advent 1 year A

Isaiah 2: 1-5 NRSV text
Psalm 122 NRSV text
Romans 13: 11-14 NRSV text
Matthew 24: 36-44 NRSV text

 

Advent is waiting time and waiting time is always difficult. It’s difficult in the same way that it’s difficult to write a really good trilogy! I’m a great fan of The Matrix. The first film in the series was simply outstanding. The third was good – and satisfying, in that it drew everything to a conclusion and answered all the questions. But the second film sucked! It was a filler – something to be going on with in between the beginning and the conclusion. I felt like the Harry Potter readers (yes, I’m one of those, too!) for whom the time between reading the latest in the series and waiting for the next was pretty empty.

And that’s the problem: waiting time can indeed be empty time. There’s a natural sense that the really important things to date belong to the past, and the really important things to come belong to the future. To be waiting is to be caught “between the times” where the glories of the past and the promises of the future seem equidistantly distant. Waiting time can feel like time to be endured.

Waiting time in the Bible
There are significant waiting times in the biblical narratives. Exile is one. The waiting for the coming of the Messiah is another. There is the period of waiting between ascension and Pentecost. And there is waiting for the return of Jesus Christ. Some of these are picked up in this week’s Lectionary texts which, during Advent, are more closely linked thematically than at other times of the year.

The important characteristic to note is that waiting time is never meant to be empty time or wasted time. There is always an urgency to waiting time. It is time pregnant with expectation and also with significance. The significance is given by the fact that it is God-filled time. It is in some sense a “proving ground”: the challenge is to hold on to faith and to discover God in what is sometimes God’s hiddenness.

Waiting time in the Bible always has two “glances”. There is the backward glance to the past – to the formative narratives and periods that make the People of God who they are. Waiting time is a time to remember and re-appropriate the past. It is time to rediscover afresh the God who has been there in the past.

Then there is the forward glance to the future, because God is the God who makes promises; the God of the living, and not of the dead. The present is not ultimate. It does not have the last or the only Word. The Living God who speaks and makes promises is the God of the future – in the very deepest sense that the future belongs to God, and the future of God’s people and of the world is the future that God intends for them.

What, though, is the purpose of these constant “back-and-forward” glances? It’s not so that God’s people resemble the crowd watching a long tennis rally! The purpose is to fill the present – the waiting time – with informed meaning. I use the phrase “informed” here not to mean “factual information” so much as “significance in the light of God”. The past reveals who God is and has been; the future reveals what God will be. Both are intended to inform the present, so that the community of faith can live faithfully and meaningfully and productively in the waiting time. The waiting time is a time to consolidate and live in response to God.

Yet it is also a time of excitement. The sense of waiting in the Bible always has an urgency about it – a “holy impatience” that prays constantly, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus!” The reason for this is twofold: one is the straightforward excitement about the promised future of God. What is round the corner is going to be quite something – and it’s worth getting excited about! The second is the impatience with the way things are in the present. The present is too far from the promised future – or even from the remembered past!

This is the third “glance” during waiting time: the “looking around”. It’s the glance of the exiles standing in the midst of the ruins of Jerusalem and surveying the devastation. It’s the glance of those in captivity in Babylon, surrounded by foreign places, people and things, taunted by their captors. It’s the glance of the Jewish people in thrall to the Romans, and of the early Christians under persecution. When they look around, things are so far from what they ought to be that they are filled with a “holy impatience” – a “divine dissatisfaction” with the present.

The acid question then becomes what sort of reaction is appropriate. What sort of spirituality characterises the time? What is Advent spirituality like? These are the questions addressed by this week’s texts.

“Be ready at all times!” (Matthew 24: 36-44)
This passage forms part of Jesus’ final address in Matthew’s gospel. It’s difficult to jump straight into the final address at the outset of the Lectionary year, but we need to note something significant in the opening verse:

But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father.

Note how these words immediately give only secondary authority to Jesus, and focus our gaze instead to God alone. For all Matthew’s insistence throughout the gospel that in Jesus, we encounter God, here he tells us that the “eschatological timetable” is known to the Father alone. The message is clear: “You’re wasting your time trying to predict the End!” It’s been a feature of the history of Churches and characteristic of cults through the ages that people try to circumvent Jesus’ clear statement here.

