noticed. If you do give this a go please don’t let it become burdensome – if you miss a day or two you can always return to it without any guilt – nobody’s going to tell you off. Let us know how you get on.
And to close, I invite you to join in setting an intention for the Advent season with some prayerful words from Victoria Weinstein, an echo of the prayer we prayed together earlier in the service:
Let us pray that we may notice and accept the Divinity of tiny things;
the Divine of ordinary miracles and even in the awkward mistakes.
We pray this moment to keep tender vigil over our precious, imperfect lives.
To know each one as a vessel, however cracked or broken, of the Holy.
So may we strive to recognize the indwelling presence of God
in all people, in all living things, and even in ourselves.
May it be, so for the greater good of all. Amen.
Sermon by Jane Blackall
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A video recording of this sermon is available: