Thanksgiving is such a full time of the year-just last week we filled the Meeting House with brass and tympani, our voices raised up in songs of praise for God's abundant gifts, for the bounty of the harvest, the richness of life. Then, on Thursday, I speculate that most of us spent the day eating an overabundance of rich food, indulging in desserts our diets won't let us touch the rest of the year, and many of you will head home after this service to finish up the leftovers with a turkey sandwich. Thanksgiving is a time when we celebrate fullness, abundance, plenty-all that we have.

But now today, just one week from our Meeting House service, three days removed from the Thanksgiving abundance, we enter the season of Advent. In church, talk shifts from we have, what has been reaped, to what is not yet, what is to come, the hope for salvation through a small child. Theologically, we enter the sacred season of yearning.

Today, the first Sunday of Advent, is the beginning of the church year. We might even consider wishing one another a happy new year as the service concludes. The church calendar follows the life of Christ and the chronology of the church: the baby Jesus comes into the world at Christmas, then we move through Jesus' life until Good Friday and the Easter Resurrection. After Easter, we celebrate the Ascension, then the coming of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church at Pentecost. Pentecost gives way to what's called "ordinary time," from late spring until Advent, symbolizing the era of the church's work on earth. The year ended last weekend, with "Reign of Christ" Sunday, celebrating the eventual fulfillment of Christ's promises of eternal life and a reign of peace and justice without end. Each year, we journey through all of Christian history, past, present and future.

So today we mark the beginning of our new year. Not Christmas, not Easter, not Pentecost-today, Advent. In effect, we begin our year without Christ, still yearning for his coming, thirsting for redemption. Our existence as a people of faith begins not with fulfillment, but with longing. Our familiar lectionary readings during Advent often come from the Hebrew Bible and express a hunger for God's presence to come among the people. Today's passage from Isaiah 64 is a communal lament for the pain and loss in the community. The people of Israel find themselves in deep distress-they have returned to Jerusalem following the long exile, but their efforts to rebuild the temple have failed due to fighting amongst various groups in Jerusalem. This in-fighting has been followed by drought, crop failure and inflation, leading to widespread famine and violence in the promised land. The people look around them, and long for the days when God's presence and guiding hand was clearly upon them. They cry out, "O, that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence!" They beg God for a spectacular appearance-seeking the sure thing, a dramatic reentry of the Holy into their existence. They acknowledge their own sin, and the ways they have failed to trust in God's guidance. Their cries go up to heaven, pleading with God to come to them in their hour of need.

This place of longing for God is where we return each year to await the coming of Christ. Advent comes from the Latin word advenire, which means to come or to arrive. It also has links to the Latin adventare, which means to keep coming closer, to approach. Advent is the season of what is to come. Like the ancient Israelites, we await the coming of God. And we spend this season of Advent getting in touch with our deepest longings, to prepare a way for God to come anew into our lives. Our Christian faith begins with our yearning for Christ, and so our Christian year begins with the season of yearning.

Of course, in the secular world, this is also the season of yearning. There is a strange confluence of sacred and secular, as both our sacred Advent reflections and our secular holiday preparations encourage us to name our longings. With Christmas comes the tradition of giving and receiving gifts, so that we are encouraged to decide and to tell others what we want for Christmas, as well as discern the longings of others, that we might determine what they would like as a gift. Children enumerate every last item of desire as they assemble their wish lists for Santa Claus. The television commercials for Christmas shopping, the holiday displays in department store, and the appearance of toy commercials during adult programming all began weeks ago, encouraging us to get in touch with all our yearnings.

Studies estimate that people who live in cities see an average of 5000 advertisements in one day. One day! That means each of us see nearly two million advertisements every year, whether watching television or listening to the radio, reading newspapers or magazines, surfing the internet, opening our mail, going to the grocery store, riding the T, walking down the sidewalk or driving the turnpike. Advertising is everywhere! Just last week I was enjoying dinner from a Chinese restaurant. I opened my fortune cookie to read my fortune, "You will be going on a long journey." And then, lucky for me, I discovered that my fortune was matched by an advertisement for a travel website right there on the back of my fortune. I couldn't believe it. Advertising really is everywhere.

Each one of those 5000 ads we will see today, whether in our fortune cookies or in some more traditional place, has one purpose: to create desire. Advertisements are designed to evoke a sense of longing, to build a feeling of incompleteness in the viewer, to make us yearn for a particular product or service. Time and again, experts in marketing make it clear: advertising does not sell anything, advertising simply creates interest and desire, and then offer suggested products or services that might curb that desire.

