Advent 2, Year B - Sunday, December 4, 2011
Isaiah 40:1-11
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8
Here we are on the second Sunday of Advent – a season that prepares us for Christmas. The problem is that there are really two very different events coming – so different as to be almost incompatible – and to add to the confusion, we call them both Christmas. For clarity sake, I'll call one of them “Secular Christmas” and the other “Sacred Christmas.” That will give you a pretty clear idea of where I'm going...
For Secular Christmas, Advent is more properly known as “shopping days until...” Secular Christmas is really just a consumption binge with a slightly altruistic marketing plan. Secular Christmas has absolutely everything to do with carnality and absolutely nothing to do with incarnation.
The work of Advent does nothing to enhance Secular Christmas and, more importantly, Secular Christmas contradicts Advent in oh so many ways. It would be tilting at windmills to try to rid Advent of the incursions of Secular Christmas. But to the extent we can keep these two things called Christmas separate in our minds, the more we can do the work of Advent and be present to the sacred incarnation that is coming.
Secular Christmas is an appealing, delicious, feel-good confection. Sacred Christmas is the beginning of a life-changing encounter – complex, challenging, frightening... Secular Christmas makes us happy. Sacred Christmas makes us whole.
Advent is not a happy, comfortable time of waiting in excited anticipation... trying to guess what is under the tree... of stockings all hung by the fireplace with care... The Liturgy of St James has a better instruction: “Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand...” Advent is a time of preparing to be made new, to be made whole.
Today, and in all of Advent, our attention is directed toward John the Baptist. When it comes to discomforting, feel-bad thinking, you can't do much better than the Baptist... except perhaps Isaiah... And wouldn't you know it, Isaiah is the other great voice we are called to listen to in Advent.
Lets start in Isaiah – “a voice crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.” These words are so thoroughly wrapped around the coming of Jesus that the context fades away. But the message from Isaiah is complex.
“Speak tenderly to Jerusalem... she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins... People are like grass – which withers and dies.” We are prepared to hear Isaiah is talking about the birth of Jesus – but Isaiah is not willing to restrict himself to that.
Our Jewish brothers and sisters understand Isaiah very differently. Isaiah really is talking about Jerusalem, about the people of Israel, not about some far-future coming of Messiah. His message is one of devastation. The reason to speak tenderly to Jerusalem is that she is to be destroyed. The pending destruction of the city symbolizes the destruction that is to fall on God's chosen people, the people of Israel.
After the destruction of Jerusalem, Isaiah is a powerful voice to a people who have been devastated, to a culture that has been shattered, to a nation that has been mortally wounded. Speak tenderly... This is a tenderness borne of extreme sorrow.
“Every valley shall be raised up and every hill brought down...”
When I was a young, the great Adirondack Northway was under construction – and valleys were raised up and mountain tops were brought down and rough places were smoothed over to make a highway that truly seemed worthy of the Lord. Somehow in the hazy innocence of youth it seemed to me that this is what Isaiah was talking about: some optimistic, modern, vast construction project.
But Isaiah is not talking about construction. He is talking about a destruction... on a massive scale... a cataclysm... Everything stable in the world, even the mountains and valleys, is about to be torn apart. Chaos and destruction are in the offing.
After the chaos, then we can take courage... then we can raise our voice... then we can proclaim that God comes in might... after the entire world has been turned upside down. It is courage born of extreme sorrow, extreme humiliation.
Pretense has been stripped away. Arrogance has been stripped away. The feeling of entitlement that comes with being God's particularly chosen people has been stripped away. Identity has been stripped away. And somehow, in the face of all that loss, we manage to breath again, to live again, to love again. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem...
John picks up where Isaiah leaves off – a voice in the wilderness crying get ready for the coming of the Lord.
As it happens, at the time of John, Jerusalem is again on the eve of destruction. By the time John's words have been recorded in the Gospels, Jerusalem has been sacked... the nation of Israel is in tatters... the temple, the very house of God, has, once again, been destroyed. John the Baptist referencing Isaiah the Profit is ominous foreshadowing, to say the least.
This is the context of Advent – of waiting for Emmanuel. For lovers of the status quo, it is a terrible time. And when I look in my own heart I find that there is a great lover of the status quo in me. I suspect I am not the only one here with that attachment.
Later today in this very church our Vespers will be centered on Bach's Cantata Number 36. In the opening chorus a voice calls us to lift our voices, our thoughts to heaven to meet the Lord. And then another voice says “stop where you are... the Lord is coming to Earth to meet you where you are.”
In our cultural stories we have a repeated story about parents coming home when the kids are not ready – when the kids have been acting really badly. It can be innocent as in Dr Seuss's “Cat in the Hat”, or it can be more adolescent as in “Ferris Bueller's Day Off” or “Risky Business”. But its the same story – with no adult supervision, the kids do exactly what they know not to do and then the car with Mom and Dad is coming up the driveway... they are going to be caught, certainly punished, perhaps grounded for life... Yet somehow, miraculously, the mess gets cleaned up just before the parents walk through the door.
Advent. We have had the run of the place and we have acted in ways that we know are exactly wrong. Children are allowed to suffer and even starve. Injustice and corruption are abundant. We beat our plowshares into swords. We take the widows mite to build grand palaces for the rich and privileged. And, as the Cantata says – God is coming to meet us on earth... the car is pulling up the driveway...
Our treasure shows where our hearts are – and that is on Wall Street and in executive suites, in the weapons of war, in the temples built to the false god of consumerism. Surely we don't believe God can look at this and say anything that sounds like “well done good and faithful servants.”
Let all mortal flesh keep silence and with fear and trembling stand.
Advent. We are called to keep awake. To make ourselves ready for the time when God takes on mortal flesh and dwells among us. Are our hearts, our homes, our neighborhoods, our nation in a proper state to receive God?
We will have to face the trap of our own attachments, our own delights, our idols and golden calves. The preparation of Advent, at least in part, is to see that we are a people not just in the wilderness, but that we are enlarging the wilderness... We are a people who not only sit in darkness, but in many ways we are responsible for turning out the lights... We are not called to despair, but to make a highway in this dark wilderness fit for God.
Shopping Days and Secular Christmas tell us that things are really good and sweet and wonderful and that we can build a better world just by doing even more of the same. That is a lie that does indeed contain some truth – there is great beauty all around us.
But we are every bit as broken as the Israel that Isaiah addresses. We are in the wilderness. We desperately need God's light to shine in our world, in our hearts. We anesthetize ourselves with stuff so that we don't know how much we need someone to speak tenderly to us.
Facing the reality that we are in darkness is part of the work of Advent. And realizing that God takes on human flesh and dwells with us... speaks tenderly to us... forgives us.. lovingly brings light into our world so that we don't have to remain in darkness is also the work of Advent.
Amen.
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