Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
Advent 2 C - Sunday, December 5, 2021
The imagery John employs is that of making, opening, and clearing a way for God. His invitation to repent is a door to forgiveness. Forgiveness comes from the Greek word meaning “to let go”. Repentance is not the same as remorse or regret. It is not wishing you were a better person, or that some things had never happened. It’s not feeling guilty, ashamed, or afraid. It’s not something that leaves us stuck or standing still. Repentance is about movement, letting yourself be grasped by God, getting new bearings, and relying on God for direction. The new life that follows repentance, the new direction that comes with a fresh start is what John is proclaiming in the wilderness. His message is a call to action: repent, turn around, accept help. God is coming to meet you.
Repentance can come in many ways. It can happen when you are confronted by remorse, disappointment, or regret, or maybe the sense that you’re spinning your wheels. Maybe it comes from something as small as wishing you hadn’t said or done something. Maybe it comes when you realize other people are with you on your journey and that your decisions affect them too and that the wilderness is not a good place to be forever. When God turns us around, offers us a way to get unstuck, to move ahead with a new way of life, our response can look like the description from Baruch: a widow who puts away her mourning clothes and instead puts on a beautiful garment. It’s not that sorrow has never happened or that there was not a reason to grieve. She accepts the robe of righteousness and a crown of glory because she trusts that her wholeness and joy lie ahead of her in some future that God is constructing.
All the lessons for today reflect the unique character of our faith in the way in which it is constantly tied to specific times and places and people in history. We not only have Luke’s carefully dated notice of the beginning of the ministry of John the Baptist, but Baruch’s prophecy of a very concrete return to Jerusalem for those in exile, as well as Paul’s letter to the congregation he founded at Philippi, with its prayer that their love may overflow with knowledge and insight, which will have produced “a harvest of righteousness.” Our lessons today are directed to us, in this time, in this place as well.
Every Advent we hear the story of John calling us to a recognition of our brokenness and to the Baptism of God’s forgiveness. Every Advent we’re called to the recognition of our failures, our self- righteousness; not in the abstract, but in the concrete daily acts of our lives. The “harvest” Paul refers to is the rightness of the way in which we live and deal with one another. If we’re looking for some spiritual or intellectual way that devalues the importance of our daily acts, then we have no business looking forward to the feast of the Incarnation. We are called to be Christ-like, and that likeness is in terms not of what we believe, but in terms of our concrete action in the real world in which we live. An orthodox theology has its place and its value, but only if it serves as the source of the knowledge and insight to do the work of God in the world. The call to us is the same as Paul’s call to his old congregation. We too are to produce in our lives the same “harvest of righteousness.”
Only when we know the reality of our need for forgiveness, for the action and the grace of God in our own lives, can we be prepared to understand the reality of Jesus’ coming into flesh like ours. God never waits for us to know enough, or to be good enough. At all times and in all places, God comes to us as we are, where we are, and being who we are. Salvation history is rooted in the tangible history of the world. God comes to us not in some spiritually perfect or abstract relationship, but in the day-by-day business of our lives. Every time we act, whether out of love or fear, out of concern or self-protection, out of our responsibility for each other or self-interest, we are showing the harvest of our lives. The harvest we reap is determined by how we act in relation to others.
We’re so afraid to lose the control that we think we have over the life that we think we’re living. Ego identifies with entitlement and individualism. We associate our ego with all our being. This distortion of reality is a lie which removes us further from ourselves, God, and each other. This illusion is insatiable, making our need for security, affection, and control lead us to addictions. It is nearly impossible to heal isolated individuals inside of our unhealthy and unhealed society, or inside any version of Christianity that supports exclusion and superiority. As we see so clearly in our day, individuals who remain inside of an incoherent and unsafe universe fall back into anger, fear, and narcissism. God’s unconditional love destroys our ego’s assumptions. This feast we’re preparing to celebrate is about being liberated from this illusion of an ultimately isolated self that must make it on its own.
The deepest question of our life is not what our father or mother or anyone else thought of us, but what we think of us. Our most difficult challenge is self-acceptance. If we take a loving look at ourselves, we will see that behind our restlessness is our longing. The problem is that we feed the restlessness instead of the longing. Without the capacity to go within, because of our fear that there is nothing there, we will only experience brokenness. When we dissect ourselves in perfectionism, we only find our flaws. We are more complex and there is more to us than we think.
Creatureliness is the root of our spiritual life. If we are not rooted in that reality we cannot grow. Roots give us humility. Without roots we become inflated causing us to overemphasize where we want to be instead of where we are. Jesus wrestled with what it was like to be a creature and struggled, like us, with the reality that there is always a pull to regress as we move forward. The human temptation is to equate our experience of God with God. But being present in the moment opens us to perceive the real Presence, to let the mystery encounter us, God on God’s terms, not ours.
God is the source of all creative expression. We do not even create ourselves. Our true self is revealed to us. Our choice is to be receptive and participate, to live into our potential. We anticipate and participate in God doing the work because God will do nothing in our lives without our consent. We must give permission for grace to be received.
This season invites us to slow down, be alert, attentive, and learn to gaze at and welcome reality. To do this, we must let go of our present way of seeing things. Reality is filled with risks, but only in taking a long loving look at the real can we uncover the transcendent in the imminent, the divine in the human. Our unresolved conflicts and issues are no obstacle to how infinitely precious we are to God. Let us look mercifully on ourselves and others. Let us try to see ourselves as God sees us as we prepare for the coming of the one who took on our humanity.
+Amen.
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