Last Tuesday, after work, I picked up my daughter from swim team,
and we drove home. My wife was seeing
clients that evening, so I made us all dinner.
Meg arrived and we ate, and while she was cleaning up the kitchen, I took
the dog out into the dark for a walk. We
went to our favorite place, a large, undeveloped field behind Casa Grande High
School. I had the bill of my baseball cap
pulled down low, and I guess I’d been walking with my eyes on the ground,
thinking about all I had to get done before the Thanksgiving holiday, and maybe
there were some low clouds or haze on the horizon—I’m not really sure.
But, for whatever reason, without even really thinking about
it I had gained the impression that I was trudging along under an overcast
sky. Because when the dog and I came out
into the open field I happened to glance up and was surprised—no, I was
actually startled, to see stars. There
were Auriga and Taurus and the Pleiades, and Orion just rising in the southern
sky. I’d been out walking for ten
minutes when I looked up for the first time, and when I did it was as if the
lid was lifted off of my mind, and I was pulled up out of myself into a larger,
more brilliant and beautiful world.
The scriptures and hymns of Advent tell us that something
like this is going to happen, to all of us, on a cosmic scale. It is a somber message, in a way, because it
says that our present state, the conventional viewpoint and collective
assumptions that we take for granted and that color everything we know and do,
are astray in a shadowland of ignorance. But is also an image of hope—the hope that, as
if out of nowhere, God will come, bringing a new light to reveal a new world.
The idea that God is coming is a bit frightening. Because whatever it would be like to meet God,
it isn’t a possibility we have taken all that seriously. Now by “taking seriously” I don’t necessarily
mean being stiff and pious and uptight.
Not if you take Jesus as a guide to what it means to be centered in
God. It might actually involve being a
lot less anxious and driven and a lot more open to just hanging out with all
different kinds of people, sharing a table and conversation about the things
that matter most. After all, in the
Gospel stories the enemies of Jesus are the ones who think he doesn’t take God
seriously enough. And, as he demonstrates,
they are really just taking themselves more seriously than they should.
Nevertheless, Jesus was in the line of the Hebrew prophets
who spoke on behalf of God to make certain demands. There were ethical demands for a high
standard of generosity and truthfulness, of compassion, and justice. And there were what you might call devotional
demands, because God loves her people passionately and cares for them tenderly,
said the prophets, and desires their love in return. So the prospect of God’s coming in power and
majesty has to make us stop for a minute and ask ourselves how wholeheartedly
we have responded to those demands. And I
venture to say many of you would probably have to join me in saying, “not
very.”
But this
isn’t merely a symptom of our secular, materialistic age. Isaiah says to God about the Israelites in
his day,
“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;”
Isaiah
knows that the presence of God brings with it the painful recognition of how
tenuous our faith really is, of how easily we can be blown off our deepest intuitions
and noblest intentions. But for all
that, Isaiah hopes with all his heart that God will come, because the presence
of God, even in awesome judgment, is a thousand times better than an endless
absence that would leave us forever as we are.
Because it is God alone who has the power to inspire new faith and
commitment in his people; it is God alone, the potter who formed us from the
clay, who can reshape us into something new.
And from
one perspective the New Testament says pretty much the same thing. It is full of a heightened sense of hope and
expectation of the decisive coming of God.
This will be a trial for which only the grace of God can prepare and
strengthen us, but it will also be a day of deliverance. It will be fearful and awesome, but only
because God will be personally present, forgotten and forsaken no more. The New Testament gives the same summons that
prophets like Isaiah gave, to be ready for an overwhelming, transforming encounter, and you could
say it doesn’t really change the basic message to say that the redeemer we are expecting is Jesus Christ.
But in
another sense it is completely different, because this Jesus has already come. In his brief ministry to Israel the Gospel
writers perceived the decisive intervention of God in history, which shook the
powers of the present darkness and filled the world with the new word of
light. And yet even as Jesus proved
their faith and joy in the fulfillment of God’s promises, they had to account
for the deadly opposition of the leaders of their own nation. They could not help but notice how their good
news left many people cold. They saw how
the world ground on, with the same dogged resistance to its own healing.
For a
century or more New Testament scholars have been having an argument about what
the first Christians thought about the future, about where it was all going,
and how long it all would take. As near
as I can make it out, it has been such a struggle to interpret because the authors
of these texts were also struggling.
They were wrestling with words and with the Spirit, searching for a way
to describe their unprecedented relationship to time. Because how do you speak about living at the
intersection of thanksgiving and expectation, of remembrance and hope?
Today’s
lesson from the Gospel of Mark stitches together different traditions that seem
to say different things about what to expect.
You might read it as describing an apocalyptic event, something cosmic
and glorious and final. But then again, it might be silent and subtle
as the yearly swelling buds of a fig tree softening toward summer. And the passage closes with the repeated theme,
as insistent as a drumbeat or a ticking clock—stay awake, keep alert, be vigilant, be watchful, keep awake--as if there’s a danger that the climax of history
will arrive and you’ll sleep through it, never knowing that it came.
As I
searched in my own experience for an analogy, to put into my own words this
paradoxical existence in time, the best I could come up with was childhood. A child has already arrived in the world. Its very being is the fruition of a
miraculous and improbable journey. She already
is completely who she is, utterly singular and unprecedented. A child lives in an immediate present, in a “now”
that is only dimly aware of the enormity of the past, and the onrushing
future. And yet a child is also a
promise of the adult, of the fully mature person he will become. He is the hope that the world can still be
something new.
And as I
thought about this, it struck me that each of our scriptures today contains an
emphatic statement about the Fatherhood of God. They could as easily say “mother” because
the emphasis is on parenthood, not gender.
And our great model, our redeemer, is a Son, into whose brother- and sisterhood God
has called us. The great “waking up”
that Jesus makes possible is a life in which taking God seriously is a kind of
play. It is a life completely immersed
in the moment, in all the suffering and wonder, hard lessons and joyful discoveries
of childhood. At the same time it is
trusting that someone older and wiser, who loves us, is taking care of the big
picture. And it means knowing, with a
sense of awe and mystery, that we are growing up into God.
After all,
isn’t that what we’re expecting, on this first Sunday of Advent—the birth of a
child?
No comments:
Post a Comment