A sermon delivered by The Rev. Dr. Nancy Lee Jose, Rector at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church.

I come from a family of athletes. For generations, we've married physically competitive partners. And so the Jose family gene pool has provided a long line of sports-minded children and adults. As a result, it shouldn't come as a surprise that one of the most anticipated events of our family life is the annual Thanksgiving kickball game.

In the old days, we'd gather in the back yard belonging to my Aunt Terry and Uncle Sparky. By itself the narrow grassy expanse behind their house wouldn't have been large enough for kickball, but fortunately it backed up to the long and wide fairway of a par 5 on the golf course adjacent to their home near Ft. Washington, Maryland. This particular fairway, in my memory, remains our best kickball stadium!

For families strongly oriented towards the Chesapeake Bay, the smell of fresh oysters and clams roasting on our father's grills spurred on the annual kickball rivalries. Besides, there had to be something good awaiting the losing team, which usually was made up of the red-headed children of the Kimmel family, who were our dearest friends, yet built more for comfort rather than speed. As a result they were no match for the Jose-children, swift footed and fiercely competitive. John Lennon once wrote: "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." And as we were growing up together, kickball was a sacramental reminder to live life to the fullest, even as we were growing up and apart into adulthood.

Kick-ball these days, at least for my siblings and myself - who're now the ‘senior generation' - has become a yearly lesson in grinding humility. One of our great grandchildren, Mason, is an 8-year-old soccer-demon, whose heart seems to beat to the rhythm and feel of a leather ball bouncing easily off either foot. At times he is the very essence of the swift footed and fiercely competitive lineage that preceded him. Mason is now the self-appointed organizer of the kickball game, analyzing the field parameters and conditions before we begin, as well as choosing his team members, and timing his strategies of selection, like a master chess player.

Having grown up with competitive sports 365 days a years, and having excelled in most of them, you can imagine the level of humility to which I was reduced this year when he chose his team, person by person, relative by relative, until there was but one person left. Me! It was like being branded with a scarlet letter "L" for LAST. A newly discovered level of empathy flooded me for all those children I grew up with who had endured the sting of not being chosen almost every time a game was organized. The jagged edge of being chosen last - was, I realized, almost entirely unfamiliar, foreign, and alienating to me, perhaps especially at my age, and at the hands of my grand-nephew, whose team went on to win this year's game by the score of 5-4!

I won't need therapy, or anything, to deal with this close encounter of familial commentary about my finitude. But as Wayne and I drove back home into the District - through neighborhoods sometimes prosperous and at other times derelict -- this seemingly innocuous family kickball tradition suddenly made me aware of all those in our city who will live their entire lives being chosen last, or not at all, as the benefits of urban living are given out, or withheld. And I also found myself reflecting differently on the whole Advent Season into which we enter today - a season of anticipation of God's choosing our humanity as the place of the divine habitation in the world.. How do we reconcile the Advent theme of God's choosing us, as opposed to all those lives around us still waiting for a single glimpse of what it means not to be left for last, or left unchosen altogether, for the blessings of our social order?

Kathleen Norris in her book, Amazing Grace, has an entire chapter entitled with the single word: Chosen. In this chapter she speaks to the power as well as the dangers of being the chosen people, being chosen and being called. Norris speaks of her own struggle about whether or not to join a church, while at the same time knowing with growing clarity that this was a commitment she needed to make. One of her experiences in particular has haunted me throughout my writing of this morning's sermon. Let me read her description of the day she was scheduled to officially join the congregation where she'd been worshiping for a while, and the ambivalences she felt over the power of being chosen.

Norris writes: "Before the service, the new members gathered with some of the older members. One was a man I'd never liked much I'll call him Ed. He'd always seemed ill tempered to me, and also a terrible gossip, epitomizing the small mindedness that can make small-town life such a trial. The minister had asked him to formally greet the new members. Standing awkwardly before our group, Ed cleared his throat and mumbled, ‘I'd like to welcome you to the body of Christ.' The minister's mouth dropped open, as did mine-neither of us had ever heard words remotely like this come from Ed's mouth. Like distant thunder, the words made me more alert, attuned to further disruptions in the atmosphere. What had I gotten myself into? I was astonished to realize, as the service began, that while I may never like Ed very much, I had just been commanded to love him. My own small mind had just been jolted, and the world seemed larger, opened in a new way. Ed's words, those few, simple words of welcome, had power. Like the sacrament of baptism, they seemed to have made an indelible mark on my soul.... As I went forward on shaky legs to the front of the church, to join the others who were becoming members that day, my eye happened to catch the disbelieving and most unwelcoming expression on the face of a younger woman, an extremely conservative member of the congregation. Absurdly, my mind jumped to that classic Western movie line: ‘This town ain't big enough for the both of us.' I felt a twinge for her, for both of us, as I didn't want to be there, doing this any more than she wanted me to be invading her sacred turf with my doubts, my suspect Christianity, so unlike her own. I nearly turned around. But I couldn't because I had just been welcomed into the body of Christ."

