Advent begins with a
longing from the prophet Isaiah,
O that you would tear open the heavens
and come down…
It is a longing echoed in the psalm,
Hear us, O Shepherd of Israel…shine
forth…restore us…show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.
One of the purposes of
this strange little season we call Advent is to re-kindle in us this longing,
for God not only to preside over the cosmos from some heavenly throne, but to
be present and active among us. Be not
only our hope for the future, O God, but be active among us now, bring your
reign of peace and justice, faith and love, now, as we have been praying for so
long, on earth as it is in heaven.
O that you would tear open the heavens
and come down…hear us, light our way, show us your face, restore us, save us.
Jesus speaks to this
longing this morning, but not necessarily in the way we would have him
speak. He says to us that when our
longing is tested by chaos and suffering:
keep awake, be ready, watch. Yet
he seems to speak as if we would not have to keep awake very long, that this
intervention of “the Son of Man” would happen very soon. He says,
This generation shall not pass away
until all these things have taken place.
By now we have lost
count of the generations that have “passed away,” and the number of times that
“these things” of which he speaks have occurred. But then we should notice that Jesus himself
hedges his bet. He says,
But about that day or hour no one
knows…not even me.
I hear in those words,
Jesus echoing our own longing, and our own frustration that the waiting is too
long.
O that you would tear open the heavens
and come down…hear us, light our way, show us your face, restore us, save us.
This week as a nation we
had one of those moments when the frustration at the unfulfilled longing boiled
over in Ferguson, Missouri and around the country. We seem to be dealing with it in what has
become a familiar way, to take up sides and dismiss those who disagree. We seem to get better and better at our
divisions as time goes on, less and less willing to do the hard work of
understanding each other and going deeper than whatever it is we think is “obviously”
going on.
In Jesus’ language, we
are not willing to see “the signs of the times,” the signs that demand of us
that we stay alert, think and pray hard, and ask, “Where is God in all of
this?” and remembering where Jesus has taught us to look for God, in the face
of the other, the stranger, in the chaos and the suffering, in what seems torn
open not in heaven but in our own lives.
How do we prepare the
way for Christ to come in this moment, and in the much larger issue of one of
our starkest differences, that of race?
We can immediately say that race is a human construct, not a divine one,
that everything would be all right if we would just acknowledge that we are all
one. That is a good sentiment, but it
wants us to mend the tear among us too easily.
Those of us who are
white and middle or upper class, have to acknowledge that the legacy of a
nation founded on inequality is still very much with us. It is far too easy for us to say that we had
nothing to do with that. That is all in
the past. We must listen to our black
and brown sisters and brothers who tell us that in their experience it is not
all in the past.
Sometimes those of us
who blindly live in a kind of heaven of our own making, need it to be torn open
so that we can see the longing of our brothers and sisters who feel closed out
of it. Let me put it this way—most of us
live in the conviction that those glorious words of the Declaration of Independence—that
all people are created equal and have the God-given right to “life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness”—are true.
That is our “heaven.” We need to
allow that heaven to be torn open, to be honest enough to hear those who say
that those words were not written to include them and we have not reached the
point in our evolution as a society where that promise has been fulfilled. “All men” still does not mean “all people.”
I know that I have gone
from preaching to meddling. We claim,
however, that the right to equality of life, freedom, and happiness is
God-given. So we are obligated to
continue to seek out God in the midst of our struggle for these things to be
true. Those who say that contemporary
justice is not righty the concern of the church are neither reading their
Bibles, nor the Declaration of Independence.
We cannot invoke God, claiming God to be the foundation of our truth,
and then dismiss him from the struggle.
In our corner of the
world we may also think that this does not really have anything to do with
us. We would be wrong. I have no doubt that many if not most of the
citizens of Ferguson, Missouri thought the same thing. That kind of chaos and suffering does not
happen here; we have no need to keep alert on this count.
That, of course, is an
illusion. So what can we do about it?
The primary answer is in
the impulse of Isaiah with which I began.
The answer first and foremost is in the longing. One of the things that I learned in my ten
years as the rector of the only majority African-American parish in our diocese,
is that the first step is the willingness to share all of our deepest longings
for something better, not for our differences to be obliterated, but for our
divisions to be healed. And Jesus is
telling us today that we can only do that when we acknowledge the chaos and
suffering as something that affects us all, and the being ready as something we
must learn to do together.
Our Christmas Eve
Service will end, as it always does, with that great hymn, “Hark, the herald
angels sing.” I have been thinking of
these words this week from the last verse:
Risen with healing in his wings, light
and life to all he brings, hail, the Sun of Righteousness! Hail the heaven-born Prince of Peace!
I do not know about you,
but those words stir up a deep longing within me. Let us sing them this year as our longing and
our prayer for all of us, together, now, in this place and time. It is not the solution to all our problems,
but if we do not long together for peace, we will continue to live in a reign
of violence, and our children—yes, they are our children—will continue to die
for it.
Let Jesus have the last
word in this:
And
what I say to you I say to all, keep awake.
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