As Advent starts today, so does our Christian year. I'm always sort of glad that it sneaks up on us right after Thanksgiving. As our liturgical New Year's, today is a little like January 1st, without all the party-mess and fatigue. And yet our everyday experiences of the demands and rewards involved in authentic hospitality should remind us that Advent itself requires the familiar disciplines of preparation if we are to have our house in order and be able to celebrate the arrival of Christ in the midst of our harried and hurried worlds of work and home.

Jokingly I said I'd take the Sunday with the most difficult readings not really thinking that I could really be stumped. After all I did go to the best seminary in the country, and I was raised Baptist, so no text can really trick me that much?...When I looked over the readings for today I was reminded of a Proverb: "Pride goeth before destruction and an haughty spirit before a fall." (Proverbs 16:18, KJV)....These readings require humility because they're strange and enigmatic, and because they are apocalyptic. 

I said to my family yesterday, "I'm sorry, I can't go on the homeless walkathon with you, because I have to write a sermon." The irony was not lost on me. I felt like the person in the letter of James who says to a homeless person "Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill," but doesn't do anything to help them get warm and fed. And it's worse, of course, if you're the preacher. Sorry, I can't DO the word of God, because I'm too busy PREACHING the word of God.

Our Presiding Bishop was reminding us that spiritual renewal means the radical renewal of our relationships with one another; it means offering to God what Jesus knew the widow had offered, not merely some small change, but rather "everything she had, all she had to live on."   For when we do, a strange thing happens.  When we give enough to others that we have to rethink our own priorities, we cease living out of the fear of having too little, and instead begin to seek out more ways to give more to respond to the needs of others.