Advent 2

Readings: Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11; 2 Peter 3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8

We hear today from the Second Letter of Peter,
“The earth and everything done on it 
will be found out.”
St. Augustine, picking up on the idea
of everything being revealed, 
wrote that in the new heavens 
and new earth that we await,
“The thoughts of our minds will lie open 
to mutual observation…; 
for [the Lord] will light up 
what is hidden in darkness 
and will reveal 
the thoughts of the heart.” (Civ. Dei 22.29).

Now that’s a terrifying prospect.

Think of how you would feel about someone
looking at your internet search history.
Even if it contains nothing 
outright illegal or immoral,
it likely contains some things 
that are acutely embarrassing,
like when we searched for recent pictures 
of a high school girlfriend or boyfriend,
or when we Googled some stupid question
like “who is the governor of Maryland?” 
or “who would win a fight 
between Batman and Superman?”
or when we searched for 
some scrap of celebrity gossip, 
or even Googled ourselves to find out
if the world is taking notice of us 
(this apparently is known as “ego-surfing”).
And some of our searches 
are not just embarrassing;
some of our searches are heartbreaking,
revealing sorrows we hold deep within:
“How do I know if my spouse is cheating?”
“What are the signs of child abuse?”
“What is the survival prognosis 
for pancreatic cancer?”
“What happens after we die?”

Contrast your internet search history
with what you see on social media.
Whenever I look at Facebook or Instagram.
it seems like everyone I know
is living their best life.
They are eating in restaurants that serve
exquisitely prepared dishes;
they are visiting places 
of cultural importance
or great natural beauty;
they are celebrating significant milestones
and impressive career achievements;
and their kids and grandkids
are saying the cutest things imaginable.

The world of social media allows us 
to curate the self that we show to the world,
to hide our thoughts and actions 
so that no one knows our pettiness,
our vanity, our foolishness, our triviality
or the deep sorrow on which we put a brave face.
But, Peter tells us, everything done on earth—

every action taken, every thought thought—
will be found out on the day of the Lord,
which comes like a thief,
dissolving the elements in fire,
dissolving the pretenses behind which we hide,
dissolving the curated self-image 
that we show to the world,
and revealing the search histories of our lives 
for what they are:
searches for meaning and love and fulfillment
that have often been futile and misdirected
and tragic and sorrowful.

On the day of the Lord 
everyone will know
that I’m just faking it.
I’m not living my best life;
in fact, my life is a mess,
my dinner is burnt,
my vacation was stressful,
my career feels like a dead end,
and my kids drive me crazy.
And on the day of the Lord I will know
that everyone else is also faking it,
that they’re not okay;
that their lives are no less messy than mine.
The day of the Lord promises to be
profoundly uncomfortable for everyone.

But in the midst of our messy lives,
in the midst of our fears 
about them being unveiled, 
the word of God says to us today, 
“Comfort, give comfort to my people…
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem.”
God is coming:
racing through the desert of our pretense,
crashing into the wasteland 
of the carefully curated lives 
we present to the world;
filling in the valleys and leveling the mountains
that we use to hide our messy realities
in all their vanity and foolishness, 
their triviality and sorrow.
God comes not to condemn
but to comfort;
not to scold or shame us 

for the messiness of our lives,
but to join us in the mess,
to show to us the love for which 
we have been searching, 
to bear the sorrow of our sin 
so that we might be saved,
to know the brokenness of our hearts 
so that they might be mended.

Everything done on the earth shall be known
because until it is known it cannot be healed.
Shame and secrecy are evil’s greatest weapons,
because they allow evil to hide from the light
that would destroy it.
It is no accident 
that the sacrament of Reconciliation
involves bringing into the light
everything that we would like to keep hidden,
laying openly before God, 
present through the ministry of the priest,
the search history of our lives,
the misdirected desires and foolish choices,
the secret sorrows and unspoken regrets.
Dorothy Day said of confession,
“You do not want to make too much 
of your constant imperfections and venial sins,
but you want to drag them out to the light of day
as the first step in getting rid of them” (The Long Loneliness).

