Homilies for Advent

1 Advent 28 November 1999 St. George’s, Le Mars, Iowa Mark 13.24-37

“Keep awake!” Mark 13:37

Hurry Up and Wait!

Having to come up with a homily on today’s gospel reminds me of a story that used to circulate at Duke University when I was in graduate school there. Years before there had been a required New Testament course for undergraduates, and from time immemorial the final exam question had asked for a rendition of the missionary journeys of St. Paul. One year there was a student who did little work for the course but planned to sail through the final examination by memorizing and reproducing an essay on the expected topic. When he got the exam he was horrified to read “Write an essay in which you critically analyze the Sermon on the Mount.” Thinking fast, the desperate student began his essay: “Far be it from me to criticize the words of our Lord and Savior; instead, I shall examine the missionary journeys of St. Paul...” It being a Methodist university where piety mattered the student got his A. Like him, I’d like to duck the text at hand, but I’ll try to resist that temptation.

In the past few weeks we’ve meditated on the theme of being prepared, being ready, being awake and alert for the coming of God. Here, although we shift in our new year from Matthew to Mark, the theme continues. Various futures to be awaited are overlaid in the vision of today’s text, yet the chronology with which events will unfold is obscure, even to Jesus. But one layer I want to focus on is this: Jesus reads his own confrontation with the religious authorities of Israel in terms of those parables of unexpected and unwelcome returns. The long-absent God has at last returned in the person of Jesus but the official keepers of the faith, the Scribes and the Pharisees, are calamitously unprepared. The watchmen are asleep on duty. God has arrived in person, and they’re blind to him. Indeed, as Jesus seems to see before they do, their response to him will be that of the tenants in the vineyard who kill the owner’s son to make the vineyard their own.

The men who plotted to have Jesus put to death and put out of the way for good were supposed to be waiting for God. They knew Isaiah’s cry, the one we heard this morning: O that you would tear open the heavens and come down! But that was the very last thing they wanted and awaited. Whatever they were doing as they sought to safeguard the religious integrity of an Israel under gentile occupation, they weren’t waiting for God. To them it appeared their religious duty, but it was a supreme indifference to the real coming of God.

I don’t think these Scribes and Pharisees were particularly wicked people. When, as he often does, Jesus calls them hypocrites, I don’t think we should take this in the modern sense of those who believe one thing while pretending to believe another. That would be too easy, a way to disown these characters who are really far too close to us for comfort. They cared about good things like the stability of the nation, worship being carried out decently and in order, about people behaving themselves and doing what God commands. This Galilean with his healings, his enigmatic parables, and his all too straightforward unreasonable denunciations of them, was capturing the imagination of the people, stirring up discontent, threatening to undermine the precarious accommodation with Rome and bring on a catastrophe. Surely God needed them to do this bit of dirty work and save God’s people from this lawless troublemaker. Like everyone, they cared about comfort and security, about peace and propriety, even if this meant making sure that God could not show up to make a mess of things. They wanted the heavens safely sealed, with no chance of a God breaking in to put at risk all they hold dear. As Jesus says: they cared about their religious traditions more than they cared about God. The example of the Scribes and Pharisees shows us how not to be prepared for God’s arrival. But how to be prepared?

When I was a boy being raised by dedicated Evangelicals we believed in the imminent return of Christ: Jesus could return suddenly, at any moment, and we were supposed to be always vigilant, expecting and looking forward to that return. It was a bit tricky knowing how to take this. It was a mark of piety sincerely to want Christ to return in your own lifetime (I never did), and to be confident that this would happen (I was afraid it would), but at the same time it was going too far to believe of some particular time, next Tuesday at noon, for instance, that that was going to be the time: “but about that day or hour no one knows...only the Father.” Looking back at all this now I’m afraid that this call to alert waiting for the coming of God was mostly a way to get people to behave themselves. At least that’s what it boiled down to for young people like me. The question was always: Would you want to be doing that if Jesus were to return!? Would you want to be there when Jesus comes back?! And it turned out that the things in question were just the things that good people should be avoiding anyway: I didn’t want to be in the middle of a big fight with my sister when Jesus showed up; I didn’t want Jesus to come back and find me at the movies, or at a dance, or in a bar...I didn’t want Jesus arriving unexpectedly and saying “Gotcha!” Surely this is trivializes Jesus’ command to keep awake; it makes God tame and safe, a guardian of the status quo.

For others, many now as the new millennium dawns, to be ready for the coming of God is to anticipate a cosmic extravaganza, to eagerly await an ultimate showdown between good and evil, preferably one that vindicates good people like us and metes out rightful punishment to bad people like them. This kind of waiting, even if it doesn’t become a matter of stockpiling food and guns for a sociopolitical Armageddon, or devolve into a suicidal rendezvous with a spacecraft hiding in the tail of a comet, still tends toward being an expression of resentment. It’s disconnected from Christian faith’s confession that God’s ultimate judgment takes place not ahead of us in some future out of bad science fiction, but in the historical past, on a cross outside the walls of Jerusalem. This, like the version I grew up with, profoundly misses the point of Jesus’ command to wait and watch.

Karen and I are great fans of the PBS program The Vicar of Dibley, a situation comedy set in a Church of England parish remarkably similar to St. George’s. One day the vicar quotes Jesus saying something about rich men having a hard time entering the Kingdom of Heaven to her Senior Warden, David Horton. Horton responds, saying “Jesus had a lot of damn wacky ideas!” It seems to me that, if nothing else, the Senior Warden had at least the beginning of a real understanding of Jesus. He saw that this Jesus won’t do as an inspiring, if archaic, model of conventional morals and civic virtue. This Jesus said things that if taken seriously would call into question everything about us, all our careful strategies for being right and righteous. The God we wait for, the God whose once and future advent in Christ we celebrate today, comes in a way that makes no sense by this world’s lights.

The best way to find out what waiting and being alert consists in is to listen to Jesus himself. Recall Jesus’ condemnation of the Scribes and Pharisees: what’s the evidence for the charge that they care not for God but for their own way of doing things? I think the answer is this: Jesus accuses them of caring more about their religion, its forms and traditions, than about their fellow human beings. These were the religious leaders who were outraged that Jesus ate with society’s outcasts while having no concern that these people were social outcasts. These are the religious leaders who were more impressed with the fact that Jesus heals someone on the Sabbath than with the fact that someone is healed. Jesus goes about the countryside healing lepers and blind people, returning once-dead children to grieving parents, freeing people from demonic powers, feeding hungry multitudes...but these leaders, shepherds of the house of Israel, care only that he fails to show proper respect for the ceremonial law, that he’s associated himself with the morally, socially and religiously suspect. They revealed that they had no real desire to pay attention to God by showing they had no interest in what God cares about: human beings in their lostness, hurt and need. Jesus vividly sees the impending cross; he knows the depth of God’s implacable love, what he is ready to give -- and ask -- for the sake of human need. Had Jesus’ opponents made this concern, God’s concern, their own, surely when Jesus appeared among them they would have been awake. They would have rejoiced to welcome their long-awaited messiah, as surprising the form of his appearing might have been to them.

