For most of my childhood, I felt like I was the house of the Lord’s next-door neighbor. And maybe it’s my history of growing up in rectories that has made me pretty comfortable and very curious about churches and other sacred places. When traveling, I seek out religious sites, especially if it is a sacred place that is layered with history. The Basilica of San Clemente in Rome is a place like that. At the street level, you enter a 12th-century Byzantine church glittering with mosaics. But when you descend down a ramp at the back, the air becomes heavier and cooler, and you find yourself in another church—one directly below, underneath the one above. In the dim light, frescoes from the 8th century gleam. And then, descend even further down, and you move further backward in time to another holy place—a 1st-century temple to the god Mithra. Devotees to that god stood in that place and, through a grating in the ceiling, were bathed with bull’s blood. Many sacred spaces have a blood-soaked and layered history. Qutub Minar in Delhi, India, is the ruin of a mosque that was built with the pillaged stones of ancient Hindu temples. In Cambodia, at the Angkor Wat temple complex, the stone Buddhas remain, but they have been beheaded. In Córdoba, Spain, a Baroque church has been plunked down right in the middle of one of the most beautiful mosques in the world. And of course, there is the Temple Mount and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. We can join with the psalmist across time in praying for peace in those walls and quietness in those towers. In all of my tourism to sacred places, I have found that the door—the entry point—is not the same as in a regular building. You can just look at our own beloved red doors, the traditional Episcopal landmark. Part of the reason that our doors are so big and red and striking is that they are meant to signify the passage from the secular world to the sacred one. In some sacred places, you actually have to step up and over the doorway to enter the sanctum. And in many houses of God, you must pass through many, many thresholds to reach the sacred center—the Greek iconostasis, the Hindu garbhagriha, and, in Jesus’s lifetime, to reach the inner sanctum of the Jerusalem temple. A marked threshold makes it plain: there is this place, and there is that place. There is a before and an after. On one side of the door, you are a stranger. On the other side, you are a participant in the holy. The house of the Lord is a lacuna in the secular world where the divine bursts through. We’ve begun a season now of thresholds. Perhaps on Thursday, you spent a moment on a doorstep, arms full of contributions for a sacred meal. Perhaps you were the one frantically preparing, listening with one ear for the sound of the doorbell or the knock or the voices waiting to gather in Kempton Hall. On both sides of the door, we anticipate an entry to a new place and a new time. Though I had many childhood homes, there were some doors that could always be counted on to be the same—and those were the doors of the Advent calendar. My mother is an artist, and beginning when I was five, we made an Advent calendar together each year. My task was to design the outside—the front façade. Usually, I drew a house with many windows or an apartment building. One year it was a street scene, another a shelf full of books. For one of our final Advent calendars, when I was a busy teenager, we used a poster of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and I drew a string of colored lights between the spires. My mother, out of my view and with careful measurements, created the calendar’s inside. She made 25 exquisite, surprising images, one behind each door. Often they were layered collages or sketches. Sometimes she used old snapshots or snippets from the previous year’s Christmas cards. The final door, opened on Christmas morning, was of course a nativity scene full of gold foil excelsior. Now, I have noticed—and you may have too—that Advent calendars have gone pretty mainstream. These days, you can get one from just about anywhere, and count down to Christmas Eve not just with traditional pictures or chocolates, but with tiny soaps or wines or whiskeys or socks or Bluey characters or mini Lego builds. Everyone seems to have gotten into the Advent calendar business. Now, I admit I may be an Advent calendar snob, but I think of many of these Advent calendars as falling into the secular trap of the quick reward or the cheap, consumerist self-care—little hits of dopamine before the big one. But in sacred Advent, our waiting is not to give ourselves little bits of joy before we get to the big one. Jesus is not our Christmas surprise. And scripture backs this up. The first week of Advent—this week—our readings are full of apocalyptic admonishments, not cozy preparations. They point us toward an end, not a beginning. And really, that shouldn’t surprise us. Last week, Canon Shariasa showed us how the ribbon of God’s time circles on itself. What we thought was an end becomes a beginning. What we thought was a beginning becomes an end. Advent is an end and a beginning. Advent is a threshold. In today’s gospel, Jesus compares God’s presence in the world to some pretty disturbing events. The first is a story very familiar to his listeners—and to us as well—the great flood. Jesus said to the disciples, “For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of man. For as in those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, they knew nothing until the flood came and swept it all away. And so too will be the coming of the Son of Man.” Like the nativity, we’ve taken the story of the flood and tamed it—cutified it. My children were even gifted a plastic book of Noah’s Ark meant to be played with in the bathtub. It was full of little cartoon animals smiling two by two, with the rainbow as a happy ending. But you can’t tell the story of the flood without telling the part that God wanted to destroy the world. It’s right there in Genesis. It says, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air—for I am sorry I have made them.’” Imagine the great threshold of the ark—up a long gangplank and to the door. Like a temple, a ship’s door is one where you must step up and over. That lip keeps the water out. You are stepping into a risky place. It is a temple, a refuge, and a cell—the house of God. Jesus’s second disturbing comparison is a thief breaking into a house. “But understand this,” he says, “If the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore, you must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” I cannot hear this warning today without thinking of ICE—thinking of how people are being terrorized in their cars and their workplaces, in courtrooms and churches and even elementary school drop-offs. I think of our friends and neighbors whose homes, because of this terror, have become like small prisons. They stay in their houses for fear of being kidnapped off the street. Defined by fear and violence, their lives have shrunk down to those very walls—to those places. Please, God—break in like a thief. Not with demands for papers, but with a righteous rage. Jesus, come and steal human violence. Steal this corruption and oppression. Clean the place out, leaving only liberation behind. God was disgusted at the corruption of Noah’s time, and I can understand that disgust today. Jesus recognized his own time in that story too, and he reminded his followers of that story so that they would act. Let us not be like those who didn’t expect it. He says, “Let us bring about Isaiah’s prophecy—beat our guns into plowshares, our spears into gardening hooks, and finally to learn war no more.” In Advent, I think an Advent calendar can be a way of practicing threshold. We can stand for a moment each day before the Holy of Holies—that tiny paper door. We commit ourselves once again at the threshold of God’s house. In Kempton Hall today at our Advent Fair, you are invited to make an Advent calendar. Ours have, rather than little doors, an envelope for each day—and there are exquisite images and words with which to fill them. My mother is retired now, so we have to fill the envelopes ourselves. And in doing so, we can practice being both host and guest, imagining with God’s help the new world for which we wait. In God’s house, it is always the end of the world and always the first day of creation. Jesus is born and dying and resurrecting all at once. Let him welcome you across the threshold. Amen.