In Advent we celebrate 
the coming of light into the world,
the light that reveals everything done on earth:
the search for love and meaning, 
the search that has so often gone astray
into vanity and foolishness, 
triviality and sorrow.
We celebrate the light
that comes to guide us to the truth,
the truth about ourselves,
and the truth about the God
who turns shame into glory 
through the power of his mercy.
So let us pray in this Advent
that God who is merciful
would have mercy on us all.

Advent 2

Readings: Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11; 2 Peter 3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8

“Be prepared.”
It’s the motto of the Boy Scouts,
so it must be good advice.
The founder of the Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell,
explained this motto back in 1908:
“Be prepared in mind by having disciplined yourself
to be obedient to every order,
and also by having thought out beforehand
any accident or situation that might occur,
so that you know the right thing to do at the right moment,
and are willing to do it.
Be prepared in body by making yourself strong and active
and able to do the right thing at the right moment, and do it.”

“Be prepared.”
It might also be thought of as the motto of John the Baptist,
with whom St. Mark associates the prophetic words:
“Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.”
Be prepared, so that you will know and do
the right thing at the right moment.

It is therefore surprising, perhaps,
that people in Jesus’s day
proved to be so thoroughly unprepared for him:
that when the right moment came—
that moment in human history
when God’s promise of comfort and salvation
was to be fulfilled—
almost no one was prepared to do the right thing.
In Mark’s Gospel in particular,
as we shall hear in our Sunday readings
over the course of the next year,
not only did the crowds and the religious leaders of the Jews
fail to do the right thing at the right moment,
but even Jesus’s closest followers,
even Peter who had confessed Jesus to be God’s anointed,
were unprepared when the moment of Christ’s passion came.

But perhaps we should not be surprised.
In the very first sentence of his Gospel,
Mark hints that the story he is about to tell
will be so strange,
that no one could have been prepared for it:
“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.”
He first tells us that this story is “gospel”—“good news”—
which in the ancient world was a term used to denote
the announcement of a royal birth
or a victory in battle.
And then he tells us that this good news
concerns Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God:
one who shares the nature of God
in the way that a child shares
in the nature of his or her parent.
Perhaps after this opening
we should be prepared to hear a story
that is not like your typical story,
since it is, after all, the story of the Son of God.
But just when we have prepared ourselves
to hear a marvelous story
of the mighty deeds
and the triumphant victories
of the Son of God,
Mark proceeds to tell us a story
of misunderstanding and rejection,
a story of betrayal and abandonment,
a story of suffering and death,
and a mysterious message at an empty tomb.
Who would have predicted that the story of God’s Son
would take such a form?
Who could have possibly,
in the words of Robert Baden-Powell,
“thought out beforehand
any accident or situation that might occur”?

It seems that the point that Mark is making in his Gospel
is that no matter how much we prepare,
no matter how thoroughly
we think things out beforehand,
no matter how strong and active
we make ourselves,
we are never prepared for Jesus:
we are never prepared for the surprising story
of the eternal Son of God
who takes on the form of a servant
for us and for our salvation.
We are never prepared because we inevitably think
within our human categories,
according to our human notions
of what the right thing is
and when the right moment.
But Jesus comes precisely to overturn
those categories and notions:
to make us rethink
what we have thought out ahead of time,
to undermine our idea of what it means to be strong.

Yet Mark’s Gospel also bids us,
“prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.”
Indeed, the Church gives us this season of Advent
as a time of preparation for the coming of Jesus.
So how do you prepare for the one who is
the one for whom you can never prepare?
Perhaps we prepare not by making plans,
but by making space.
Not by thinking things out ahead of time
but by opening a place in our hearts and minds
for the Word of God that comes to us in Jesus Christ.
Not by becoming strong and active,
but by making our hearts soft and pliable to God’s Spirit.

This is, of course,
the most difficult sort of preparation there is,
particularly in the season of frenetic activity
that leads up to Christmas.
But this is the challenge of Advent:
to clear some time in our busy lives,
to make some space in our crowded minds,
to prepare a way into our hearts
for the one for whom we can never prepare,
but who comes to us to shock us,
to surprise us,
to delight us with his love.