I remember the Hal Lindsey stuff in the late 1970s about “Terminal Generation” and the “Left Behind” movement that confidently predicted the founding of the State of Israel as the fulfilment of the last eschatological prophecy. 1948, it was said, was the birth of the “terminal generation”: Jesus would therefore return within 40 years (a biblical generation). It led to all sorts of doomsday scenarios. Importantly, this world was written off: God was going to destroy creation through nuclear holocaust; all that mattered was ensuring that you were one of those who were “Raptured” and not “left behind”. I remember this vividly because I came home from school one day and, for some reason, none of my family was at home, and I had no way of knowing where they were. I tried ringing friends and people I considered the sorts of Christians who would certainly not have been “left behind”: coincidentally, they were all out. I was in a real state, convinced that Jesus had come and I’d been left behind! Fortunately, my mother came home in the midst of all this, and I comforted myself with the thought that, if I was going to hell, at least I’d have familiar company …

Jesus’ point in these verses is that (a) you cannot predict the time of his return and (b) you have to live every moment as though it were imminent. The image he uses is a familiar one from the gospels: we are like household servants, taking care of things while the Master is away on a long trip. Everything needs to be kept in order and the house needs to be ready to welcome him home at any hour of the day or night.

The challenge, then, is to maintain a vigilant faithfulness. We don’t stop what we ought to be doing – we continue doing it! We continue doing God’s will on earth. We continue making disciples, preaching the gospel, caring for the needy, transforming unjust structures of society and caring for the earth (the Five Marks of Mission). We are not to be like the US energy spokesperson in the Bush administration who said, “We don’t have to worry about global warming, because Jesus is coming again soon!”

Advent spirituality doesn’t opt out from the issues of the day or the mission vocation: it engages ever more vigilantly and faithfully. Advent people are “wide awake” to the world, because “The Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour”.

“Match the vision” (Isaiah 2: 1-5)
The United Reformed Church has been engaged in a 3-year “Catch the Vision” programme. Isaiah’s challenge is to “walk in the light of the Lord” (2:6) – allowing the vision to shape our living and acting in the world. To “match the vision”, in other words.

The vision of Jerusalem as the centre of world peace exposes the enormous gap between God’s intentions and the lived reality (read on further into Isaiah’s message). Jerusalem is not filled with “the ways of the God of Jacob”. Judah is busy behaving like and becoming a nation-state like every other nation, compromising religiously, building up armies, engaging in statecraft, building a socio-political hierarchy that elevates some and ignores and makes victims of others. It is a system, in other words, whose cost is measured in human lives. The future vision is the mirror against which to reflect and measure the present.

Significantly, Yahweh is referred to as “The God of Jacob”. Judah is being drawn back to its past – to the God who has been revealed in the promises to the Patriarchs and to the God of the Exodus. These are the constitutive events of Israel as the People of Yahweh. It is a divine reminder of the Covenant: the People of Yahweh are to create a state that models the difference between Yahweh (the Liberator God of the Exodus) and all the other gods.

The most striking and compelling thing about the vision is peace.

They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

This is a vision that stands in absolute opposition to the project of statecraft. Every national budget is dominated by “defence spending”. The US spends enough on defence daily to feed the whole world for two weeks. That scale is repeated by governments across the globe. “National security” is predicated upon war as an ever-present reality and the inability to envision peace. One of the most disturbing facts to emerge from the end of the Cold War is that war is, in fact, an economic necessity: the former Soviet Union found itself with the problem of how to employ the millions who had made up the vast Soviet military machine. The absence of a credible threat did not mean that the Soviet Union could suddenly disband the army and channel armaments budgets into building a peaceful society: they had “learned war” for so long and so thoroughly that they were unable to “do” peace – even when the threat of war had gone!

Similarly, war in the UK is Big Business. Defence contracts in this country are protected by all sorts of privileged contractual conditions that run directly counter to the espousal of Free Market Economics”: if Iraq (for example) defaults on payments for missiles supplied by a British firm, the British taxpayer picks up the bill! Defence contracts are always honoured – somehow. Firms that deal in war are not allowed to go out of business – even when the market shrinks!