Let me quote another Senior Warden, a real one a bit closer than Dibley: she was discussing the possibility of engaging in a minor ecclesiastical irregularity -- I think it was a baptism during Lent, or something like that -- she summed up her view on the matter in two words: “People first!” As David Horton, that good man of the world would tell us, that’s a damn wacky idea. But the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men.

If we want to be attentive to God, to be awaiting his coming, we’d better focus on what we know he cares about. We’d better be willing to give up whatever needs to be given up if that’s what it takes to do God’s work in this world. From last week’s appalling lesson in Matthew’s Gospel we know what that work is; we know what God cares about above all things: remember who the goats are and who the sheep are.

There’s an expression from the military, probably from World War Two: “Hurry up and wait!” To our ears it’s paradoxical: the troops are always being ordered about, forced to quickly march off to some location just so they can wait around doing nothing. “Hurry up so you can do...nothing!”. For us “waiting” connotes not action but inactivity, an in-between time, in which we do nothing of significance because it’s not yet time to act. But, as St. Paul told the Corinthian Christians in this morning’s epistle, our task is to be waiting for the revealing of our Lord, Jesus Christ; he’s not telling us to bide our time. He’s telling us to hurry up and wait: to get to work because Christ has come and he’ll come again.

So it seems to me we have a crucial part of an answer to the question. To be faithfully waiting and watching for God’s coming is to be at work building that Kingdom in which the hungry are fed, the loveless are loved, the unacceptable are accepted; the broken in heart, mind and body are picked up and made whole; the good news that God cares and acts is proclaimed -- in word and action -- to all manner of human need. We know that we’re trying to do what by any reasonable human calculation is impossible, but that’s fine; it’s God’s work of reconciliation we need to hurry up and be at. It’s not one more human plan to make things a bit better. We need to escape the temptation to push God’s Kingdom off into a realm of wonderful but impractical ideals, or to send it away into an eschatological future that’s always coming and never arriving, but to live it now, in all the ambiguities of our present situation and with all the inadequacies of our present selves. We need to ask: are we living in ways that make sense only if it’s true that Christ has come and Christ will come again? Only then are we awake and not asleep. To be alert to anything else, no matter how valuable -- to correct theology, to morality, to beautiful form in worship -- without being alert to this is to be asleep, not to be on watch for God’s coming. Our prayer to God must be that he will give us insight and courage so we do not delay but get busy and wait, that he will give us the faith to keep awake.

Amen.

First Advent

December 2001

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Matthew 24.37-44

Ready and Waiting

Warnings that the end is near, that there is divine judgment impending, that the jig is up and we'd better be ready…or else: they've pretty much lost their power to snap us out of our everyday complacencies. The placard-bearing beatnik calling us to repent because the

end is nigh is a staple of New Yorker cartoons, not a sight that focuses our minds. The Second Coming is the stuff of jokes: there's good news for the Pope: Jesus has returned and he's on the phone; the bad news: he's calling from Salt Lake. Or the feminist version: God's coming back…and she's really ticked off! Or, not funny but sad, it’s the province of the deranged, who have in it found who knows what refuge from reality: last month I was doing my duty as an alternate to the diocesan convention by walking around downtown Des Moines. I came across a fellow, obviously mentally ill, wandering those empty Saturday morning streets spastically grasping his hindquarters and crying out "Christ is coming! You're going to hell!" (I don't think he was one of the delegates…) Nothing in this promises the power to change our lives, to make us see the world anew. What can we make of Jesus' admonition: "Be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour!"? What does it mean to wait for him, to be ready for his appearing?

I won’t say a lot about Matthew’s text itself. For years tradition has regarded Jesus here as speaking about his second coming, about the rapture of the Church followed by a cataclysmic end of the world. “As the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage…they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them away…Two will be in the field, one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together, one will be taken and one left.” The consensus of scholarly opinion has, I think, shifted. Jesus’ words, it now appears, are much more rooted in the time and place in which he spoke them. Jesus is talking not about the end of the world, but about events very much in the history of Israel, events that are now past, part of our history, not our future. He is, in particular, talking about the judgment and disaster that would surely befall Israel if, as then seemed inevitable, they were to reject him. His way of love and peace forsaken, the Jews would strive to throw off the Roman yoke by force, the legions would come, the Temple would be destroyed, the blood would flow. He is telling his disciples to be ready for this, to be ready to flee the general destruction, to head for the hills to survive, to be the remnant from which God would create the new Israel with Jesus, its vindicated messiah, as its king. We know that what Jesus foretold came about. Jesus predicts a military disaster from which one might escape, if at all, only by the skin of his teeth. So watch out! Be ready to run!

We know what Jesus was telling his disciples to be ready for and it can’t be what we should be ready for, since it happened in A.D. 70 at the end of the second Jewish Revolt against Rome. Yet we transpose these words for Advent because, like the disciples then, we too must wait, watch and be ready. For us, the waiting and watching and readiness must be both like and unlike what Jesus asked of his disciples. Unlike them, we know that Jesus’ warnings about the destruction of Jerusalem and the demolition of the Temple were, in due course, fulfilled. And, unlike them, we know the God of Israel did vindicate Jesus, for we know of his resurrection. Still, with them, we look forward to the completion, to the day when the great work of reconciliation that is God in Christ will be complete, the world’s wounds healed, and the Kingdom of God made fully present. We live “between the times:” The glory of God’s salvation are already – and not yet – revealed. The resurrected Jesus is present with us, but he is ascended, and present with us only under the sign of his absence. The powers of evil and sin and death were decisively defeated by Jesus crucified, dead and resurrected, yet their effects are all around us.

So where are we? Together we say: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. At all times but most explicitly each Advent we’re waiting and watching for his coming. He who defeats death, evil, and sin has promised to return but he is the God who, in infinite humility, refuses to be present but by way of human words and deeds. For now, it would seem absurdly enough, our faulty flesh, our weak and hesitating hands, is all he has to do his work, to keep his promise, to redeem the world.

In his book The Frog Prince: A Fairy Tale for Consenting Adults, Stephen Mitchell writes that when someone makes a promise, he states that he will stand by his word but, even more, he states that he stands inside his word: that the act has already been performed, since nothing but time stands between the performance and his statement that he will do it. Promise and performance are not, Mitchell says, two separate things, but two stages of the same thing, like child and adult. When someone makes you a promise, he is assuring you that however the world changes, his word will not change. Thus he is creating the future inside the present.

That’s how we can think about our waiting for the appearing of Jesus. We’re living into his promise and creating the future in the present. We are keepers of his promise. Waiting, watching, making ready is finding a way of life that makes sense not in terms of the dying past, but of the future unseen but guaranteed in his promise. That means bearing witness against the darkness of this age even when doing so seems pointless. It means living in hope.