Advent 2

Readings: Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11; 2 Peter3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8

Advent is, of course, a time of expectation –
expectation of the birth of Christ
but also of his second coming –
and in today’s first and second readings
we have voices that present us with images
of the coming salvation of God
that involve a cosmic transformation
of the very fabric of the universe.
Isaiah tells us that, “Every valley shall be filled in,
every mountain and hill shall be made low,”
and, even more strikingly,
the Second Letter of Peter says that,
“the day of the Lord will come like a thief,
and then the heavens will pass away with a mighty roar
and the elements will be dissolved by fire,
and the earth and everything done on it will be found out.”

These voices remind us that world as we know it
is merely temporary, not eternal,
and that the very fabric of reality will be transformed
in the marriage of heaven and earth –
transformed by God in a way that we cannot even imagine
and so we must speak of it in metaphors
of valleys being filled in and mountains being laid low,
of heavens roaring and the elements being dissolved in fire.

After presenting such dramatic images Second Peter asks,
“Since everything is to be dissolved in this way,
what sort of persons ought you to be?”
In other words. . . so what?
If this is all true, how does it affect my life now?
Peter answers his own question,
saying that if this is true we should be,
“conducting [our]selves in holiness and devotion,
waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God.”

Waiting and hastening.
These two things might seem incompatible.
How is it that we can patiently wait for something
and yet still impatiently seek to hasten its arrival?
Even more, how can we,
by acting with holiness and devotion,
do both things at the same time:
both waiting and hastening?
In answer to his own question
of what people we ought to be
in the face of God’s coming transformation of the world,
Peter says our lives should be a hastening that waits
and a waiting that hastens.

We need somehow to work for the world’s transformation
while at the same time waiting for that transformation,
which only God can bring about in God’s own time.
That day we work to hasten
is what Second Peter calls “the day of God” –
the day whose coming belongs entirely to God and not to us.

A hastening that waits and a waiting that hastens:
what Peter says about the kind of people we ought to be
might at first sound quite strange and paradoxical
but perhaps it is not so unfamiliar as it first appears.
Think of the process of growing from a child into an adult.

Of course for me that was a long time ago,
so I think of this in terms of my more recent experience
as the parent of teenagers.
I know that, as a parent, I want my children
to work at developing into adults
and to act like the adults they are becoming,
How many times have I said,
“you’re too old to act this way”?
At the same time,
I want them to be patient with themselves,
not to rush too quickly into adulthood,
but to let it arrive in its own good time.
How often have I said,
“Sorry, you’re too young for this”?
I want them both to wait for adulthood
and to hasten toward it.
And this is not, I hope,
simply one more unreasonable parental demand
because, oddly enough,
these two things often occur simultaneously
in a hastening that waits and a waiting that hastens.
Sometimes it is a step toward maturity to recognize
that you are not yet mature enough for something
and that the most adult thing you can do
is to let yourself be a child for a little while longer.
At other times maturity involves stepping forward in faith
into a risky new experience,
despite all hesitation,
trusting that, whether your succeed or you fail,
it is all part of your becoming an adult
though it may require patient waiting before you can see that.

Maybe if those of us who are adults
can recall how it was that we became adults
we can have some idea
of the sort of persons we ought to be
as “we await new heavens and a new earth
in which righteousness dwells.”
If we listen to the voice of the apostle Peter
calling us to cultivate lives
of holy waiting and devoted hastening,
then the Advent season can be for us
a time both of anxious yearning for the world’s redemption
and of patient waiting to receive it as God’s gift.

2nd Sunday of Advent

After the kingdom of Judah was conquered
by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar,
the Jewish people lived in exile in Babylon
for the next two generations,
until Babylon itself was conquered by the Persians
and the exiles were allowed to return.
For two generations the Jewish people
remained faithful to their God —
studying God’s Law, keeping God’s Sabbath —
as they awaited God’s salvation
and their return to their homeland.
Our first reading is an announcement of that return:
"Comfort, give comfort to my people. . .
speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her that her service is ended."

