Advent season 2003 approaches a country drenched with the enticements of a consumer society. SUV’s and minivans, Crown Victorias and Camrys are in the parking lot of a mall - as if drawn by some irresistible magnetic force - awaiting the bounty of this year’s seasonal shopping.

The economy is starting to recover, and the mall is simply teeming with goods; and though there are masses of poor being held outside by the fence around the parking lot, people leaving their cars are flowing toward the mall: like a river rushing madly toward the falls.

The mall is well-protected, of course. The most incredible army the world has ever seen, using weapons so sophisticated that computer games have not yet begun to fantasize them, is protecting the mall by bombing and occupying small countries half-way around the world.

They are protecting, aren’t they? They must be.

For millennia, ministers have been saying that Advent is about waiting; and here, in the crowded parking lot, are clear signs of a kind of waiting - row after row of vehicles are waiting to be filled.

The SUVs and the Camrys stand with open doors and raised trunk lids, symbolizing hopes for one more huge, shelf-busting, economy-driving Advent and Christmas season.

Yet here and there in the parking lot, some people have stopped on their way into the mall. They are listening to distant sirens that seem to be getting closer.

These shrill warning sirens, actually coming from many directions this Season of Advent, are disconcerting and disturbing. They suggest something is terribly wrong in the land; and they stir up deep anxieties, for those with ears to hear.

The first siren - in some ways the loudest, or at least the most insistent - is the Biblical texts that will be read during Advent. Here is a sample:

"When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately. Nation shall rise up against nation. Earthquakes. Famine. Plagues. Dreadful portents. There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars."

"The messenger of the covenant is like refiner’s fire, and like fuller’s soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver."

"The crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways made smooth."

"You brood of vipers. Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees."

"God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts, brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich empty away."

Advent texts - the first warning siren. They tell of tremendous upheaval and dramatic change. There is Good News, of course. God’s reign, God’s Realm is coming. The poor will be fed, the lowly will be uplifted. "All flesh shall see the salvation of our God," as one text says. That’s surely good news!

But everything that happens comes with radical change and disturbance, tumultuous turbulence and upheaval. Even the positive things. Good liberals like me like to think of the poor being fed and the lowly being uplifted as raising everyone so there is complete equality.

But that’s not what the text says. When the lowly are lifted up, the powerful are brought down. When the poor are fed, the rich are sent away empty. Change, disturbance, and tumult.

"Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things, to stand before the Son of Man."

Whatever happens, it’s not going to be easy.

Another siren is environmental; and here, I’m speaking directly to those of us who care about the environment - for whom conservation is important; for whom the words "reduce, reuse, recycle" actually matter.

Unfortunately, we have tended to think about environmental issues as if they were like other social issues. "If we don’t get a good prescription drug bill, we can pass a better one later. If we don’t raise the minimum wage now, we’ll do it next time. If we don’t change our militaristic attitude in time to stop this war, we’ll do it in time to stop the next one."

Justice and Peace activists have to have that attitude. No justice issue is won the first time, nor ever won completely all at once, as a single happening. You have to allow yourself time. Occasionally, lots of time.

However, now I’d like you to listen to a couple of other sentences:

"If we don’t reduce energy consumption now, we have time to do it later. If we don’t conserve our fossil fuel resources now, we can begin to conserve them later."

There was a time when those sentences were true. But they may not be true any longer. It is possible - more than just barely possible, I think - that the world-wide production of petroleum, of oil, will peak around 2010. Then it will begin to decline.

If we do nothing now, starting sometime after 2010, the world-wide availability of oil will have to fall. It doesn’t take much imagination to begin to understand the catastrophic consequences in 20 or 30 years if we do nothing now.

The environmental siren is sounding. The present administration in Washington D.C. seems determined to avoid hearing it; but it is sounding, nonetheless.

The third siren is the cry of the poor, the oppressed and the displaced around the world.

Whether it is the cry of those who have been subject to oppression, and then war, in Iraq or Afghanistan or the Occupied Territories in Palestine; or peasants facing low-intensity-warfare in Central America; or people living in almost invisible poverty in the United States; or people dying from AIDS in one of the African countries - the cries of the poor rise up like dust in a desert wind.

The cry of the poor is the third siren causing people in that Mall parking lot to stop and listen this Advent Season. And the fourth siren is the spiritual emptiness of a nation whose well-being is measured by how much they buy, spend and consume from Thanksgiving to Christmas.

What does one do, in the parking lot, when one begins to hear those or other sirens of danger, disturbance, and the degradation of the human and natural world?

Many try to close their ears, hunch their shoulders, and march determinedly, into the mall of material escape. But some don’t. Some wait in the parking lot, to hear more clearly the sirens’ announcement of the coming danger or disturbance. They try to understand what it means. Maybe they talk among themselves. And maybe they decide not to go into the mall, but to take some other, more appropriate action together.

One thing is clear, if these Advent texts are read in the context of a clear hearing of all the sirens: Christ is coming in judgment on the present world order. And immediately another thing becomes clear: People are called to faithfulness in the midst of whatever tribulation will come to pass.

If you say that very loudly and act upon it, those SUVs and Camrys in the mall parking lot may try to run you down, and the Mall Police may haul you off. The present administration questions the patriotism of anyone who disagrees with their foreign policy. People in and out of government are intimidated into silence.

Nevertheless, faithfulness to the coming Messiah may compel us to go against the grain, not just during Advent, but for all of our lives.

Advent is about waiting and watching, being alert to the sirens, and the signs of the times. It is about acting to help make little, local changes in the world, all the while hoping for God to act and bring God’s Realm and all its goodness closer to fruition, closer to our world of pain and need.

People in churches I’ve served have wondered why we have to sing Advent hymns at all. A person in my last church thought "O Come, O Come Immanuel" was the ugliest and worst hymn ever written. Why can’t we sing Christmas Carols now? The culture has been celebrating Christmas for over a month. Why can’t we join in?

The reason has to do with the sirens.

The Advent season is about hope: hope in what God has already done in Jesus Christ, and hope for the completion of God’s purposes for the world. However, the Biblical texts of Advent do not allow us to speak about hope glibly, or to offer a shallow optimism.

The sirens remind us that much is wrong in our world, and that even beginning to fix those things will cause radical change and turmoil - to say nothing of the disturbance and upheaval that will come from not fixing them.

"O Come, O Come, Immanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear." That is not a bad image of the human condition.

With Palestinians and Israelis both in dreadful captivity to vengeance and violence, with Americans dying in Iraq at the hands of people they were sent to liberate, with campesinos in Central and South America being ground into the dirt by corporate Capitalism, with AIDS running through nations in Africa like wildfire on a dry, windy Savannah, with the terror in the voice of the woman I talked to this week - "My son and I are staying in a motel. I only have 2 days left and I don’t get paid until next week. It’s Thanksgiving. It’s cold outside. Can you help?"

With the world as it is, "captive people mourning in lonely exile" is not a bad image of where we are.

The Gospel of John begins with this stunning image: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." As Advent begins, we are going to sit in the darkness a while, and ponder the darkness. We are going to listen for the sirens. We, too, are going to wait "until the Son of God appear."

That’s why we don’t sing the Christmas Carols quite yet. We are going to wait in the darkness awhile, wait in lonely exile for God’s promise to be kept. Because God’s promise will be kept. The Son of God will appear. For that promise, and for that terrible and joyful hope, we give God thanks and praise. Amen.