“Nuclear Stations of the Cross” is a Good Friday service that’s held each year, deep in the Nevada desert, at an off ramp of Highway 95 alongside the barbed wire fence that marks the perimeter of the Nevada Test Site. This is a nuclear weapons facility where, since the early 1950’s over 1,000 nuclear devices have been detonated and where subcritical weapons testing continues. Many of the participants have spent days walking the seventy miles from Las Vegas. For them, this is a place and time to bear witness for Christ, for life, and against what they regard as our culture’s covenant with death. One of the worshippers afterwards wrote this account of what he experienced there:

Nearing the halfway point of the service I began to feel hopeless

about the futility of such a tiny, prayerful action against the force

behind continuing nuclear proliferation. Much as I often find the

crucifixion of Jesus too awful to contemplate, the environmental

damage and human misery caused by fallout and contamination

seems too big and too horrible to fit inside my head. But then,

answering this despair, came the reading at the sixth station: "In

the end we are left with nothing but small, apparently insignificant

things, gestures of hope made a mockery by the enormity of evil.

Perhaps the bomb does make foolishness of our attempted

faithfulness to life... unless we can believe, with Veronica, that

when we minister to each other, we carry away the image of

Jesus' face in our hearts.”

Our world is wounded, broken, dying. In it we watch for the wounded healer, the lord of life. We testify to a future that is not apparent, known now only in faith in the Christ who went down into death. To watch in readiness for him is to do what Mary Christopher told us we should do at yesterday’s retreat: to decorate ourselves with hope.

Seventeen year old Johnny Thaljiya, a Palestinian Christian left Vespers one day not long ago, walking into Bethlehem’s Manger Square, the place where, tradition holds, Jesus was born. Seeing his cousin standing in front of a souvenir store he stopped to talk. An Israeli soldier, sent there to put down the Intifada, shot him in the head and he died. The next day, instead of the service he was scheduled to assist at – he aspired to go to theological college and become a priest – the Church of the Nativity held his funeral. Because of his death and those of several others in the past weeks Bethlehem has become a city of mourning

What can it mean to be waiting and watching for Jesus when the innocent lay dead in the streets where he, the Prince of Peace himself, was born? To be ready for the coming of Christ is to be making peace, to live in constant rejection of the law of retribution and retaliation, to be in active denial of the law that says demand what’s yours at all costs. It’s to be ready to give up, to lose, to lose oneself.

You can guess what sort of souvenirs are for sale in that shop for the benefit of European and American tourists. A crèche purchased in the City of David; that’s probably a big seller: the little animals, Joseph, Mary, the Wise Men and Shepherds, maybe some angels. And of course the infant Jesus in his cradle. Somewhere I read about some other store in some other place that was selling crèches (I’m sure it wasn’t Hands Around the World). Beside one of them a small sign said “Lift baby Jesus to see price.” Beyond the commercial crassness lies something true: the ruined lives, the endless hate, the lust for revenge; it seems hopeless. What will it cost to take away the world’s fury, to heal its wounds, to forgive its sins? Nothing less than the life of God himself; lifted up on the Cross.

In the denouement of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (or, as it’s called in the unfortunate American translation, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) Harry awakens in the Hogwarts infirmary, recovering from his terrible battle with the evil sorcerer Voldemort and his minion, Quirrell. Voldemort killed Harry’s parents when he was an infant; he tried to kill him too, but left only a sinister mark on Harry’s forehead. The wise old wizard Professor Dumbledore, head of the school, comes to Harry’s bedside and Harry has some questions for him:

Voldemort said he only killed my mother because she tried to stop him from killing me. But why did he want to kill me in the first place?

This (for reasons to be made clear in subsequent volumes) is a question Dumbledore cannot answer. So Harry asks another:

But why couldn’t Quirrell touch me?

Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign…to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us…protection forever. It is in your very skin. It was agony to touch a person marked by something so good.

In passing, one can only wonder what’s going on in the heads of those folk who are so worried that reading Harry Potter will inspire children to become witches that they have no concern for them to hear this great word, this Christian message of the power of self-sacrificing love.

Here we are, each of us, in our own way, touched by the love of God in Jesus, each bearing his mark, trying to grow into that skin. It’s not always comfortable. We don’t always feel completely at home in it. Sometimes it hurts. We are, by training and inclination, sinners: all too willing to let the world have its way, to acquiesce in the way of fear and hate, to deny the gift of God’s very life.

St. Paul in this morning’s epistle admonishes us: “Now is the moment for you to awake from sleep!….The night is far gone, the day is near!” It’s high time for us to forgo the pleasures of being in the right, to end the dream of security that comes from having power over others. It’s past time to abandon the sense of confident identity that comes from drawing boundaries that exclude the unworthy, and assure us of our own worth. Paul tells us the way to be watching, the way to be ready, is to be building that kingdom of love and peace. It’s a kingdom where all duties and obligations are given up; in it no one owes anyone anything, except to love one another. It’s a kingdom that flies in the face of what’s reasonable in this present darkness, for it’s the kingdom that’s hidden in the promise of the coming Christ. It’s only just beginning to appear as we grow into his life of self-giving love, making it our own. “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” And now we are in Christ and God is reconciling the world to himself in us as we make ready for his coming.

Therefore, as good old St. Paul would say, let us put on Christ. The day awaits. Wake up, get out of bed and get dressed. Let us wear the mark of his love. Something else Mary said yesterday was that before any lights or tinsel go up this Advent, we should decorate ourselves with the joy of Christ’s glory. Thomas Merton said it another way:

Make ready for the Christ,

Whose smile,

Like lightning,

Sets free the song of everlasting glory

That now sleeps,

In your paper flesh,

Like dynamite.

Amen.

1st Sunday in Advent

30 November 2003

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Luke 21:25-31

A Space for Waiting

Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near! (Luke 21:28b)

Where is God when you need him? In José Saramago’s horrific novel Blindness a man pulls up at a traffic light and suddenly, unexpectedly completely loses his sight. Over the next weeks the plague randomly strikes one person after another; the government’s attempts to contain the epidemic are ineffectual as soldiers, doctors and officials lose their sight. Society collapses; bands of the helpless blind roam the streets looking for food. Yet one person, an eye-doctor’s wife, is inexplicably spared. She is the one sighted person left on earth. With great courage she devotes herself to caring for the blind, leading her husband and friends through horrendous scenes she alone can see. Near the story’s end she enters a church; like every public building it is crammed with the starving, filthy sightless seeking shelter. Above and around them, what she alone can see is that in every painting, someone, before going blind himself, has painted across the eyes; to every statue, even the one of the man nailed to the cross, someone had fastened a bandage covering the eyes. All the sacred images in the church are blind, as blind as the hopeless humans they overlook. The doctor’s wife describes what she sees to her husband; he says “that priest must have committed the worst sacrilege of all times and all religions, the fairest and most radically human, coming here to declare that…God does not deserve to see.”