Many of us are familiar with these words
from the opening of Handel’s Messiah,
which places them in the context of the Christian faith,
so that the waiting of Israel in exile
becomes a sign and symbol
of humanity’s long wait for Christ, the world’s redeemer.
And our Gospel reading today
presents us with John the Baptist,
a voice "crying out in the desert,"
who announces that redeemer:
"One who is mightier than I is coming after me. . . .
he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."
And so the redeemer whom the world had awaited
arrives in the person of Jesus of Nazareth,
and the words of Isaiah are fulfilled:
"here is your God!"

And yet. . . and yet. . . aren’t we still waiting?
Has the rugged land been made into a plain?
Has the rough county becomes a broad valley?
Has the glory of the Lord been revealed?
If we look at the news,
don’t we still see the rugged land of terror and violence?
If we look at our own lives,
don’t we still find in ourselves
the rough country of pride or sloth or greed
or just plain thoughtlessness?
If we look at our world,
can we see even a glimpse of God’s glory being revealed?
We believe that the world’s redeemer has come;
why then does our world look so unredeemed?
If in Jesus God has spoken God’s definitive word of comfort,
why do we so often feel that we are still in exile in Babylon,
far from the homeland of God’s promise?

The way theologians sometimes put the matter
is that in Jesus we experience a salvation
that has already come to us,
but is not yet realized fully in our world.
Through faith in Jesus we are already
in the homeland of God’s promise,
but still have not yet completely left behind
our exile in Babylon.

Already. . . but not yet.
It’s a nice theological formulation,
but does it help us solve the problem
of how we live with that "not yet"?
Our second reading tells us that
"with the Lord one day is like a thousand years
and a thousand years like one day"
and this may help us to grasp intellectually
why we can’t expect the world’s redemption
to follow our human timetable,
but it doesn’t tell us how we are to endure
the passage of those thousand-year-long days
as we await the new heavens and new earth
in which righteousness dwells.
What we really need to know
is how to cultivate patience as we live in the "not yet."

I sometimes think that in our world today,
patience is one of the most under appreciated virtues.
It seems like we need everything to have been done yesterday,
that our computers never boot up fast enough,
checkout lines at stores never move speedily enough,
change in Washington never comes promptly enough,
and those with whom we must live and work
never adapt to our needs briskly enough.
But I suspect that it is not simply today
that we find patience so difficult.
Our second reading testifies to the fact that in the first century
people were complaining about the delay
of the world’s final redemption,
and I suspect that those same people complained
that their ox carts ran too slow
and their crops took too long to grow.

We find patience difficult because patience is hard;
indeed, the word "patience" comes from the Latin patior,
which means "to suffer."
We don’t like being patient because we don’t like to suffer.
But patience is precisely what we need
to live in the "not yet."
It is the form that faithfulness takes
as we await the new heavens and the new earth.
It is a faithfulness that allows God to act
according to God’s own schedule,
in our world and in each one of our lives.
It is what allows us to take action to make our world
a better place and ourselves better people
while allowing the fruits of our actions
to remain in hands of God,
who judges our actions and our lives
in terms of faithfulness and not results.

And so in this Advent season
we should try to cultivate patience.
We should let this season of spiritual anticipation
become a time in which we strive to live
with all of the "not yets" in our world.
I would make one concrete suggestions.
Our patience, our faithfulness,
is founded on God’s patience and God’s faithfulness.
Our second reading tells us
that what we perceive as the delay of God’s promise
is in fact God being patient with us,
God giving us time to change,
so that we can live joyfully in God’s kingdom.

As we try to be patient with God,
we must recognize that God is the source of all patience,
and so our cultivation of patience
must involve prayer, asking God for the gift of patience.
One way to cultivate patience is to make the world stop
by taking time each day, even if only five minutes, to pray.
And in your prayer, ask God for a share in God’s patience.
Ask God to enable you to see yourself and others
through God’s eyes,
those eyes for which a thousand years are but a day,
those eyes of infinite patience.
And then listen.
Listen for the glad tiding that are already here,
listen for God’s word of comfort,
spoken tenderly to you and to our world.
And then speak:
become the voice that cries, like John the Baptist,
"make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God."
Become the one through whom God speaks
words of comfort to a world in exile.

Ask. . . listen. . . speak.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.