Thus begins the holiday season. Welcome baby Jesus! How do we know? The shopping blitz has started, and the economy is supposed to be either saved or trashed by what happened in the stores on Friday.
‘Tis the season though when we church people again proclaim hope, that something – someone – is coming that is going to change everything, restore everything, make right everything, and usher in a new era of peace and just rule. And, no, this one did not just get elected president of the United States. We might want to think a little bit bigger than that. We call this season advent, the season when we anticipate anew the inbreaking of God into our beautiful and oft broken world. And we wait and work accordingly.
Our three texts today beg such bigger matters. What they all have in common is that they are sober messages – pleas if you will – to see and find God at work in the midst of terribly trying circumstances. These situations are not religious abstractions; they have to do with those places where politics, culture and violence come together in painful ways. And the biblical voices don’t presume that life is neat and tidy. They speak out of desperations. The first two of them out of the reality of the utter destruction of what they had known to be best and most precious in their worlds, the final one out of the coming realization that the world they have known is about to be completely upended.
How then might these voices reflect hope? Let’s give them a look.
We started with verses from Isaiah 64. There are 66 chapters in Isaiah, so we know we’re near the end of the message. Most scholars locate these words late in the 6th century BCE, when exiled Jews are returning from a lengthy and unwanted stay as captives in Babylon (what we now know as Iraq). While joyous at the prospect of a renewed freedom, and grateful to be coming home, what they hear reports of and find upon their return breaks them anew.
The verses immediately after the ones we heard today speak that Jerusalem has been leveled, and that the Temple has been torched and flattened. No more worship as it was for those returning home. No more architectural and symbolic center of the Jewish faith and life. So the question is what’s God going to do about it? This is the reality that the exiles come home to; a mix of joy at their release and return, and sorrow at the devastation, and some uncertainty as to how they are going to move ahead and find their God in these new circumstances.
The mythical good old days are no more. Would they spend the rest of their lives a defeated people? Would their own many mistakes never cease to haunt them? Would their enemies gloat indefinitely at their desolation? Was their God mad at them to the point that there would be no more relationship? Did God even care?
This gives voice to the lament we find in our verses. The people plea boldly: “DO SOMETHING. COME BACK DOWN FROM HEAVEN!” In the midst of their despair we hear hope, that God might come back into their lives again, and do the kinds of things that Israel had experienced before.
Psalm 80 is likewise a lament, from an earlier time with similar concerns. The Northern tribes of Israel fell in 722 BCE to the conquering Assyrians, countless killed, many others carted off. As with the pleas of Isaiah, the psalm calls God to re-do what they have been graced with in the past, to again be their shepherd, to bring divine presence and favor in the face of violence and injustice from without.
The chorus is repeated three times in the entirety of the psalm, twice in our portion: “Restore us O God; let your face shine, that we might be saved.” Like with Isaiah it’s a call for God to DO SOMETHING. Preferably rather soon, those singing the psalm insist.
Then there’s Mark. Ah, Mark. There is going to be a lot of lectionary texts from the Gospel of Mark this coming year so we may as well get used to it. And since Mark doesn’t include a whit about the infancy of Jesus, the lectionary cheats a bit and jumps the queue forward into the 13th chapter to get advent readings. This morning’s passage is from a lengthy monologue Jesus shares with his disciples while prophetically seated opposite the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. What the returning exiles mourned in a desolate Jerusalem had been largely re-built and even expanded by the time of Jesus. The temple was again becoming the symbolic center of religious and social identity in Israel.
Leave it to the disciples to say something stupid in order to hear something far more substantial. They start it by making a seemingly off-handed comment about how big and impressive Herod made his architectural commission of the new Temple, “Oooh, pretty building. How large! How very…striking!” Jesus’ reply isn’t likely what they were looking for. “Yeah right, give it a few decades and the whole place will be leveled.” Huh?
Then Jesus gets weird – Hunter S. Thompson gonzo kind of weird. Doom and gloom, earthquakes and wars and betrayals, sufferings and celestial signs, a cosmic Son of Man flying in on the clouds. Weird.
This kind of language borrows heavily from Hebrew apocalyptic forms like in Daniel. And as with that text (and later on John’s Revelation) it’s not just weird, symbolic language for its own sake, but words and images that are cryptic in order to camouflage meaning from authorities who don’t want to discover subversive groups speaking out against their might and authority. Smoke signals, if you will.
The institution of the Temple was going down, and indeed it did. Jesus states in no uncertain terms that it would be a big mistake to put one’s faith and trust in the religious/political complexes of that day. As it turns out they and their adherents are just as prone to intrigue and violence as the dreaded Roman empire and its minions. A bad investment to make, committing oneself to a system to which Jesus is in prophetic opposition. Elvis has left the building. God is going to do something else, something bigger, wider and more wonderful. Therefore stay alert. Be nimble, be quick. Be ready to get out of Dodge in a hurry.
It was hard for the good God-fearing people of Jerusalem, Jews, Christians, others, to imagine that the geographic center of their faith – God’s home address, if you will – would cease to be. This is where some thought God lived, after all. Despite that it had happened before, they were a lot like any of us, assuming that the world we most deeply value will perpetuate. Yet history tells us – sometimes all too graphically – of how the might of Rome, rebelled against one too many times, unleashed its wrath upon the stubborn opposition in Palestine in the war of 66-70 CE. Clinging to their religious nationalistic dreams of an independent and self-determining Promised Land, there were those who fought back, a guerrilla war against the greatest power in that part of the world, the Roman Empire. And then Titus came. And the Jewish historian Josephus (an accommodating sort to the lures of power), spoke in his reporting of the ensuing carnage of the streets running high with rivers of blood from those slaughtered by Rome.