Advent is thus a time for grand visions – but visions that are supposed to have bite in the present! To wait for the coming of the Prince of Peace is to strive for peace in the present. It is to hold up the challenge of the vision of the promised future, and expose the ways in which we “learn war”. It is a reminder that the One who comes in Bethlehem comes as the Prince of Peace, and that we cannot and dare not seek to enlist the Prince of Peace in our dreams of domination and in the despair of weapons production.

“Peace and justice!” (Psalm 122)
The vision of Jerusalem (“City of Peace”) as the epicentre of world peace is reflected in Psalm 122. It is the place to which “all the tribes of Yahweh go up”. The Psalm is “a Song of Ascents” – in other words, a psalm that would be sung by pilgrims as they walked up towards the Temple Mount.

Of course, it reflects the assumption that this is Israel’s capital; that these are Yahweh’s people. Its primary focus is about national celebration, worship and renewal. What Isaiah does, and Jesus even more so, is to burst the narrowly nationalistic connotations of this understanding of Yahweh’s purposes. Jerusalem is not only the centre of the Jewish world but of the whole creation; Yahweh is no tribal God, but Lord and King of all creation. The “peace of Jerusalem” necessarily entails the peace of the whole Middle East – and indeed, is linked to world peace.

We know, this Advent, just how true this is, and see so clearly how deep those connections are. The peace of Jerusalem cannot be secured by walling off Israel’s “enemies”. It is not a peace to be obtained at the expense of others: it is peace because it includes those others! The Zionist vision is of peace obtained and maintained through security; this is a faithless narrowing of the biblical vision. Jesus’ vision is of the whole world as a Kingdom of Peace. It is made possible, not through security and the containment of hostiles, but through justice which dispels hostility and makes enemies into friends, brothers and sisters.

The Advent hope and prayer for peace thus involves us in the struggles and conflicts around justice and oppression. It means opposing the Wall. It means actively seeking a just solution to the Israel/Palestine question – a solution that is not satisfied with treating the Palestinians as less important or less human than Israelis. It is a peace that is found, not at the expense of one group, but through a solution that accords equal rights to Palestinians. To pray for peace is not a matter of trying to stop or contain conflict: it is about changing the world.

“Bodies matter!” (Romans 13: 8-14/World AIDS Day)
Paul writes to the Romans here in the context of the expected return of Jesus Christ:

Salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.

The image of “the day” vs “the night” (ie light rather than darkness) provides the vehicle for talking about Christian behaviour. Paul refers to “the works of darkness”, in the face of which we need to put on “the armour of light”.

He is talking, in other words, about powers. “Darkness” is a realm – the realm we habitually inhabit. It is not just an individual realm, but a whole world. Living as “children of the light” is not easy! It is living in constant conflict with the norms, values and habits of the world of the everyday. Paul uses a military metaphor: “light” is an invasion force. But like every invader, the Children of the Light need to be armoured against the enemy. They need to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires”.

It is significant that Paul talks about this conflict as one that is fought out in bodies. In verse 9-10, he speaks about the commandments being fulfilled in love. These are the commandments that relate to our neighbours. Note that they are both broken and fulfilled in the body. Similarly, in verse 13, the list of vices are sins committed in the body.

Bodies matter! To be human is to be embodied. The Greek notion of “the real ‘us’” as some sort of “spirit” encased in a bodily husk (that will ultimately, in death, disappear) is not the same thing as the Jewish/Christian belief in the significance of bodies. Christian faith asserts, “We believe in the resurrection of the body”, not “We believe in the immortality of the soul”. Resurrection says that bodies are important to God. We are our bodies – and neither we nor our bodies will be lost!

Salvation is obtained through a body – the broken, bleeding, dying crucified body of Jesus Christ. This is why “the preaching of the cross” is “foolishness to Greeks”. How can something like salvation possibly depend on something so insignificant, earthy and “unspiritual” as a body? It’s patently absurd! Yet note that Paul refers again and again to the crucifixion! It is what happens to Jesus’ body that matters: he dies, is buried, and is raised. Salvation is a “bodily” event – and it is through what happens to the embodied God that we are saved.