Most of us here this morning, whatever your own athletic or generational skills at kickball, have grown up expecting, as I did on Thanksgiving afternoon, to be among the chosen. By virtue of our innate intellect, the color of our skin, our family heritage, the hard work we've done, or the particular time in which we were born, we're all part of a generation for who having and possessing and accomplishing has been the fuel of moving forward and moving up.

Thanksgiving, at least in part - when we get beyond the PC of Pilgrims and pumpkins - is about our gratitude for all the blessings we've been given, and all the things that we've achieved. What our generation has missed seeing is that fulfillment, in and of itself, puts us perilously close to the slippery slope of entitlement. Our accomplishments have the potential to create the dangerous illusion that we've been chosen to receive them, while others did not - that we have a right to expect fulfillment. We deserve to be first, not last, to be full, not hungry, to be remembered, not forgotten. Yet for me it only took something as innocuous as a kickball game -- just before gorging myself with turkey and stuffing and enough trimmings to feed a small army - to startle me into being able to see the fragility of the fortunes of life, to make me ask again how I know who I am, and whether I matter in God's eyes, if this isn't measured in terms of the order in which I get chosen, or the level of fulfillment that I attain?

William Carlos Williams, one of the most eminent of 20th century American poets, was known to most of those who knew him as a general practitioner of medicine and the pediatrician who delivered their children and cared for them as they grew. In his poetry and prose, Williams repeatedly explored the tension between art and conduct. He once put it this way: "We say something pious, and we mean it, but in a moment we forget it, because we become the heartless cutthroats we also have it in ourselves to be." He also reflected often on the fact that the way we bear ourselves over the long haul speaks louder than either our pious words or our lapses in charity or judgment. "A life's moral conduct" he wrote, "has to do with time, longer than the length of a university examination, longer than the length of a bar examination, longer than the length of a foundation-supported sabbatical, and yes, longer than the length of a church service, or for that matter, a season, even the Advent season."

Advent, Williams reminds us, is itself about slowing down, and seeing things not through the eyes of entitlement and chosen-ness, but from the perspective of God's way of making that choice known - not through the accomplishments of royalty, but through the birth of a child who in the eyes of the world was no different from any other infant being born this month in Southeast DC, or any other impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhood across the globe.

That's why in these next weeks of Advent we intentionally tone down not just our liturgy but also the approach to our lives, by focusing more on the simplicity of silence and waiting. Advent invites us to take a deep breath, and to let God become incarnate in each of us in a new way this season both personally and corporately. Advent invites us to examine the state of our heart, the shape of our soul, the economy of our relationship with God. Advent is an overt invitation to examine our personal piety - to say ‘no' to something or someone, so that we can say ‘yes' to carving out time with God, not just as individuals but also as a religious community, the Body of Christ.

Advent is about remembering that God has chosen us, not out of entitlement, but because God needs us in order to bring God's gracious presence to those who mourn, or despair, or have been passed by when we've done the choosing. We've been chosen not because we deserved it, but because God needs us to be God's hands and feet and heart in the world. We've been chosen to be God's perpetual place of habitation, to be the Body of Christ in the world.

Advent is not about being chosen and called to the Divine First Team, but to follow a star in the dark of night to find where God's getting ready to be born again where we least expect it. Advent is about choosing to be God's people, who welcome those who least expect it, to take their place as part of the Body of Christ, God present and manifest in our world.

Let us pray: O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. We yearn to know your ways O Lord, please teach us your paths. Lead us in your truth, for you are the God of our salvation, and for you, we wait all day long. Make us long to choose you, O God, who waits in our future to become incarnate again, love made flesh, dwelling among us with truth and grace.

Amen