Good morning, church! And welcome to the one hundred and seventy-second annual meeting of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Brookline, and my 12th Annual Address as your rector.

This past year was a crucible. It was a refiner’s fire. It stretched us -- individually, as a community, as a church, and as a nation -- in ways we scarcely could have imagined at last year’s Annual Meeting.

In his Open Letter from Birmingham City Jail in 1963 the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “The contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are.”

Thirteen days after I came into this world, I was baptized. My parents took me to Martin Luther Chapel in Pennsauken, New Jersey and gave me over to God in baptism. I died and was reborn, washed in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

I have no memory of this event, of course, but that it occurred, and that it marked me forever, I have no doubt. This plate, given to my parents, is marked with my name, the dates of my birth and baptism. It is one of the tangible reminders of the reality of that sacrament.

It is handmade, of terracotta clay, with a white glaze and the design carved out of the glaze to show the reddish-brown clay underneath. The painted flower design in the middle is reminiscent of Pennsylvania Dutch culture, known to us as the Amish, whose lives revolve around the promises they make at baptism to be steadfast and faithful to God no matter how odd they may look to the outside world.

It is morning, after a long night for Mary, Joseph, and the newborn infant Jesus. The events recounted in our gospel for this morning are hours old – the multitude of heavenly hosts have gone back whence they came, the shepherds have returned to their fields and their sheep, and an exhausted mother is left to recoup her strength and, as Luke tells us, to ponder all these words in her heart.

There must have been some serious adrenaline pumping through Mary and Joseph the night before. The urgency of birth, the inescapability of it all, may have kept them going. The sudden appearance of shepherds, bearing with them the certainty that God was moving, bringing salvation so surely – I can imagine that joy, or something like it, felt very close that night.

But in the morning? What happens then? When the baby – God or not – needs its first diaper change and you’re not sure you actually heard the shepherds right when they said that this child is Christ the Lord? What if you can’t hold on to joy?

We were probably less than a month into this pandemic when I had already tired of the word “unprecedented” as an adjective to describe the time through which we are currently living.

Yes, the particular details of the trials and tribulations of our day may, some of them, be new to the scene, but the overall anxiety, exhaustion and longing for God to break in and deliver all of God’s creation? That is all as old as creation itself.

Just listen to the song of the Psalmist and tell me we have not been at this a while:

“Those who sowed with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed will come again with joy shouldering their sheaves.”

The hope described so eloquently by the Psalmist and writers of Isaiah is a hope we know well. The need to endure current pain with the vision of a future joy is a need shared by every generation before us.

Episcopal priest and esteemed preacher, Fleming Rutledge, has written that “Advent begins in the dark.” She is referring, first of all, to the readings on this Sunday, which in many Christian circles is the first Sunday of Advent. For us here at St. Paul’s, and for a small but growing number of Christian communities around the world, it is the fourth Sunday of Advent – we began our journey in early November.

So we have noticed for some time that Advent has begun, once again, in the dark. Not only physical darkness, as the clocks shifted back an hour and the shadows have been inexorably lengthening. Our readings have also been for some time in shadows. The bridesmaids, watching their lamps grow dimmer as the bridegroom’s arrival is delayed. A so-called “worthless slave” thrown into the outer darkness for his unwillingness to risk. Those who gave no food to the hungry, no drink to the thirsty, no welcome to the stranger, punished for their obliviousness to the God who is calling them.