There is currently a Toys-R-Us commercial on television that makes this explicit. It is an ad directed at parents, not at children, and I have seen it airing primarily after 10 p.m. during adult programs. It begins with a mother entering the living room to find her husband on the couch. Puzzled, she asks why he is not upstairs reading a bedtime story to their children. "Oh," he responds, "Their friend Geoffrey offered to read to them tonight." The picture cuts to the children's bedroom, where Geoffrey, the giraffe that is the Toys-R-Us spokesperson, is reading to the children from the Toys-R-Us catalog, offering advice on what they should ask for this Christmas. I couldn't believe the insidiousness of this commercial when I first saw it. The toy company reveals how they are targeting children, creating a desire for the newest, latest, greatest toys this Christmas.

While there is something in all of us that enjoys seeking the next new thing, most advertisements manufacture desire for a particular product by playing into bigger desires we already feel. If you want to sell a new long distance plan or a Hallmark card, you fill the screen with images of family closeness and intimacy. You tap into the desire we all have to be known and loved by a close family or group of friends, and you deliberately avoid without all the squabbling and struggling, missteps and awkwardness that goes on in real life families and relationships. If you want to sell a car, you show us pictures of freedom, the joy that comes from being far away from all responsibilities. You show your car driving over the mountains or across the desert without a care in the world, and you ignore the fact that most people use their cars for making mundane trips to work, to the store, to pick up children, and they spend an awful lot of time just sitting in traffic. And if you want to sell, well, just about anything, you appeal to our desire for romance, love and sex.

And it works! Advertising works because we do feel unfulfilled. Advertising capitalizes on our own longings for a more meaningful life, a deeper sense of family or community, our dissatisfaction. The word advertise also comes from the Latin, and can be found right next to advenire and adventare in the Latin dictionary. But the root for advertise is the Latin advertare, which means to turn or direct, to steer. Advertising creates desire and steers us toward a product. It turns or directs us toward an object that we might purchase or obtain or hold on to.

Advent versus Advertise. The difference is immense. You see, God does not advertise. God does not direct us toward something we can obtain or possess, or even steer us in the direction of fulfillment of our desires. That's because we cannot buy God; we cannot possess God as the object of our longing. God does not advertise, God advents. God does not turn or direct us, but God comes right to us. Ours is the God of the Advent, the God who keeps coming closer, approaching us every year at Christmas in the form of the tiny baby Jesus. We need not race after perfection, or satisfaction, or completion-we need only make way for the God who is coming ever closer, reaching out to us year after year, desiring only that we open our lives to this Divine Approach.

This year, let us celebrate Advent, not advertisement. It is the season of yearning, and we can take an Advent lesson from the prophet Isaiah. The people pour out their lament and they pour out their confession. They bring to God their deepest longings, they do not hide anything from God. God hears their cries, and God comes to meet them in their distress. Now is the time for us to pour out to God our lament. We must search our souls and lay bare our broken places before God. We must look into our hearts and come clean about the ways we have sinned. We must examine our world and name the ways that peace and justice remain absent. We must reach deep to speak our innermost dreams and longings. Individually and corporately, this season of yearning gives us the chance to cry out to God to come and make us whole.

This Advent, you are invited to enter the season of yearning. Do not be seduced by advertisement, because toys or cars or clothes or food or anything else they might direct us to will not fulfill our longings. Instead, name to God your yearnings of a deeper kind, for yourself and for our world, and wait with hope and faith for the Advent of God again this year. In the words of the prophet, "O Lord, you are our Father, we are the clay, and you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. … Now consider, we are all your people." God hears our cries, and God will come to meet us.

Let us pray.

Ever approaching God, we thank you for coming to us, reaching out to us, meeting us at every turn. This Advent season, help us to identify our deepest yearnings for you, so that we might open ourselves more fully to your coming. Hear our lament, for ourselves and for our world, and come to us again. In the name of your Son Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God-with-us, we pray, Amen.

Scripture Reading
Isaiah 64: 1-9

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence -
as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil-
to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down,
the mountains quaked at your presence.
From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him.
You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways.
But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.
We have all become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.
We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us,
and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
Yet, O Lord, you are our Father, we are the clay, and you are our potter;
We are all the work of your hand.
Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever.
Now consider, we are all your people.