Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
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Last week we heard the anguish of the people of God bellow out of the prophet Isaiah: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” giving voice to the desperate hope for divine intervention. Today we hear God’s compassionate reply, “Comfort, O comfort my people…the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together….” The book of the Isaiah, one of our main guides through the season of Advent, takes us through a roller-coaster panoply of highs and lows…of hopes and despairs…of sin and redemption. These pages echo those of Ecclesiastes, “For everything there is a season…a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance….” Israel’s time of punishment is now complete, she has served the term for her transgressions and it is now time for comfort. Though she had wondered if her subjection would ever come to an end and if her torment would ever cease, the voice is now heard, “Here is your God! He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom….”
By the time we come to the end of our Isaian roller-coaster ride and close the book, we are left with one overriding sense: that no matter how desperate and hopeless we may at times have felt along the way, God is Emmanuel, right here with us, and everything will be okay! But this is only part of the truth. The biblical testimony goes further…not only will everything will be okay but everything will, in the end, be far greater than it ever was before. The glory to be revealed is not a restoration of a mythical paradise of the past but an entirely new revelation which would not have been possible without the journey through the highs and lows of the roller-coaster ride of our lives. The pain and suffering of Israel, as well as our own, have not been for nought…they are birth pangs of a new creation.
So, if last week’s answer to Israel’s cry was depicted in the tearing open of the heavens in a sudden divine intervention, this week’s answer offers us a fuller expression for our hope. Taken on its own, last week’s parting of the clouds may lead one to see the divine intervention as a kind of “deus ex Machina,” “a god from the machine,” a phrase used in Greek tragedies of an actor portraying a god being lowered by a crane into a scene or raised from a trap door. It was a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly resolved. Its function was to resolve an otherwise irresolvable plot situation, to surprise the audience, and to bring the tale to a happy ending. This scenario, taken on its own, may lead one to question…Is our Advent hope purely a projection…a kind of naive wish, a baseless hope…one ultimate deus ex Machina to bring the tragedy of life to a final conclusion? Certainly, many since the tragedies of the twentieth century have thought so. But today’s scenario of a God who is actually encountered in the here and now and effects true and lasting change offers a fuller vision for our hope than some sudden escape route and a surer foundation for our future fulfillment and justifies why we have every reason to remain full of hope and expectation.
Instead of placing all of our hopeful energy on one final apocalyptic cataclysm to right all wrongs and usher in a new heaven and a new earth, today we hear of the role played by God’s chosen ones: Israel, Isaiah, John the Baptist, and ultimately by Jesus and his disciples. Rather than wallowing in misery and self-loathing, holding out for the final day, these chosen of God seized upon their call and vocation and became divine agents of transformation and birth which helped hasten this new heaven and new earth. And in Christ and his disciples, even helped make it visible in their own flesh.
The temptation whenever we suffer and find ourselves in an existential crisis is to wallow in the questions and never reach a resolve to do anything about them. Why do anything, we reason, if none of this makes any sense and life seems to be just one tragedy after another? The answer that God’s chosen ones offer us is not to evade or ignore the problem. They were all very much in touch with their own pain and sorrow. What was different about them was that they had the faith to see that their pain and sorrow was not the last word but served a greater purpose. In the haunting words of Second Peter, the fire of God is a purifying agent so that “everything done on [earth] will be disclosed”…it serves to ground us in the truth. It’s the baptism of fire that John the Baptist preached which would lead, not to our end, but prepare us for something far greater, a new beginning where all things become possible. With God, pain and sorrow, rather than being sterile and debilitating, can become a fecund womb capable of being impregnated with a divine seed and, with faith, can give birth to something astonishingly new.
What would happen if we channeled all the energy that we put in the hope of a future divine intervention and focused it on the God who is present birthing the new creation in the here and now? What if instead of worshiping the “sky god” far removed from us, we worship the God of Incarnation who seeks at every opportunity to erupt with the brilliant blaze of glory from within to conquer the dark places of our lives and our world? The evidence for this God of Incarnation, unlike the absent “sky god,” is all around us. I see it in the multitude of lives once bound by sin set free by this grace of divine Presence. I see it in the multitude of saints whose lives exude an aura which attests to a transcendent realm of peace and joy now accessible. I see this God of the new creation present in the evolving world of which we are a creative part…and in the astonishing variety of species we are still discovering. I encounter this birthing God in an expanding cosmos that has no end in sight…and in the overwhelming beauty of it all that reminds me just what a privilege it is that I exist. I encounter this God of Presence in the random acts of kindness that are making real differences in people’s lives each day and in the righteous indignation felt when the most vulnerable of us are cheated or degraded or ignored. The welling up of this love and of this kindness and of this anger is the welling up of the divine within us incarnating itself in our flesh and transforming us, and the world through us, into what God has desired us to be all along, and we, like God’s chosen ones, are hastening the coming kingdom. Maybe the metaphor is misplaced and outdated and God may not break through parting clouds, but the breaking-in of God into our world remains true and, perhaps, more realizable than ever…not from outside our world in a distant future but from the deepest dimensions within it right now.
How does this new orientation…this new focus on the “what is” rather than on the “what may or may not be” affect the way we live our lives and the way we live this season of Advent? Much in every way! To live in the future is to worship the god of the “what if only” which leads to frustration and anxiety because it is not grounded in reality. The only way toward the ultimate fulfillment of what Jesus called the “kingdom of heaven” is to bring the vision of our future hope into the living reality of the present which is the only place where the God who makes all things new can be encountered. The present, with all of its crosses to bear, is the only way to the future. Too much of Christian spirituality through the centuries has tried circumventing this straight and narrow path and preferred a spirituality of escapism and rapture and has lost what is most profound about the God of Incarnation: the mystical possibility of bearing God in our own flesh!
Teilhard de Chardin once said that “joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God.” For Teilhard, authentic Christian spirituality is about vitality…what he called “the zest for life.” To be truly Christian is to quite literally be alive with the creative force of the God of evolution, who through divine grace and spiritual vitality, is using us to fill the world with Christ and bring the world to fulfillment. He called this process, Christification…making all things alive in Christ…and amorization…making all things alive in love.
The humble maiden awestruck at the wondrous and disturbing announcement of an angel remains the archetype for our involvement with this God of Incarnation. Our common Christian vocation is this Advent journey of encounter, impregnation, gestation, and birth. But unlike Mary, we are not giving birth to a separate existence outside ourselves. Through the gift of the Spirit, Christ is birthed into his new body, which is you and me, and makes his appearance upon the joyful, the peaceful, and the loving countenance of our own faces. And he then acts to bless the world and transfigure it through our own hands. “Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together!"
Malcolm Guite, the Anglican poet and priest, perhaps captures best this truth in his poem Annunciation:
We see so little, stayed on surfaces,
We calculate the outsides of all things,
Preoccupied with our own purposes
We miss the shimmer of the angels’ wings,
They coruscate around us in their joy
A swirl of wheels and eyes and wings unfurled,
They guard the good we purpose to destroy,
A hidden blaze of glory in God’s world.
But on this day a young girl stopped to see
With open eyes and heart. She heard the voice;
The promise of His glory yet to be,
As time stood still for her to make a choice;
Gabriel knelt and not a feather stirred,
The Word himself was waiting on her word.
So, as we continue our Advent journey with this God of Incarnation, let us awaken to the fact that it is not so much we who wait on God, but, rather, it is God who waits on us! And not from a secure abode somewhere far away out of reach but right here in the tenacious, obstinate, relentless spirit of our own lives ever knocking until Spirit is joined with flesh and all of life is caught up in the swirling shimmer of God’s glory.
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