Hopes realized, hopes vanished. It is jarring when dreams come true in big, even global ways. It is even more so when they’re accompanied by stark reminders that we are not in paradise yet, that things are still pretty messed up.
I remember February of 1990 as one of those times. Having been involved in the student anti-apartheid protest of the mid 1980s I was stunned when on February 11, 1990 Nelson Mandela was released from jail in South Africa. “My God, it has happened.” Might there be a new day for that tortured country? Indeed, as we all know now that for all the lingering problems in South Africa the transition to fair and democratic rule was made without the bloodshed we all feared, in large part to the wondrous moral leadership of Mandela when he assumed office of president of that nation. His being let out of prison truly did signal a new and just day.
But February 16, 1990 did come five days later, and with it the news that pop artist Keith Haring was dead of AIDS at age 32. Of course Haring wasn’t a political or moral leader anything approaching the stature of Mandela. Apples and oranges. But I had spent a couple of years working in the art world, and was one of countless who greatly enjoyed Haring’s joyful graphics and was most intrigued by his theories and practices of making art and beauty accessible to everyone, be they on public murals, chalk drawings in the New York subways or even on tee shirts. Marybeth and I had seen him give a lecture and slide presentation at Art Center in Pasadena just three months prior, November 1989, just before Thanksgiving 19 years ago. He was funny, sort of a Woody Allen-like sense of humor, and a pleasure to hear narrate the slideshow of his works. He painted a mural that remains there to this day. And three months later he was gone.
The end of apartheid, the ongoing onslaught of AIDS. One dream moving towards fulfillment, another nightmare moving ahead relentlessly. Isn’t that one microcosm of the world in which live? Then and now, it’s at just such intersections of fragile hope and looming and likely despair that people of faith find God at work.
There are overwhelming and urgent needs in our own time, and our texts speak of the desperate and urgent needs of faithful peoples in centuries past. What were they to do? What are we to do?
The simplest answer I can discern from our three scriptures is to pray, act steadily towards the ends we know to be just and true, and be patient.
The patience part should trouble us. Waiting is counter to our culture of convenience wherein we, unique amongst most people throughout our planet’s history, can meet many of our basic needs almost immediately. Forget something at the store? Hop in the car, go back and get it. Who needs a metaphysical delivery system that brings the mail in Pony Express speed when Skype allows you to communicate with someone halfway around the globe in real time, and even see their facial expressions.
More profoundly, patience also seems to run smack against the desperation that violent and unjust circumstances demand. This is where we might wax theological – talk about God – for a moment.
In Isaiah we get the earthy image of God being a potter to us as clay. Some people have found this imagery to be rather condescending, but I think there’s a better way to understand it. When I was younger I made a lot of bad pottery, working as an assistant in a children’s pottery class. Working with clay is messy, and very involved. It’s not like photography or computer graphics, where the method is more detached – cleaner – from the mechanics of making an actual physical piece of art. Work fast, you’ll screw up and make a mess. If God is working with us as a potter to clay – very “hands on” activity – this metaphor is meant to be comforting. We can find it encouraging to think that God is seeking to fashion our lives and our world as unique pieces of art, working intimately and slowly for that outcome.
This comes a few verses after Isaiah makes the proclamation that what is special about our God in the experience of the people is “From ages past no one has heard, no ear perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, WHO WORKS FOR THOSE WHO WAIT FOR HIM” (Isaiah 64:4). I don’t think it’s accidental. Rush a potter and you’re going to get a big lump.
So our task is to be patient in the midst of great uncertainties, and to do so hopefully both when our dreams come true and when it certainly seems as if they don’t. This is not passivity, mind you. Patience is not resignation; far from it. Our task is to pray for God’s work to come to pass (a purpose of lament, apocalyptic forms), and to act creatively within our own realm to bring about those same alternative modes of living for which we hope.
Practically, I take some cues here from two helpful sources: reflections on the Gospel of Mark by activist and scholar Ched Myers, and from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s wonderful little book Why We Can’t Wait, which presents King’s take on several of the key experiences of the Civil Rights Movement. Both King and Myers are quite blunt about the crucial element of prayer, seeking to discern what God is doing through protracted prayer and listening. Both outline the necessity of sober self-assessment, to acknowledge one’s own fears and wrongs and integrity before attempting to change or resist larger systems. Both speak of the need to do thoughtful cultural analysis, to determine how things actually work and what might be appropriate responses to the needs that arise where injustice rolls forward. Both are very clear about the importance of working with strategic allies, and seeking to collaborate broadly with people of good will.
And both speak of the need to be involved over the long-haul. This is how God works after all. The Babylonian captivity lasted almost 50 years. The earliest church spent almost four decades vacillating as Temple-centric, struggling to figure out how to address matters of the equal participation of Jewish and Gentile Christians, before Jerusalem was again laid to waste by 70 CE. The Civil Rights Movement accomplished so much in its time, and yet as we have seen so poignantly in this last election, full access to all offices on the basis of accomplishment and character have just happened in our own day. And the world watches with wonder. And there are many more such things to be done.
Patient hope is one of the messages of the coming Christ child; don’t let the frenzies of the season swallow that. Hope would be realized in ways that don’t initially make a lot of sense: since when did a baby solve any problems? If that is God’s answer to the scorched earth of our lives and worlds, it is a most inauspicious response, at least for starters.
Yet we know that somewhere around 30 years later that baby would become one who was not afraid to live and proclaim a broad love, to stand opposed to the powers of injustice and hypocrisy, to reject the temptations of violence, and to do so at the cost of his own life.
That’s a hope worth waiting and working for, again and again and again. When it seems like it will work, and even when it seems like it may well not work. Pottery done well takes time.