Can we in any sanity hope for a God who sees our world as it is and sets it aright? A God whose goodness can be vindicated, despite everything? Or has God finally given up on us? To answer “yes” is, no doubt, for us to give up on God. This is the question for Advent. Despite everything, can we hope for deliverance; at this late date can the promise “Your redemption draws near!” be anything but empty?

The same questions would have haunted the crowds Jesus speaks to in the grounds of the Temple in Jerusalem. What he said must have been as strange to them as it is to us. Jesus, of course, speaks in the language of Jewish Apocalyptic: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.” I grew up hearing this sort of text through a wooden literalism, as making straightforward though bizarre predictions about future cosmic events, a kind of biblical science fiction about the “end of the world.” But this is the standard way for Hebrew prophets to talk about the great historical events God works by way of Israel. Jesus’ audience, unlike later generations, knew not to take the metaphors literally. The language is poetic, but as Marianne Moore said, imaginary gardens can contain real toads; plain truth inhabits metaphorical extravagance. Wonders in the heavens represent world-changing events on the ground, in the socio-political and military fortunes of Israel and the nations.

Jesus’ words shocked in his all too literal predictions about the city in which he stood: he announces not, it seems, the fulfillment of Israel’s messianic longings, the imminent vindication of Israel by God, but the opposite: defeat and desolation. Jerusalem will be besieged and the Temple destroyed: not one stone left upon another. Holy Jerusalem and its Temple, the very sign and symbol of God’s presence with his people, will be reduced to ruin. This is an extraordinarily inappropriate way to proclaim that God oversees the course of events, that God’s kingdom is at hand, that redemption approaches. His audience looks in hope for a messiah appointed by God to lead them to victory over their oppressors; instead they hear their defeat announced by the man they hoped would be that messiah. The people of Israel look to their God to overpower their adversaries; all Jesus offers them is powerlessness. Immediately before today’s lesson Jesus tells them they will see Jerusalem besieged, but they should not take up arms in eager expectation of God’s great battle, the final victory prophesized in Zechariah. Instead, it will be the time to head for the hills, to flee, not fight. He tells them that Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles, her people put to the sword, captured or exiled. He tells them the vindication of God lies ahead: the Son of Man will come in power and glory but there’s no way to it except God’s way, the way that insists on our powerlessness.

Consider where Jesus stood, uttering his apocalyptic prophecies there in the Temple precincts; where as a first century Jew he inevitably saw himself located: At the center of the world, Israel, God’s land of covenant promise, the nation of kings and priests, the light to the nations. At the center of Israel, Jerusalem, the holy city, city of God’s peace. In the center of Jerusalem, the Temple, the sign of God’s presence on Earth. In the center of the Temple the Holy of Holies, in the center of the Holy of Holies the ark of the covenant, on each side of it a cherubim and between them…an empty space. No idol, no discernible deity, just the emptiness, the sign of the God who is present when and where and how he chooses, the God not of our making, not in our control, the God who does not endorse our dreams of empowerment and security but who comes to us in our helplessness. It is most often under the aspect of powerlessness that God chooses to fill that space, to make himself known to us. He comes to us as a helpless infant, born in a backwater, and under suspicious circumstances. As Jesus, man of sorrows, companioned with the unwanted, having no place to call his own. As failed messiah, rejected, betrayed, accused, dumb before his interrogators, helpless, put to shameful death, and unceremoniously disposed of by the managers of the world’s piety and power.

In Advent we take our places with Jesus in that powerlessness. Our call is to focus on the fact that we yet wait for the coming of the God who saves. We don’t much care for waiting. Maybe men especially; make me wait and you make me mad. (Just ask my wife.) For waiting is about not being in control. The helpless frustration of waiting in airports, waiting for test results, waiting for delayed loved ones, waiting in hospital waiting rooms, waiting in traffic…our impotence made too plain; we can do nothing to make happen what we need to happen. Having to wait injures pride: make me cool my heals, make me get in line, put me on hold, that reminds me I’m not in charge, that my power does not avail.

In Advent we examine ourselves. We ask whether we can still believe in God’s goodness, so long denied and delayed. Like the people of Jesus’ Jerusalem we look for God’s vindication, for some surety that God cares, God saves, God sees. Sometimes the time of waiting is rich in expectation; we’re gifted with hope in the coming kingdom, we almost see redemption dawning. But as often we wait for explanations not forthcoming, for hints of God’s power at work in this world, if only behind the scenes, at the controls of some subtle cosmic plan in which everything makes sense, and everything is for the best. Easy answers worn away, we find ourselves helpless, waiting, mostly bereft of a satisfactory accounting. Nothing of much weight to say to those who, like José Saramago, gesture toward a world that seems empty of any God worth knowing and reject the possibility of a God who casts a merciful eye on humanity’s travail.

And yet…it’s possible we’ve got things a bit backwards. As we live into these silent, empty spaces in which we wait on God maybe the questions that should press upon us are not those we ask and God does not answer. Maybe what to listen for are the questions God puts to us here and now, in the time of waiting, in the Advent time of his apparent absence. I think the Son of Man, resurrected, glorified and vindicated by God even now divests himself of his power. I think Jesus steps back to make a space for us, asking us to take his place, to be his presence is an otherwise godforsaken world. The man on the cross might see but choose, with infinite humility, to do so though our inconstant eyes. Returning home to peaceful, rural New Hampshire after a visit to New York City, Jane Kenyon wrote:

After three days and nights of rich food and late talk in overheated rooms, of walks between mounds of garbage and human forms bedded down for the night under rags, I come back to my dooryard, to my own wooden step. At the Cloisters I indulged in piety while gazing at a painted lindenwood Pieta -- Mary holding her pierced and dessicated son across her knees; but when a man stepped close under the tasseled awning of the hotel, asking for "a quarter for someone down on his luck," I quickly turned my back. Now I hear tiny bits of bark and moss break off under the bird's beak and claw, and fall onto already-fallen leaves. "Do you love me?" said Christ to his disciple. "Lord, you know that I love you." "Then feed my sheep."

(“Back From The City,” in The Boat Of Quiet Hours, 1986)

Rowan Williams wrote that God the Father is not shown in the world in acts of power, but only in Jesus (Resurrection, pp. 85-6). But then in what acts of power is Jesus shown in this world? Perhaps not in acts of power, but only in our small acts of faith and love done in his name.

Amen.

Second Sunday in Advent

4 December 1994

St. George's Episcopal Church Le Mars, Iowa

Luke 3:1-6

The Power of Distraction

Tuesday evening I came home and turned on the TV. "NBC Dateline" was on and Woody Allen was being interviewed. I'm a Woody Allen fan, so I watched. After some predictable questions about child custody battles and movie making, Bob Cox, the interviewer, asked "What do you have faith in?"