That is why Paul’s favourite image of the Church is the Body of Christ. Among many other things, it is a protest against the easy tendency to denigrate and ridicule the body and human physicality. Life; suffering; death; resurrection – all of these are things we live and experience though our bodies.

In this passage, the waiting time is to be filled with significance by the ways in which we do and don’t use our bodies. We are called, in other words, to pay attention to the ways in which bodies are related both to darkness and to light.

It is therefore absolutely appropriate that World AIDS day falls this week. Some 40 million people in the world are living with HIV/AIDS. AIDS hits the most vulnerable hardest. 2.8 million people developed the disease in Sub-Saharan Africa last year. That region accounts for 62% of the global total of AIDS sufferers. In my home country of Zimbabwe, 35% of all adults have HIV/AIDS, and the life expectancy has dropped from 63 in 1981 to 37. In that worst-hit region, 60% of the sufferers are women – yet the primary responsibility for caring for families and children rests on women! If women become infected in that region, they face violence, rejection, divorce, loss of property and income.

Young people are at the centre of the epidemic, with 40% of new AIDS cases breaking out in the 15-24 age bracket. Among those, nearly 3 young women are infected for every one young man.

How might we think about these things as Christians? Let me be honest: I haven’t a clue about how we might respond in a way that gives due weight and significance to what is happening! But I do know this: the first thing we need to recognise is that this is a pandemic. It is not a “non-Christian” disease that is somehow appropriate as God’s judgement on sexual immorality! That is how the Church characteristically responded when AIDS started to hit: it was the “Gay Plague” – God’s judgement on homosexuality! AIDS sufferers needed care less than they needed reminding about the wrath of God.

AIDS is transmitted today mainly through heterosexual sex. In many African societies, men are told that the cure for AIDS is to have sex with a virgin. The rape of babies and young girls has become a common route for infection. In traditional, patriarchal societies – which include vast sections of our western democracies! – women have little say over their own bodies in sexual relationships. Decisions over “safe sex” are in the hands of males, and “bareback” (unprotected) sex is seen as macho, risky and exciting among these men.

But more importantly, the Church needs to recognise AIDS as a problem within the Church, rather than treating it as something “out there”. “The Body of Christ has AIDS!” is a cry of agony that reminds us of this terrible reality. AIDS is one of the presenting problems of our age (along with oppression and global warming). It is a kairos – one of the “signs of the times”. It is a defining moment: how we respond to AIDS shapes and defines what the gospel means in today’s world.

What do we see when we glance around at the global response? For all the advances made in combating and containing the disease, and in preventing its spread, resources fall far short of projected needs. Effective AIDS medication is expensive. There are huge sums of money to be made by pharmaceutical companies in developing and marketing improved medication, and these are simply unavailable to those who are most at risk and mostly infected. In Zimbabwe and South Africa, combating the spread of AIDS and treating infection is radically hampered by the peculiar blindnesses of Mugabe and Mbeki to the problem. Both want to pretend that the scale of the problem is vastly smaller than it is. Both are profoundly homophobic, and pretend that it is a problem only among the gay community (which, ironically, they want to pretend exists only as a tiny, recalcitrant group of “perverts” on the fringes of African society!).

This simply highlights the fact that a proper, global response to AIDS is still hampered by its association with homosexuality and its economic cost. Governments are prepared to spend obscenely large amounts of money on defence, but demand economic returns on investment in AIDS treatment. In the UK, Gordon Brown, then-Chancellor, declared an “unlimited war chest” for the invasion of Iraq; no such economically-blind “generosity” is evident in the war against AIDS!

An Advent spirituality cannot duck the big questions of the day. We believe in a Lord who was crucified and broken for us, and who was raised for us. We believe that bodies matter! These are potentially enormous theological resources available – resources that are part of “the armour of light” to provoke engagement, compassion, and faithful action, and make us into the People of God who are seen to be Jesus’ people because we look and act like the One for whose coming we wait.

Amen.

 

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