Hello From the Wilderness (Reflections on Advent 2, Year C)

 

So I’m sitting in my office last night, sipping my tea, reading some C.S. Lewis, and killing time before the 7:30 PM Praise Team rehearsal. The Alcoholics Anonymous folks are setting up their meeting room right outside my door, and I hear them discussing the latest instance of human insanity—the shooting rampage in San Bernardino, California which left fourteen dead and seventeen wounded.

“Do you think it was ISIS?” someone asks.

“They had Muslim-sounding names,” another replies.

“I think we should just line ‘em all up against a wall and shoot ‘em!” opines another voice.

And I’m sitting in my safe little office thinking this is one crazy-assed world. Where is John the Baptist when we need him? Because we are most assuredly in the wilderness, and we need a voice telling us to get our act together.

The Hebrew word which our Bible translates as “wilderness” is midbar. It literally means “that which is beyond.” The wilderness is not a charming forest which would inspire John Muir with its beauty. It’s a place beyond civilization, beyond control, and filled with savagery in the form of wild beasts and murderous nomads. Kind of describes our world, don’t you think? In this spherical lunatic asylum—awash in chaos and voices crying for violent revenge—we could sure use a word of hope. The trouble is, of course, that hope is useless without repentance.

 And what is repentance, except saying “yes” to things being different? We're going to have to get used to Muslims being our neighbors (For my parish in Philadelphia that will be soon, because an Islamic youth center is opening next month around the corner!). We will have to decide that some of what we consider to be individual freedoms might need to be sacrificed to the public good. We will have to decide that ecumenism is necessary, and our worship spaces will have to be shared with those of other traditions if they are going to stay open at all. Or, we might discover that the future of the church in this nation lies in electronic media and peoples’ living rooms, not in grand institutional buildings.

We will also have to rethink the way we look at the church in general. We might be saying “bye-bye” to full-time professional clergy, and demanding a greater level of discipleship from lay people. We will have to start considering church to be about local and global mission to the poor and suffering and lost, and not about providing us with individual spiritual comfort. And we’ll have to stop looking at Jesus like we look at Santa Claus (to whom we’ve done a similar disservice in our popular culture). That is, we’ll want to embrace Christ’s spirit of sacrificial love which opens us up to the world, rather than just wanting to be alone in the garden with him making us feel good.

The prophet Isaiah, quoted in this week’s Gospel (Luke 3:1-6) tells us that preparing the way for our deliverance means changing things in a radical way—and a way that will be visible, public, and obvious to everyone. Are we ready for this? I hope so. Hope is impossible without repentance, but there is no point in repenting without hope.

Happy Advent, my repentant friends. To be continued...