The question came out of left field. It was one of those moments when grace seems to nudge the regular course of events off track, creating a silence into which something totally unexpected might enter. It wasn't the sort of question Woody Allen was ready to answer. He hesitated, squirming a bit, obviously thinking 'what sort of question is this?' Finally, he answers: "What do I have faith in? I have faith in the power of distraction."

The world, he said, is an unhappy, painful place; the best we can do is find distraction from it in romance and art. This cynical, sad answer was, I think, pretty honest, one we need to pay attention to. It's the voice of a certain wisdom, of a forlorn resignation, the sober counsel of those who have given up foolish hopes for profound help and healing in favor of a mature appraisal of things in the cold light of day. It's the voice of lowered expectations and if not despair, at least of something coming close to it, for it's the counsel of a world into which no grace breaks. We'd better grab whatever peace and pleasure we can find in this life, says this worn, worldly advice. There's nothing wonderful to wait for. I suppose there's nothing particularly modern about this point of view. Even if Woody Allen does us the service of being honest and clear about it, it's common to the human condition.

No doubt, there were many in first century Israel resigned to the Roman occupation, to the slow loss of national identity, to the silence of the prophets, to God's apparent forgetfulness of his promises. Giving up wild messianic hopes, they faced up to the relentless demands of, and occasional welcome distractions from, the hardness of daily life. If God is far off, unconcerned or nonexistent, if there is finally no help and healing from One who is greater than us, then let's put our faith in distraction, getting on with our lives, cutting our loses, hedging our bets, avoiding pain and disappointment as best we can, not holding out for what is, after all, just too good to be true. This is the world into which Christ comes.

Hope for some glorious, thundering revelation from the Infinite had almost died out, but now, out of the silence and darkness, comes a helpless infant's cry. The gift of the child Christ: in place of the power of distraction, the power of incarnate love, the power of redemption, presents himself. Hope in God vindicated; his love for us taking flesh. Too good to be true? Wishful thinking? So says the jaded wisdom of the world. That voice comes from within us, as well as from outside. Advent's penitential dimension invites us to examine ourselves so we can renew our welcome of the Savior into our lives. Part of that is honestly acknowledging the inner wounds of doubt and disbelief, of recognizing the depth to which we regard God as inaccessible and indifferent, and the degree to which we've resigned ourselves to living with that. There is, of course, simple doubt. Is it really true? Is there a loving God? Is Mary's baby who we confess him to be, or is it all just a wonderful story, one that brightens dark times and makes us feel good once a year, but not, ultimately, where those who know what's what put their faith? In today's gospel reading Luke, that careful writer, takes pains to pull John's proclamation of the coming Christ out of the realm of myths and warm feelings and to nail it down on the background of political and ecclesiastical administration, anchoring it securely in a real time, a real place, not in our dreams but in the real world, connected, ultimately, to our lives. And yet, whatever fine and wise things the man this child became said, we should turn back to real life and place our trust in what Woody Allen calls the power of distraction - unless this child actually was God fully, impossibly, here with us and for us. As St. Paul said many years later: if Jesus did not rise from the dead -- if the one we thought came as a child to defeat death is himself dead -- then "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." Luke, Paul, and the Bible's other authors make no claim to prove beyond all doubt that Mary's son was who we confess him to be. Nor are we capable of proving it. Our calling is to live without proof and thus with the possibility of doubt.

A stanza of W.H. Auden's poem 'Atlantis,' in which the quest for the lost mythical land represents his hard journey from despair of life's distractions to faith in Christ:

Should storms as may well happen

Drive you to anchor a week

In some old harbour-city Of Ionia,

then speak

With her witty scholars,

men

Who have proved there cannot be Such a place as Atlantis:

Learn their logic, but notice

How their subtlety betrays

A simple enormous grief;

that they may teach you the ways To doubt that you may believe.

Faithfully questioning ourselves this advent does not call for denying doubt, nor for trying to replace it with certainty. The opposite of doubt is faith, and we must see that living in faith doesn't mean always feeling sure. It can mean acting trustfully just when we're unsure. Part of faith is relying on God, in his own time, to transform our doubt into firm belief. Another, perhaps deeper, part of our Advent self-examination might be to ask ourselves in what ways have the springs of faith and hope gone dry, to what extent have we imperceptibly grown to accept the world's sad sobriety, the wistful cynicism Woody Allen expressed, that says, even for us, the only real healing power is the power of distraction, of getting by as though God's love for us has not become flesh in the real world of our daily lives. Here we need to repent of our resignation, of our unwillingness and inability to expect him to heal and deliver, to shape our lives and those around us in great grace and power.

Our prayer this Advent can be that our Savior make us more convinced in our thoughts, feelings and actions that beyond all doubt and hope there is a God neither nonexistent nor remote but sharing our lives, taking responsibility for us. It's at all times and in all places easy to think, in our hearts, of God at work safely far away, in the religious past, in the natural world, anywhere but here and now. Our calling is to be not distracted but amazed. We are called to believe that God has so humbled himself as to make his work in this world what we in our faltering faith do. God is at work here, now, in our hands, and if not in us, perhaps nowhere. This Church, we believe, but just barely, is the body of Christ, human flesh tied in trust to God and brought to life by his Spirit: God remains incarnate: here we are; here he is. Christ has come. Christ will come again. In the meantime the seasons of Advent come and go, but God is truly present in this old sad world. In the face of doubt and against the pull of despair: persisting in prayer, in the ministry of word and sacrament, in firm faith and merciful action, bearing witness to God's faithful presence as the Christ child, as the crucified and risen Savior, and here and now in us.

Amen.

Second Sunday in Advent

December 2007

Church of the Savior

Orange City, Iowa

Matthew 3:1-12

Repentance

A few weeks ago Karen and I flew to San Diego for the annual meeting of the AAR/SBL. From my point of view, it was a worthwhile conference. I spent the better part of a day on the USS Midway, the aircraft carrier now permanently docked in San Diego harbor and open to the public. When commissioned in 1945, it was the largest ship in the world: 972 feet long, 238 feet wide, with space for well over a hundred aircraft and crew of 4000, it was a vast three-dimensional steel maze, chock full of steep ladders, hatches, endless, intricate narrow passageways, complicated machinery, engines, pipes, tubes, control panels, navigational instruments, planes, guns, bombs. While Karen languished at scholarly presentations, I concluded my tour relaxing on the ship’s fantail, sipping a beer and watching the sun settle into the blue Pacific. It was great. I’d like one of my own.

