Advent ... stumbling toward the light

"For a second you catch a whiff of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart…The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.” (Frederick Buechner).

Advent is here, a time of deep longing, fervent hope and joyous expectation, but also one of soul-searching and taking stock. The Old Testament lesson for the first Sunday of Advent is on the somber, searching side:

Oh, that you would rip open the heavens and descend, make the mountains shudder at your presence ... Since before time began no one has ever imagined, No ear heard, no eye seen, a God like you who works for those who wait for him. You meet those who happily do what is right, who keep a good memory of the way you work. But how angry you've been with us!  We've sinned and kept at it so long!  Is there any hope for us? Can we be saved? We're all sin-infected, sin-contaminated. Our best efforts are grease-stained rags. We dry up like autumn leaves—  sin-dried, we're blown off by the wind. No one prays to you or makes the effort to reach out to you  Because you've turned away from us, left us to stew in our sins.  Still, God, you are our Father. We're the clay and you're our potter: All of us are what you made us. (Isaiah 64:1. 4-8)



The prayer at the end is almost child-like in its longing and pleading for a renewed relationship with God. "Still, God, you are our Father", as if the person praying says, "Yes, yes, yes, we admit that we have been unfaithful and ungrateful, that our sin-sick souls have lost their ways, but please remember God, we come to you as your children. Can't you see how much we need you in our lives?"

Other aspects of this deep longing can be heard in this text by German poet, playwright and teacher Rudolf Otto Wiemer (1905-1998):

Let’s assume he is on his way, he of whom you spoke, God, when those prophetic men (whose startling names to learn we toiled in confirmation class) named him “Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace”, when they spoke of “Bethlehem Ephrata” and cried out, “Surely, he has borne our griefs, for a bruised reed he will not break nor quench the dimly burning wick”.

Let’s assume he is on his way. Let’s further assume, God, that we are on your mind: this restlessly flickering star, amidst our constant questions of “Why”, amidst the gloom over the nations, where hourly the blind man listens in the direction of the door, hoping to let him in who is supposed to come in the Name of the Lord, not the legend, not softly falling flurries, not bogus cheerfulness, but himself.

God, if that is what you have in mind for us, if he comes from you, if the hiding place of his birth is not too far from the slums, not far from the bed of the ailing man who wordlessly counts out the present dull days on the calendar if all this is true, let him come. Make him small, so he won’t overlook that which is small. Make him poor, homeless, and exposed to the coldness of the world. God, don’t keep him back in your heaven. Let him come.  (German text by Rudolf Otto Wiemer, 1967; English translation by Fritz Wendt, 1999)

Exposed to the coldness of the world:  According to Paul Krugman of the New York Times, between 1979 and 2005 the income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent; at the same time, the equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent. As we leave "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" behind, we realize that as Advent people we are aliens in a world that in its appeal to greed looks even more pathetic now that more and more of us are worrying about being able to pay our bills. 

Last year, 46.2 million Americans lived below the poverty line. Living in a nation where many people are slipping backward in the wake of a downturn that left 14 million people out of work and pushed unemployment rates to levels not seen in decades, why is it so hard to see that the values of this world stem from a collective ego spinning out of control. "Make your ego porous," said Rilke, "Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything."

Even though he didn't specifically write this for Advent, Carl Daw's hymn comes to mind:

Faith begins by letting go, giving up what had seemed sure, taking risks and pressing on, though the way feels less secure: pilgrimage both right and odd, trusting all our life to God.


Faith endures by holding on, keeping mem’ry’s roots alive so that hope may bear its fruit; promise-fed, our souls will thrive, not through merit we possess but by God’s great faithfulness.


Faith matures by reaching out, stretching minds, enlarging hearts, sharing struggles, living prayer, binding up the broken parts; till we find the commonplace ripe with witness to God’s grace.

Isaiah 64:1-8

"That's the Son of God, boy!" ... Biblical thoughts on our current crisis.

Greg Warren, stand-up comic from St. Louis, Missouri tells this story about growing up:  

Everything in my parents' house is broken. We play chess, and there are six pieces missing. So, we replace them with pieces from my mom's nativity scene. We're playing chess with the Virgin Mary and goats and wise men, and my Uncle Earl cheats. It's like: 'Uncle Earl, that's a pawn. You're not supposed to move him backwards.' 'That's the Son of God, boy! You move him wherever the heck he wants to go.'

