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DonateDecember 19, 2004 |
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Isaiah 7: 10-15
Romans 1: 1-7
Matthew 1: 18-25
Three of the passages for this last Sunday in Advent express the desperate nature of the situation in which they are written. Isaiah is speaking to the king of Judah at a time when he sees little possibility of coping with his enemies. The psalmist depicts the land of Israel as in ruins. Paul describes the universal human condition that has resulted from people choosing the worship of idols instead of the true God.
The positive alternative is seen in quite different ways in the three cases. Isaiah reassures King Ahaz that his enemies will be destroyed by Assyria, leaving space for Judah to flourish. The psalmist beseeches God to restore Israel, with no apparent certainty that God will do so. Paul is explaining the context in which the work of Jesus had its transformative effect.
The fourth passage is also from Romans. It is Paul’s salutation to the faithful there. In the context of the salutation, Paul summarizes his understanding of who Jesus was and what Jesus accomplished. The greatness of the accomplishment is accentuated by the severity of the need to which it responds. The importance of expectancy and the intensity of hope reflect the degree of distress about what is.
This time, instead of focusing on the situations that gave rise to our texts, I want to focus on the situation in which we await Christmas. In its immediate appearance to most of us, it does not have the desperate character reflected in the Old Testament texts. If we lived in some other parts of the world, this would not be the case. But for us middle class Americans, the immediate situation is generally comfortable. Some of us experience a sense of economic insecurity because of the outsourcing of middle class jobs and other effects of economic globalization. Some feel a personal insecurity generated by the terrorist attack on us a few years ago. These elements in our situation may give us a slight inkling of what it is like to live under the immediate threat of destruction by one’s enemies or in a devastated land.
However, the comparison forces us to recognize how little, comparatively, we have to fear. We live neither under threat of destruction by our enemies nor in a devastated land. The hopes and expectations we bring before God are more likely to be for preserving what we have and improving our situation here and there than for salvation or restoration of the sort to which our Old Testament passages refer. The temperature of our anticipation is far lower.
At a deeper level, however, our situation is more desperate than ever before. What is threatened today, even if the threat still remains largely invisible to most Americans, is the future of humanity on the planet. The wonderful scientific and technological successes that have made for our current comfort and security have also made the human future precarious.
Sadly, Paul’s analysis of the human condition, into which Jesus came as savior, is all too relevant to the analysis of our situation two thousand years after Jesus birth. Led by Christendom, or what was once Christendom, and especially by the United States, the world worships an idol. Its name is Mammon or wealth. This worship has organized our global life, expressing itself in the world’s most powerful institutions and in its almost universally accepted ideology. Most governments worship at this throne. For the most part the churches are silent about this idolatry.
God has given us up to the consequences of our idolatry. These include the profound injustices involved in the obscene contrasts of wealth and poverty in most countries, including our own, and even more in the world as a whole. They include the decay of the social fabric, as our families and communities erode, as we see our neighbors as potential threats, and as we imprison more and more of our citizens. They include the extreme impoverishment of the inner lives of myriads of people as they seek their happiness through the acquisition of property and the consumption of goods. They include the degradation of land and water and air. They include our trust in military weapons to impose our will on all the people of the earth, a trust that leads again and again to suffering and futility.
In such a situation, for what can we hope? For what should we hope? We cannot and should not hope for the results of our idolatry to end or be reversed. It is far too late for that. We must collectively pay the price for our collective sinfulness.
Consider just one example of the results of our worship of wealth – the increasingly rapid climate change that is largely due to our excessive use of fossil fuels. It is too late to prevent the consequences of such change. Most of the glaciers of the world will soon be gone together with the ecosystems nourished by their melt. As the rivers flowing from the melting glaciers dry up, millions of people will be displaced. The global shortage of fresh water will be exacerbated.
Similarly, most of the corral reefs of the world’s tropical oceans will soon be gone together with many of the species of fish that have depended upon them. In a world where we have already gone past the point of sustainability in the exploitation of many species of fish, the oceans will be further impoverished. The problem of adequate protein in the diet of many people will become more critical. The displacement of fisherfolk will accelerate.
In all probability climate change will lead to changes that speed climate change. There are feedback loops. Storms will increase in number and ferocity. There is a serious possibility that ocean currents will be affected, including the Gulf Stream on which the happy climate of Europe depends. We will have no choice but to adjust to all this and to much more.
But hope is not irrelevant in relation to climate change. The Pentagon is planning for defense of American interests in a climatically changing world. It assumes that these interests will be in opposition to those of others, who must, therefore, be suppressed by force. We can hope that, instead, American policy will be to work with other nations on the global problem, taking steps to slow climate change and to respond to it collectively so as to reduce the inevitable suffering everywhere.
It may be idle to hope that global policies will not continue for some time to be shaped in the service of Mammon. But perhaps we can hope that the Christian church will cease to be complicit in this idolatry. In many parts of the world the church already realizes the devastation brought about by this idolatry and opposes it. Finally, just this Fall, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches has spoken against it and called for resistance. Perhaps it is only in the United States that Christians remain so naively ignorant of the consequences of this idolatry. We can hope that major segments of the church in this country will awaken from their slumber, that the scales will fall from our eyes, that we will see the horrors to which we have acquiesced, and that we will repent.