The next evening, I visited another San Diego tourist attraction—this time with Karen— the Natural History Museum, which housed an exhibit of 27 Dead Sea Scrolls, on loan from the Israel Antiquities Authority. There, painstakingly assembled and lovingly preserved under glass, were the ragged shards of two-thousand year old papyrus and vellum, inscribed with the words from the Psalms, Leviticus, Job and Isaiah. Attendees quietly filed by, showing as much quiet respect as, the day before, we had showed the guns, missiles, and bombs affixed to the planes on the Midway’s flight deck. I was struck by the contrast between the two exhibits, between the 74,000 ton ship and the fragile flakes a breeze could take away, between the insubstantial, fragmentary word of God and the massive, seemingly indestructible weapon docked in the harbor, between the long buried and silent, life-giving words of God and the great proud ship, built to bring violent retribution to the nation’s enemies.

This was, for me, reminiscent of the contrast Matthew seems intent on making in his portrayal of John the Baptist and his encounter with Jesus. On its face, John’s pugnacious reaction to the arrival of the Pharisees and Saducees is unreasonable. They are, after all, ostensibly there, like everyone else, for repentance and baptism in preparation for God’s long-awaited deliverance of Israel. We can only assume that John regards their repentance as bogus. The first—and too easy—thing to think is that in John’s eyes they are hypocritically going along with the common people to look good, that they are wicked people who want to keep on being wicked while faking repentance. But what John goes on to say suggests something somewhat different: “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’!” They don’t see themselves as in need of repentance. It’s not them, it’s the unwashed masses, at best careless in keeping the law, of dubious religious purity…they’re the ones who need to repent, to clean up their act to be ready for the coming of the Lord. I imagine these religious leaders go along with the crowd’s enthusiastic response to John to encourage them to do what they themselves do not need to do, for they are already righteous, in good standing with God. Scrupulous keepers of the law and dedicated guardians of the temple, they have a privileged position; they are the true heirs of Abraham, the true people of God. But John calls them a brood of vipers: they are children not of faithful Abraham but the faithless progeny of snakes, children of Satan. These well-off, well-connected religious authorities live a lie.

The Baptist culminates the long line of prophets who condemn Jerusalem’s unrepentant elites who adhere to the law’s outward purity but in their actions subvert it, denying justice to the lost sheep of Israel. They do all the sacrifices perfectly, but they forget that what God wants is mercy. They flawlessly maintain cultic purity, but forget that God wants the purity of heart that welcomes the stranger and cares for the widow and orphan. Their claim to good standing with God, in virtue of being Abraham’s descendants? Big deal: God can make these stones into children of Abraham. God is coming, the God who demands true righteousness and purity of heart. Here comes the winnowing fork, the axe, the fire. Repent!

This dark warning is not just for a wayward first century Israel. We make it our own as we move into the season of Advent. Here in the first turn of the liturgical year we are called to be serious, to slow our time, to examine ourselves and know what it is to wait, unworthy, for the arrival of the God who has come and will come again. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, God's coming is not only a matter of glad tidings but, first of all, "frightening news for everyone who has a conscience." Yet it seems to me that we miss what’s most important in today’s text unless we juxtapose it with John the Baptist’s next appearance in Matthew’s gospel. Soon after he baptizes Jesus, John is thrown in prison and Jesus heads back up north to Galilee, where he starts to call disciples and begins his ministry. Some time passes and John, still in Herod’s dungeon, having heard about what Jesus has been doing, sends him a message: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (11.2-3). This is surprising, in contrast to John’s bold proclamation of Jesus as the one who was coming to mete out God’s justice. Jesus’ answer is that the facts of his ministry speak for themselves: “Go ahead and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (11.4-5). Jesus’ answer points to what must have led to John’s loss of confidence. Jesus turned out not to be what John expected. Where’s the winnowing fork, the axe, the unquenchable fire? What about the those rich, self-righteous bastards in Jerusalem getting what they deserve? And, while we’re at it, how about seeing to it that this collaborator Herod who has me in this cell, and his filthy Roman bosses, get what’s coming to them? How about that Day of the Lord we’ve been longing for? How about the vindication of Israel? John is not merely puzzled; he’s perturbed at Jesus for not doing what he’s supposed to do and maybe for not being what he is supposed to be. John’s heart was set on something large, loud and destructive, but all he gets is these acts of mercy and words of love. He wants God’s violent victory for his faithful people, the fateful comeuppance of the unrighteous. The hoped for apocalypse is not materializing; all he sees is Jesus handing out indiscriminate forgiveness. Jesus is well aware of how the Baptist feels, and sympathetic: “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me” (11.6). Particularly telling is what Jesus says next. He begins by speaking well of John, who is, after all, his cousin and his erstwhile supporter. He describes him as greater than all the prophets and even now he acknowledges him as the messenger sent ahead of him, preparing the way for him. Yet what he goes on to say is devastating. He essentially disowns John the Baptist: “The least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” (11.11).

John’s way of seeing things, his all too plausible view of what God should be doing, has no place in the very kingdom of heaven he once so boldly proclaimed. The sad irony is that, in the end, John is so much like the Saducees and Pharisees he so readily condemned. Like them, he is offended by the extravagant grace of God. The passage that follows is admittedly enigmatic: Jesus speaks cryptically of the kingdom of heaven “suffering violence” and of the violent seeking to take it by force. I think he’s referring to John’s fervent hope that God’s kingdom arrive with a display of might that obliterates God’s enemies. It makes all the sense in the world to envision a just God destroying the unjust and setting the world to rights. It makes no sense we can fathom to think God will let us get away with murder, but that, quite precisely, is what he does. Advent calls us to repent, but that repentance can only be the turn of heart and mind to the God who was in Christ, God not as powerful avenger but as humbled, vulnerable vi flesh. God putting himself in the way of our thirst for justice, our hatred, our violence. The crucified God.

Helmut Thielicke wrote that whenever the New Testament speaks of repentance, always the great joy is in the background. It does not say, “Repent, or hell will swallow you up,” but “Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” The joy of that kingdom is founded not on the rightful destruction of the wicked, but on an unimaginable grace that saves us all, despite ourselves. Advent invites us to examine ourselves so we can renew our welcome of the Savior into our lives, honestly acknowledging the inner wounds of doubt and disbelief, recognizing the depth to which we regard God as inaccessible, indifferent, hostile, and acknowledging how often we've sinfully resigned ourselves to living with that. It asks us to admit that part of us that demands the kind of God John the Baptist wanted, and takes offense at the kind of God Jesus was. And it calls us into the impossible possibility of the kingdom of heaven, where seemingly ephemeral words of love and hope outlast all this world’s mighty means of death.

To conclude: a prayer Dietrich Bonhoeffer composed for Advent:

Lord Jesus, come yourself, and dwell with us, be human as we are, and overcome what overwhelms us. Come into the midst of my evil, come close to my unfaithfulness. Share my sin, which I hate and which I cannot leave. Be my brother, Thou Holy God. Be my brother in the kingdom of evil and suffering and death. Come with me in my death, come with me in my suffering, come with me as I struggle with evil. And make me holy and pure, despite my sin and death.

Amen.

3 Advent

15 December 1996 St. George's Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

John 1.6-8, 19-28

Repent!

