Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Advent 3 C - Sunday, December 12, 2021
If you have ever undergone a conversion, become sober, allowed yourself to be changed deep within, you know what a journey it can be. The prophet can appeal to our moral aspirations by critique of our behavior and the danger and pain that it is causing. The prophet can inspire us to a greater vision of ethical life - to see beyond our own selfish and immediate interest to the good of the community and the long-term viability of peace and harmony. So once we are sufficiently motivated to avoid pain and adopt a better way, we will change - but not before. If the stakes are high, if our very lives (and perhaps souls) are at risk, then the urgency of the prophet’s witness becomes the means of awakening us to our true condition of imperfection. God’s love will do whatever it takes to get our attention, to make us listen, if in those moments there is the possibility that we will attend to the call, heed the warnings, and forsake our sins.
We can choose to ignore or mock John the Baptist and his message, but that does not change the urgency of repentance and preparation. Criticize his style or his method of pastoral care all you want, but the bottom line remains the same - he is speaking to us, the repentance he demands is directed to us, the call to wake up and avoid catastrophe is for us. The charges he is levelling at the religious leaders of his day can be just as true for us. These are the traps of the so-called “good” person. They made following the external standard of the law a life substitute rather than a life revealer. Righteousness was not a way into dependence on God, but a way out. Abraham is our father, everything will be fine, God will protect us, the Romans can’t harm us. And then 70 AD and the Fall of Jerusalem happened and it was all destroyed, not one stone upon another. Apocalypses are not real until they are, and we deny the possibility of the same happening to us at our peril.
Today’s Gospel is a continuation of Luke 3 from last week’s reading. Last week’s call to repentance and the offer of forgiveness and the quote from Isaiah 40 framed the theological overview of the urgent alarm to wake up and be alert for the coming of Messiah. The way of the Lord is to be smoothed out and leveled. Oppression, injustice, abuse, and corruption are to be called out and exposed and put right. We are invited to participate in the great leveling project that clears a straight path for Christ. Repentance means “transcend your mind”, your fixed categories of thought, of grasping at absolutes and non-negotiables and welcome new ways of thinking and speaking and being that will be open to the surprise of Messiah’s coming. “Stop hurting yourselves and each other”, John the Baptist is saying, “there is a better way.”
The common thread which weaves together each answer John gives is that entrance into the kingdom of God goes against nature, against our ingrained and habituated ways of discerning what benefits us. Whoever wants to repent and be transformed does so with full awareness of his or her responsibility and the consequences of choices made and not made. This is a call to the narrow and difficult way. As I embark upon this way, my selfishness and greed and arrogance do not magically disappear, I am not delivered from temptation and struggle - if anything, waking up increases temptation and struggle.
Group consciousness, living in a mass movement, is the road to hell. John is not exhorting his listeners to easy, charitable gestures of moral niceness, he is calling them to fundamentally change the way they are in the world. His commands are not about the material goods and money, but about relationship - the potential for community, sharing, abundance, peace that is more valuable than all the money Rome collects or steals. John is interested in fundamentally subverting the system of injustice. Generosity in a crowd that idolizes greed is controversial. Kindness where extortion and fraud is acceptable is revolutionary. Sacrifice where building bigger barns is a sign of success is dangerous. This is the kind of language that could cause a person to lose their head.
Christian communities of all types continue the vocation of John. We hear and repent and proclaim conversion. We model and witness to the coming of the Messiah in every act of service and compassion because those acts are exactly the acts that renounce and dismantle the evil ways of this world which oppose God. From our privileged perches we can faintly imagine the kind of distress and fear that filled the air of Israel in the first century. The times were different then, we say. We are safe, it can never happen here, we say. If the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD was the wrath of God, it happened because the people did not discern the time, they became arrogant and complacent, and believed they were God’s special, protected people. Whenever we close our ears and shut our eyes and dissolve into the crowd, we are in that response already experiencing the wrath that betrays our human dignity and divine image.
As we embark on the journey of conversion, we keep in mind that the end is joy. Listening leads to repentance, repentance leads to liberation, liberation frees us to receive the grace and mercy of Christ, which lavishes us with the blessings of goodness and peace. Waking up to ourselves and changing our ways is the deepest expression of what it means to be beloved children of God, objects of God’s eternal and unrelenting love. The Collect confesses to God that we are “sorely hindered by our sins”, next year, God willing, when we are here for the third Sunday of Advent, we will once again know the truth of those words. But knowing how hindered we are is the opening to what we most need. The collect goes on to ask God to help and deliver us, speedily, speedily, by your grace and mercy.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment