The word “Advent” comes from the
Latin Adventus which was the name of a
regular administrative event in the ancient world, when the governor would come
to visit. He would dine with the leading
citizens, and hold court to hear appeals.
He would audit the tax collectors, and reward meritorious officials and
punish corrupt ones, and generally put the public’s house in good order. Depending on the governor, it might bring with
it a lightening of unjust taxation, or a fair ruling in a legal dispute. But whatever justice, whatever setting-things
right one could expect from the Adventus
would be limited. Even in the best case,
it would go only as far as the established order allowed.
But Advent in the church is
different. It begins with the announcement
of John in the wilderness that someone is coming who will change everything. He will come with a new government, a new
kingdom. This kingdom could not be more
different from the kingdoms of the self-styled rulers of Galilee and
Judea. It is not even like the kingdom
of their master the Emperor in Rome. It
is the kingdom of heaven— its coming near is the coming-near of God. This Advent is not a scheduled appointment on
the administrative calendar of the powers that be. It is unlooked-for and uninvited, the breaking-in
of the God of Israel into the history of the world.
So even though we keep Advent every
year, it is not simply the repetition of the same old thing. It is about God entering into history and
transforming it into something else, starting something new. And that transformation is ongoing. That is why in every Advent in every generation
the church has said that the cry of the Baptist that “the Kingdom of Heaven has
come near” is about this moment, and demands a response from us.
This Kingdom of Heaven is not
something we can reduce to an intellectual proposition. If you’re talking about how God breaks into
the world, you have to speak symbolically and mythically. You have to appeal to the imagination. And that is what prophets like John do—they awaken
our imaginations with new visions of what God is doing in history, and new possibilities
for us to respond.
Today’s lesson from Isaiah gives us
a picture of such awakening in one of the best-loved symbols of Advent—the tree
of Jesse. Isaiah spoke to the people of
Jerusalem in a time of national defeat, with foreign empires about to swallow
them up. And he said that God showed him
an old, dead, dried out, fire-blackened stump.
It was the stump of Jesse, the father of David, whose name symbolizes
Israel’s ideal king. Isaiah sees
something no one in his historical circumstances would expect, a fresh young branch
sprouting from the roots of Jesse’s stump.
But this new king will be more than
another David. He will not win his
victory by violence, but by the spirit of God’s wisdom and the word of God’s justice.
And the prophet sees a vision of
Jerusalem transformed by this branch, not into a well-ordered, well-administered,
well-defended political entity, but into a paradise that does not seem to be
this world at all. It is like the peace
and harmony of the Garden before Fall, where humans dwelt in childlike
innocence side by side with fierce predators and poisonous snakes; in the peace
and justice of that world the animals themselves will forget the “law of the
jungle” and the wolf shall live with the lamb and the leopard lie down with the
kid.
When I was a child my mother put a
picture of this vision of Isaiah on the wall of my bedroom. It was a reproduction of a painting by Edward
Hicks, who was a self-taught artist and itinerant Quaker preacher in the early
years of the American republic. Over the
course of his life, Hicks painted at least 64 different versions of this scene,
The Peaceable Kingdom of Isaiah. They all depict small children playing in the
midst of a mixed herd of lions and cows, sheep and leopards, bears and
goats. Interestingly, in many of the
paintings you can see in the background a scene from Hick’s own history, of William
Penn and other English colonists signing a peace treaty with the Native
Americans. And the landscape of Hicks’ vision
is always recognizably Eastern North America.
That’s how it is when God breaks into the human imagination—it is an
event not confined in time, one that is liable to break out with new meaning, in
unlooked-for ways and undreamed-of places, like a branch shooting from a withered
stump.
John the Baptist in the Gospel of
Matthew is also like a fresh branch from an old stump. His arrival, it is said, was foretold by the
prophets, and his appearance is like a description of Elijah of old. But when he preaches that the Kingdom of
Heaven has come near, he is not referring to the wisdom of the past, or
dreaming of the future. He is announcing
that the time is now for a decision. Now
is the time to repent—to turn our lives around and start acting as if the
Kingdom is really here. Now is the time
for the visions that the prophets sowed in our imaginations to bear
fruit--because the one who is coming after John, who is more powerful than he,
is all about making us fruitful.
Edward Hicks wasn’t the only white
American to look at the landscape of this continent and see a vision of a
peaceable kingdom. Generations of us have
imagined this as a virgin land onto which we could project our hopes, and out
of which we could give birth to our dreams.
When ranchers and farmers and gold prospectors came to California they
thought they saw a land unaltered by human hands. That was part of their rationale for taking
it from the native inhabitants. “After
all”, they said, “they weren’t doing anything with it.” What they didn’t know was that the land they
found had been carefully, deliberately husbanded by human beings for
centuries.
And one of the main tools those
human beings used was fire: fire, that destroyed the pests and pathogens; fire,
that germinated the wildflowers whose seeds they harvested; fire, that killed
the smaller, brushier species, like poison oak, but did not harm the oak groves
that bore the acorns that were their staple food.
And because the indigenous
inhabitants of California set regular fires, and allowed lightning-fires to burn,
there never built up the volume of dead wood and grass, and small, flammable
brush, that causes catastrophic infernos.
But after 150 years of management that immediately suppresses any and
all fires, the forests of California and the rest of the western United States
are a vast tinderbox. Full of dead and
dying trees, choked with brush, our wildlands need nothing more than to burn,
but every fire that does occur become a conflagration, like the Rim Fire that
consumed tens of thousands of acres last summer in Yosemite National Park.
I can think of no more fitting
image than those forests for a Christianity without repentance, one that is all
comfort and no crisis, one that speaks only of God’s love and never of God’s
judgment, one that fits us to be nice hard-working servants of a
well-administered church, but never announces the presence of the Kingdom, that
never urges us to the moment of decision.
John at the Jordan calls us to be baptized into that moment, to say
“yes” to the wildness of the Spirit that thins out the blighted trees from our
orchards, and winnows the chaff from our grain, that burns away that which does
not bear fruit, and fertilizes our souls with the ashes.
What comes to us at Advent is not a
yearly task to be properly administered, nor is it simply the retelling of a
beautiful imaginative story. It is a new
moment to welcome Christ, to invite him to transform our history. This means letting his light shine not just
on what we choose to show him, but also and especially what we fear most--loss,
suffering, violence, disorder and death, the darker corners of who we are, and
what the world is under the powers-that-be, and our helplessness to change it. If this seems too hard, it is because we do
not see that he comes with the Kingdom, with the power and the judgment of God. And if seems too risky, it is because we do
not understand that his judgment is nothing but perfect love, and that the only
power he seeks is the power to make us bear fruit.
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