Today's gospel lesson is about John the Baptist. Now he's a strange character. Gauche and, truth be told, a bit comic and crazy. His father, Jesus' uncle Zechariah, was a priest. So John should have been priest too. But he doesn't take his place in Israel's religious establishment. After recounting his miraculous birth, Luke writes that this child of Elizabeth's and Zechariah's old age grew and became strong in spirit; then he drops out of sight and we don't hear about him again until 30 years later. John disappears into the wilderness to wait.

We have no reliable account of how he spent all those years; almost his whole life. There's some reason to think he hooked up with the Essenes, a pious apocalyptic sect on the fringes of Jewish religious life. His reappearance in the gospel narratives coincides with the start of Jesus' ministry. Out of the wild country down by the Dead Sea, John is suddenly on the scene. A caricature of an Old Testament prophet, he's oddly out of place in the New. Wearing animal skins and eating locusts with honey, John rants in the desert, preaching hellfire and brimstone, urgently calling the people to be ready for the one who is coming. Dorothy Sayers describes him in her play The Man Born To Be King: he has no humour, no patience and a one-track mind. His preaching draws large crowds. This attracts the attention of the Jerusalem authorities. They send investigators to find out who he is, by what authority he preaches and baptizes. But he won't really answer their questions. I'm a nobody! I'm just a voice crying in the wilderness! His reason for being is to point beyond himself to he who is on his way. He's preparing the way for the coming Christ. Any interest in him is a diversion, a distraction he won't tolerate. His sole concern is that we be ready for the one we're waiting for.

Part of our advent waiting is the experience of joyously mounting expectation. This is just what's expressed in this morning's psalm: Our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy! and in the lesson from Isaiah: Be glad, and rejoice forever in what I am creating! When, in our pilgrimage through the Church year, we move into this season, we encounter the blessedness of the coming Christ child. We feel the promise of Peace on Earth and good will to all!

But to put John the Baptist at the center of the lessons shifts the focus to another dimension of Advent preparation. For as much as this is time of gathering joy at our Savior's coming, it's a penitential time as well. We are called to self-examination and repentance. We who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death look for God's tender compassion, for the dawn from on high to break upon us. Part of this is to look to ourselves, to see to our readiness to receive the Lord who comes to save and forgive.

Repentance has gotten a bad reputation. That's part of the reason John the Baptist is not a very credible or attractive figure for us. He's the prototype of the disheveled cartoon prophet bearing a placard that proclaims: Repent! The End is Nigh! For the popular modern mind the biblical call to repent is moralistic and melodramatic. Its hard edge of seriousness has been dulled. There's no obvious way to incorporate the Baptist's call for repentance into our preparation for Christ's Advent.

And anyway, it's not easy to make sense of it, to avoid seeing it as at odds with the good news of God with us. When we hear the command to repent, it sounds as though we're being told to straighten ourselves out, to stop being bad, mean and lazy and to start behaving ourselves. As though the message is: God is on his way, so we'd better improve ourselves so we'll be good enough for him when he arrives. We'd better be worthy when he gets here - or else. Like "Santa Claus is coming to town," but for real.

If that's what repentance is all about we have a serious problem: if we had the power to turn ourselves around like that we wouldn't be in such deep need of God's help. If we had the capacity to heal and rescue ourselves we wouldn't be longing for help beyond all merely human possibility. If we could repent like that we wouldn't really need that child born to be our savior. Whatever real repentance is it can't be making ourselves good enough for God. To preach repentance in that sense is a cruel demand for what we can't do. It's to deny the Christian faith by denying our need for Christ.

Yet, the sad truth we all know is that Christians often do deny the faith in just this way. Think how often, and in how many ways, the Church is portrayed not as a family of persons who have thrown themselves on God's grace and mercy, but as a club for people who are good enough to belong. In reality, Christianity is not for those of us who are succeeding at being good. It's for those of us who have felt the hopelessness of that and turned to God's goodness incarnate in that Jesus whose birth we'll soon celebrate.

Then what is the repentance to which we are called, and which is an appropriate expression of faithful waiting for our coming Christ? You'll probably recall that when the New Testament speaks of repentance, the term usually used is "metanoia:" to think again, to change one's mind. For John the Baptist, Jesus the Christ is on the scene, God's kingdom is at hand. God has not forgotten his people; he is arriving, to be with us and for us. The call to repent is a call to reorient ourselves to this impending reality. God in Christ comes to the people of John's day, as he comes now to us, as healer and savior. To repent is not to heal and save ourselves as he approaches. To repent is to face up to the reality of our need. John's fiery preaching, and the baptism by which people signified their acceptance of it, aimed at breaking through the self-satisfaction, at tearing down the walls of false security in our goodness and strength. To repent is to examine oneself and acknowledge oneself as a sinner, as hopeless and helpless but for God's unconditional love. John's call for repentance forces us to focus on our own need and to put all our hopes on the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.

The Baptist prepared the way for the Messiah, crying in the wilderness the need for penitent hearts to receive the savior. Helmut Thielicke, the German theologian, wrote Whenever the New Testament speaks of repentance, always the great joy is in the background. It does not say 'Repent, or hell will swallow you up!' but 'Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand!' (The Waiting Father, p. 26) So the last word is that penitential Advent and joyous celebration Advent our own and the same.

It would be hard to underestimate the audacity of the good news that lies in this invitation to repent. Only our long familiarity with what the gospels say hides how outrageous, how unnatural this call is. The Jesus whose arrival John announces is a stumbling block. He subverts our sense of right and wrong, our sense of what makes sense. John the Baptist himself has his doubts. John fled the corruption of Jerusalem, seeking purity in the desert. He was a solitary ascetic who avoided sinners unless they were coming to him for baptism. I suspect he had a hard time with his cousin, who not only spent his time with, but actually seemed to like, the wine-drinkers, harlots and even tax collectors any pious person would have the good sense to avoid. After his confident public proclamations about Jesus being God's son and the savior of Israel, John quietly sends messengers to Jesus to ask: Are you the one who is to come, or are we to await for another? Jesus' response reveals how great the gulf is that lies between even John's way of thinking and God's: Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me. (Luke 7.20-23). Even John misses the point and doesn't see that Jesus isn't in the business of making people behave themselves, and that the call to repent really is a call to let Jesus love, help and save us.

In this Advent season, let us be preparing the way for Jesus, once again opening our hearts to him in true repentance. Amen.

Third Sunday in Advent

12 December 1993

St. George’s Episcopal Church

LeMars, Iowa

John 3:12-23

The God of Peace

A few years ago, when the Cold War came to its relatively bloodless and surprisingly quick close, many of us were like the people the Psalmist refers to: “we were like those who dream; our mouths were filled with laughter and our tongues with shouts of joy.” For many of us, the standoff between the superpowers had seemed a fixed feature of the universe. The unexpected end of the “balance of terror” with which we had lived our whole lives made it hard not to feel that here, at last, was peace. Of course we knew better: whatever the “New World Order” was going to be, we knew it would not be the end of hatred and conflict. Even so, what has happened since then -- the Gulf War, Armenia, Georgia, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, not to mention the seemingly endless killing in the streets of America -- has made it vividly clear that the coming of real peace is always an illusion, even if it is an illusion it would be hard to live without. At best, we hope realistically for a local and temporary break in the action. The genuine peace we hope for lies beyond us.