Would our repentance, that is, both recognition of wrongdoing and turning in a new direction, have a practical effect on American policies? Of that there is no assurance. The churches for whose repentance we can hope do not have great political influence today.
However, we would not find ourselves alone. The World Social Forum has come into being to counter the World Economic Forum. The terminology is important. The Social Forum refuses to subordinate all other goods to the worship of wealth. It calls for a future in which wealth serves human beings rather than one in which human beings are required to serve wealth. If the American churches recognize that they are called to give themselves to the cause of this change in global focus, our government might have to give some heed. It is not wrong to hope.
The long history of hope has taught us that even if, probably in an unexpected form, our hope were partially realized, history would continue in its ambiguous course. But it has taught us also that this is no reason not to hope and even to express our hopes in concrete ways. Both as they are fulfilled and as they are frustrated, our expressions have to change. Our hope is often, properly, for the unlikely. It should not be directed to the impossible.
Although the selection of readings for Advent made clear that this is the season for hope and expectancy generally and not simply to remember and reenact the expectation of Jesus, still it is the season to reflect also on the coming of Jesus. As a result of that coming, Paul reconstructed his understanding of the hopes of Israel. Our hopes this Advent must be in the light of our memory of his coming and also of our actual situation now. That actual situation is deeply influenced by Jesus as are the hopes that we, as Christians, now formulate.
The actual situation is one in which there are vast numbers of Christian congregations in which Jesus is remembered. Sadly, the interpretation of Jesus’ message and mission is often drastically limited. Jesus’ proclamation of a world in which God’s purposes are realized is ignored. So are most of his radical teachings about attachment to the goods of this world. In place of all that we have a message about the steps individuals must take to secure the destiny of their individual souls. These steps rarely include serious discipleship or participation in Jesus’ faithfulness to God. They are often tainted by the legalism against which Paul worked so hard.
But despite all the distortions, there remains the potential for Jesus’ real message and mission to come alive in our situation. I noted how it came alive at the recent meeting of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. Some of these churches are in the United States, and their leaders are committed to bringing the message home in this country. It is because of the already existing influence of Jesus that we can hope for some success.
Our situation includes, as Paul’s did not, supportive influences from other religious traditions. We need not work alone to oppose the idolatry of wealth. In such work we would be supported by many Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Bahai, Buddhists, indigenous traditions, and others. There are even remnants of secular humanism that will work with us. But this does not reduce the importance of Jesus. It is his message that opens us to working with all these others against the idolatry that poisons our world and engenders terrible consequences for humanity as well the other species with which share the planet.
Still, we do not anticipate that Jesus will come again this Christmas except in the sense that it is a time to remember his coming in the past and to open ourselves to his renewed influence in our lives. How can we then think of advent as a time of anticipation of Christ? We can do so only if we stop thinking of "Christ" as a synonym for Jesus and understand it as naming the way that God was incarnate in Jesus. The coming of Jesus was the coming of God in and through the human Jesus. That coming transformed the world. It brought liberation to many. It established for many an alternative way of being in the world to that encouraged by the Empire of that day.
But it could do that only as God kept coming, again and again and again, into the world that had been changed by God’s coming in Jesus. Again and again and again that coming transformed the personal and historical situation in ways that were not foreseeable or controllable by human planning. Because of Jesus, we can identify God’s coming in these past events and in what is happening today as well. We can see that in them Christ is present. We see Christ in our neighbors. We see Christ in events of world-historical importance. We see Christ in the little healings and transformations that draw us closer to the faithfulness to which we are called.
Our hope always, in every way, is for the coming of Christ. Apart from that coming, there is no hope. Indeed, the hope within us is also the work of Christ.
Advent is the season when this hope for Christ’s coming is lifted up and thematized. It is grounded in our assurance of what God did in Israel and above all what he has done in Jesus. At Christmas we recall that especially. But the hope is directed to what Christ is doing now and what we believe Christ can do and will do in the years ahead.
The hope is shaped by our understanding of incarnation. God acts in the world in and through the actions of God’s creatures, especially the human ones. We cannot act apart from God’s presence, and too often we do not act as God calls us to act. Nevertheless, as we are open to God’s call and working within us, Christ comes. As we seek to serve God, we are never alone. At Christmas we say again Immanuel, God with us. Immanuel is Christ. In Advent we anticipate Christ’s new coming as we remember Christ’s coming in Jesus.
The temperature of anticipation in many of our churches throughout the year, and even in Advent, is low. Many Christians expect very little. They expect to go through some enjoyable experiences, receive some gifts, sing some carols, and then get on with their routine lives. In a world heading for catastrophe, this shows a profound disconnect with reality. The Bible gives expression to people who did not have any such disconnect. They appraised their situations with radical honesty and stated their urgent needs. They hoped in God. Their need for God’s help was urgent.
Can that sense of urgency become part of the lives of our congregations? That, too, though improbable, is a legitimate hope. If we appraised our situation realistically, and if we realistically considered our need for Christ’s coming, the hope to which this would give rise would not be casual or lukewarm. May Christmas this year, in some small part, be the beginning of a new realism in our congregations!
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