We Started Without
You: 2nd Sunday in Advent: Year B
Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Peter
3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8
This Second Sunday in Advent in Year B is the best: Christmas
like we remember it. Isaiah proclaims comfort to the people who
have waited for so long. What more beloved verses than these,
used for half the Christmas portion of Handel’s Messiah? “Prepare
the way of the Lord”; “Comfort ye my people”; “Rejoice Daughter of
Zion”; “He will feed his flock like a shepherd . . .”
Perhaps The Elves cherry-picked verses
1 and 2 of Psalm 85 so we wouldn’t think God’s Kingdom might be
established without first forgiving our “sin.” But what is “sin”
really? Breaking the rules? What are the rules? In
parable after parable in the past year A, Jesus broke or
subverted as many Roman rules as he could. But the rules he never
broke or subverted were God’s rules. “The grass withers, the
flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.” And
what is that Word? Distributive justice.
Unfortunately, by the time the leader of the Christian community in
Rome wrote the letter in Peter’s name, the “rules” had been watered
down to “holiness” and “godliness,” whatever that meant.
“Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” right? So, is a holy life one
with lots of baths?
God’s time is not our time, the writer reminds us. As the hymn
says, “A thousand ages in God’s sight
are like an evening gone.” The best we can do is lead lives of
“holiness and godliness” and wait. In the portion not read we are
advised to shore up the belief (faith) in the story of Jesus’s death
and resurrection “with goodness, goodness with knowledge, knowledge
with self-control, self-control with endurance, endurance with
godliness, godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with
love” (1:5-7). This is not a bad
list, it just leaves out the kind of radical abandonment of
self-interest that Jesus embodied, and avoids the conundrum of
retributive versus distributive justice.
The prophet who created “Second Isaiah” had not yet confronted the
reality of conditions back in Jerusalem once the exiles would return
from Babylon. The hope was still strong for distributive
justice-compassion, and the return to living in God’s realm under God’s
rule. But by the time the letter called 2nd Peter was written –
in an interesting time lapse of a thousand years later – the leadership
had begun to figure out ways to continue life in a still-untransformed
world. The excuses are all there: “God’s ways are not our
ways.” We have to learn to go on and maintain hope in the face of
enormous doubt and disappointment. In 1:4-5, the writer reminds the
people that through the promise of Jesus, if they forgo the corruption
that comes with lust, they may yet attain immortality. Presumably
those who made it would wait for the Lord in heaven. Earth is a
lost cause.
Psalm 85 personifies the qualities of righteousness
(justice-compassion), peace, faithfulness, and love, and says they go
before God like heralds or a vanguard before a king. Yes, the
words seem to echo Mark’s use of Isaiah 40, which literalizes those
qualities in the person of John the Baptizer. But suppose the
Psalm means that before the world can be transformed, the people in it
must live their lives from distributive justice-compassion?
Forget about saving your soul from hell. The only “hell” is the
“hell” of retributive, pay-back, conditional “justice,” which is not
justice at all, but revenge and reward for those caught in the
seemingly inevitable normalcy of civilization.
These words are beginning to flow too easily from my mind through the
keyboard and into cyberspace. Just as glib as the writer of 2nd
Peter in his diatribe found in Chapter 2: “They promise them freedom,
but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for people are slaves to
whatever masters them. For if, after they have escaped the
defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, for the
last state has become worse for them than the first” (19-20).
The “normalcy of civilization” and “the defilements of the world” are
not petty trespass, such as not sharing your toys, or plaigerizing term
papers from the internet, or being unfaithful to your marriage.
These are all symptoms of the corporate sin that traps everyone in
systems that start with the idea of the greatest good for the greatest
number, but end in debilitating, disempowering Communism on the Left
(tyranny of the majority), and Fascism on the Right (tyranny of the
minority).
The hard part is – as we have learned through two millennia of waiting
for Jesus to come back and finish what he started – it’s really up to
us to establish the kingdom. The writer of 2nd Peter couldn’t
imagine such an outrageous and terrifying idea. Neither can
significant percentages of humanity today. We look outside
ourselves for salvation, for hope, for meaning, and we fight to the
death over the metaphors.
Second Isaiah was written from exile in Babylon. The Gospel of
Mark was written in the 60s to 70s C.E., in the context of the
destruction of the Jewish Temple, and a second kind of exile. The
2nd letter of Peter was written from the Christian community in Rome,
near the end of the first Century, C.E., when everyone who had known
anyone who had known Jesus was dead – yet another kind of exile from
the spirit of the original Jesus, and his particular revelation of the
kingdom of God.
Two thousand years later, the exile has become so complete that the
homeland is alien territory. Scholarship, including the search
for the historical Jesus, the work of the
Jesus Seminar, and Matthew Fox’s reclaiming of the
mystical, creation-centered
tradition provide maps, but the signposts and trail markers
are not what most Christians expect or want.
Nevertheless, Priests for Equality (The Inclusive Psalms)
translate Psalm 85 using present and future verb tenses, with the
result that the metaphor speaks to the call for Christians to
participate in the ongoing work of distributive
justice-compassion. Because “[l]ove and faithfulness have met; justice and peace have embraced[,] fidelity will
sprout from the earth and justice will lean down from heaven. Our
God will give us what is good, and our land will yield its
harvest. Justice will march before you, Adonai, and peace will
prepare the way for your steps.”
If Christianity is to have any relevance to spiritual truth in the
post-modern world, we must let go of the idea of divine intervention,
past or future, and find our confidence in the order of the universe
that surrounds us. Then, as Rhineland mystic Hildegard of Bingen sang in the
12th Century, we may experience the Cosmos as “limitless love, from the
depths to the stars: flooding all, loving all . . . the royal kiss of
peace.” [Gabriele Uhlein, Meditations with
Hildegard of Bingen (Bear & Co., 1983)]. With
that confidence, we can perhaps find the courage to radically abandon
self-interest – as Jesus taught us – and join the ongoing struggle for
justice and peace among humanity.
“A voice cries out: In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord . . .
and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has
spoken it.”
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