We have much the same experience in our personal lives. We think: “If I can just hold on until the weekend, until this project is finished, until vacation, until semester break, until the holidays are over, until my raise, or my promotion, or tenure, or retirement, or whatever, then I’ll be O.K. Then I’ll get some rest, catch up on my work, tie up my life’s loose ends, get organized, get things under control, and in general make peace with myself and the world and be healthy, happy and whole.” Experience teaches again and again that it doesn’t work this way. We get at best momentary respite from the roller coaster, treadmill, rats’ maze of life (pick your metaphor). It’s just one thing after another. Whatever peace we can make or find for ourselves is not the real thing. We all know better, but finding out each time is a new disappointment.

All in all, life is a matter of peace looked for but not found. What the Church confesses is that this lack of peace is something we do not have the power to escape. Real, enduring peace lies beyond our capacities. For the causes of hatred, conflict, war lie within us.

We are not at peace with ourselves. To be a human being is to be internally conflicted. We are at odds with ourselves. We judge and cannot honestly satisfy ourselves. We internalize standards and ideals and judgments and find ourselves one way or another not measuring up, not good enough, not beautiful enough, or popular enough, or smart enough, successful enough, not having worked or studied or tried or loved hard enough, and so on and on. We suffer, as St. Paul would put it, under bondage to the law. No amount of self-approval suffices for the empty places within us; they were meant to be filled only by God’s love and acceptance.

We are not at peace with one another. This is the most obvious lack of peace from which we long to be delivered. Thus the universal appeal of the Christmas story: Mary and her baby in the manger among the animals, angelic choirs hovering over wintry fields, the gift-laden, star-following magi...Everyone responds to this part of the Christian story. Even those who have no use for the Cross and the Resurrection, even those who boggle at the literal God made literal flesh, experience the palpable blessedness of the coming of the Child Christ. “Peace on Earth, and good will to men!”

We all are ready to hear the promise of peace, for we know conflict at every level of human life. Hostility between nations, wars and rumors of war without end. Abductions, serial killers, drive-by shootings, random violence. Insane conflict between ethnic groups, hatred between the rich and poor, between the powerful and the marginalized, between women and men. Even when there seems nothing but good intentions there can be systematic domination and exploitation of some persons by others. There is something radically broken in human relations. We do not see ourselves as created for trusting God. We do not see one another as loved by a trustworthy God. The human thing is to long for security, power, control; to be right and in the right. We are dangerous to one another.

And we are dangerous to the rest of nature. The original human task and opportunity to take responsibility for the natural world, to respectfully and thoughtfully steward its resources has been squandered. We have not trusted God to supply all our needs; we have greedily, foolishly destroyed, spoiled and wasted much of nature.

These ways in which human life is full of conflict have one underlying cause. We are not at peace with God. We need to make peace with God and will only be at peace with ourselves, with one another, and with our world when there is reconciliation between God and his human creatures. The idea that the basic human problem is the need to make peace with God can be hard to swallow. We easily accept the notion that we need to be good, more like God, or more the sort of persons we can imagine God approving of. We admit that we ought to take a greater interest in God, or at least in the ethical and religious things God is reportedly interested in. The idea that there is enmity between God and us, and that something must be done to bring it to an end, sounds pretty strange. Yet it is this that we confess. We are created for trusting God. The temptation of Eve and of all her children is to trust not in God but in oneself. The Genesis tale puts it in the the serpent’s mouth: “To be like a god, knowing good and evil.” Our temptation is to be for ourselves what God intends to be for us. Being a god means not having to take things on faith, not having to rely on the goodness, and on the approval, of someone greater than us, someone we cannot control. To be godlike is to be more than a creature; it is to be always in the right, secure, powerful, independent, self-justifying.

If there was any doubt about what has gone wrong deep within the human heart it disappeared when God himself became one of us. The vulnerable child of Christmas grows up to be the man of sorrows, the man who as God puts himself into human hands, hands that kill him for blasphemy. Humankind is not at peace with itself because it is at war with its Creator.

The good news of Advent is that God has come to make peace. He does what we cannot do. God, in the Messiah John announced, brings peace to those in conflict within themselves, with one another, and with the natural world. The coming of the Christ child is the beginning of the end of the long waiting for peace. Good Friday and Easter lie ahead, but already there is the overwhelming fact of the great joy. God is with us. He has not left us to our own devices and desires.

Above all, God was then and is now in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. God is not only bringing peace to us, he is making peace with us. In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and by way of the community that at all times and places faithfully witnesses to Jesus, God decisively acts to make peace with us. He acts to undo our attempts to do away with him and go it alone, taking his place. We are, by fallen nature, God’s enemies. Nonetheless he gives us faith in Jesus, a faith that joins us to Jesus and lets his goodness, his obedience, his perfect trust in God his father, count as ours. Our being enemies with God is over. We are now justified, our relation to God restored. By God’s grace, through faith in Jesus Christ, we have peace with God.

We tend to think of peace in negative terms, merely as the absence of conflict. Peace, we think, is whatever we’ve got when the conflict ends. But the peace the God of Advent brings cannot be adequately described in terms of what it isn’t. Nicholas Wolterstorff, in his book Until Justice and Peace Embrace, uses the Hebrew ‘shalom’ to draw attention to the positive content of the peace God makes:

The peace which is shalom is not merely the absence of hostility, not merely being in the right relationship. Shalom at its highest is enjoyment in one’s relationship....To dwell in shalom is to enjoy living before God, to enjoy living in one’s physical surroundings, to enjoy living with one’s fellows, to enjoy life with oneself (69-70).

The Messianic texts we heard today look far ahead to the rich fullness of human life when God’s work of peacemaking, his healing, reconciling and making right and whole will be complete. Happiness, joy, rejoicing are what characterize the human future lived in the presence of the God who delights in us.

Until then we have our time to take up what Wolterstorff describes as “both God’s cause in the world and our human calling” (72). As those who bear witness to God’s reconciliation in Jesus the Messiah, it is our task to do what can be done now, however imperfectly and incompletely, to heal where hatred and conflict has done harm, to make peace, to strive for reconciliation, even where this seems impossible in merely human terms. The works of peace, when they do not flow from faith in the God who came as Jesus to make peace, are ultimately hopeless, however laudable and heroic they may be. Faith in that God without the works of peace is, as James would tell us, lifeless. Living faith that witnesses to the reality of what we celebrate in this Advent gratefully expresses itself by sharing in the work of the God of peace.

Amen.