It's in this Sunday's gospel text, about the baptism of Jesus, when the Son of God began to move, and mightily so. The Son of God came out of obscurity. He came into the light as John the Baptist baptized him in the muddy waters of the Jordan river, and, with the Father's formal approval, he began to proclaim that the kairos had come: the point at which the Kingdom of God would become visible here and now. Much like the children who tried to tell Greg Warren's Uncle Earl to play by the rules, the Pharisees and the rest of Jerusalem's establishment were worried that their rules were kept. They were none too happy with how the Son of God moved "wherever the heck" he wanted to go.

They had been nervous about the preaching of John the Baptist -- he seemed way too much in line with the Old Testament prophets and their unconditional demands -- but Jesus was a threat to them. Isaiah's words must have been in their ears, words Jesus surely heard as words spoken to him: "I have called you ... to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness".

The powers that be were nervous because they knew that things were not right in their society -- and they knew things had to stay that way so they could continue to profit. The administration of power, worship, agriculture, banking and debt management had been corrupted, and thus the poor became poorer and the rich became richer. When, three years later, Jesus was crucified, it was because he was critical of the socio-economic power arrangements of his time and place -- and as his disciples, we need to follow him and imitate the way he challenged the powers that be.

The administration of power, worship, agriculture, banking and debt management had all been corrupted... does that sound familiar? Henry A. Giroux, not a man of the church but an American cultural critic, observes that we now live in "a brutal and ruthless form of economic Darwinism that shreds the social fabric of the state, eviscerates the importance of the social question and creates the conditions for a society resembling Thomas Hobbes' war of all against all, a survival-of-the-fittest social order", which is characterized by "a machinery of exploitation, cruelty, inequality and militarism".

Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann shows that in Old Testament times a society like ours tended to progress in three steps:

• It begins with a treasured narrative memory of emancipation and covenant (Israel's narrative is about the journey from Egypt to Canaan, while our nation's narrative is about achieving freedom and independence from the King of England), in which power, worship, agriculture, banking and debt were administered in a context of neighborliness. 
• But sooner or later comes an erosion or interruption of that narrative in the form of accumulative acquisitiveness (when a few begin to accumulate a lot of the means and when those few begin to change society's values in ways that ensure their continued wealth) and a reckoning upon such acquisitiveness (usually a divine one, but often hidden under "normal" life events). 
• The third step is society's conversion and a return to neighborly values. 

Brueggemann suggests that our current economic crisis represents the point of reckoning upon acquisitiveness, much like when Jesus predicted the end of Jerusalem's temple and its greedy "temple economy", an elaborate financial system that exploited the poor and ignored those parts of Old Testament law designed to protect them. In 70 A.D., a Roman military force of about 30,000 troops under the command of Titus marched into Jerusalem and began a systematic slaughter of the inhabitants as well as a complete destruction of the Temple and City of Jerusalem, as Jesus predicted 40 years earlier.

Giroux reminds us that the United States has the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world:

Over 44  million people or one in seven Americans live below the poverty line. In recent years, the steepest rise in poverty has taken place among children, with some experts predicting that six million kids will be living in poverty in next decade. ... over 50 million people cannot eat without food stamps, and a stunning 50 percent of US children will use food stamps to eat at some point in their childhood.

He adds that the social state, its state protections, public values and democratic governance, have been allowed to collapse when recent administrations "embraced the logic of the market, and farmed out government responsibilities to private contractors ... Everything is up for sale under this form of economic Darwinism, including prisons, schools, military forces and the temporary faculty hired to fill the ranks of a depleted academy."

In his Christmas oratorio, "For the Time Being", William Auden imagines King Herod's rage over "being tricked" by the wise men, and found a perfect way to express the fear of the powers that be at all times:

[If this child Jesus survives] reason will be replaced by revelation; justice will be replaced by pity as the cardinal virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish. The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Age, when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.

Since that child survived and became a man and went to the cross and came back to life, the Herods of this world continue to tremble. At this point of crisis and reckoning, this nation is invited to convert, away from greed and acquisitiveness and exploitation, back to neighborly values.  The word "repentance" carries in it the idea of changing one's heart.  Let's all become Greg Warren's Uncle Earl and disturb those who think we have to play by their rules.

"That's the Son of God, boy! You move him wherever the heck he wants to go."  It's our call and our mission. It's our promise.

Matthew 3:1-18; Isaiah 42