The light of God always comes to us
Commentary
“It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” says the song that plays endlessly in the nearly vacant Fancy Mall -- and every other store from Victoria’s Secret to the Family Dollar. So why do so many of us feel so crabby, weepy, or downright depressed? Why is setting up the tree so much trouble rather than fun and beautiful? Dread settles on us as we plan for holiday parties and the onslaught of friends and family come to celebrate with us.
Perhaps we expect too much magic from the holidays: We ought to be unrelentingly happy. Presents need to be “perfect” for the person to whom we give them. Meals must be the biggest, most calorie-laden, and beautiful we can think up. And there are the treats needed to go to the office (and maybe two, if both spouses have a job), school classrooms, and yoga class; the cards have to be addressed and sent; and if they don’t stop playing “Santa Baby” every hour, I’m going to scream!
This is exactly why Advent is so necessary to us Christians. We need some time to reflect on the meaning of Christmas. Not the “it’s the darkest time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and we need some fun and light!” reason -- rather, the “it’s the darkest time of the year, the world’s a mess, and I need a drink” reason. Our hearts need the Light of God. Our psyches need a boost. We need to be reminded that the emptiness we feel is a God-shaped space that will not stop hurting until we acknowledge our emptiness, recognize that we cannot fix ourselves, and turn to God to be made whole. This is the purpose of Advent: to slow down rather than speed up; to take time to renew ourselves spiritually; and finally, to acknowledge our dependence on God for our sanity and stability. Welcome to the quiet time of Advent that precedes the storm that we know as Christmas.
Isaiah 64:1-9
Isaiah is harking back to the events at Mount Sinai, when God stood on the mountaintop and the ground shook at his appearing. The Mount Sinai experience has not been repeated down long centuries, Isaiah complains, and the people need to be revitalized. “Where are you, God? No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you because you have hidden from us. We are wasting away because of our sins!”
We often think that the people of ancient times were vastly different than us. They lacked our sophistication. They were credulous, easily fooled by stories of God on a mountaintop or a man rising from the dead. They sought out the holy priests for them to tell the future or interpret their dreams. They believed that they could make the gods -- even the Hebrew God -- forgive their sins by roasting the meat of lambs or goats so that God could smell the aroma and draw closer.
But substitute a few equivalent words, and they sound very modern: Moses climbed Mount Sinai because the mountain was shaking and howling, and clouds were gathered around the summit while lightning danced all around. He was hoping to get a word of guidance from God. And when he came back down, he had Ten Words carved in stone, the most basic rules for the people of God to follow. People today call psychic hotlines and read their horoscopes every day in the morning paper, hoping to avoid trouble and find happiness. As for a man rising from the dead, well -- Pilate didn’t believe it; the High Priest said that his disciples had come and stolen the body; and the disciples did not believe it until they met the risen Jesus.
In today’s passage, Isaiah is telling God that the nation needs a new visitation, a new vision. “No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you because you have hidden from us. We are wasting away because of our sins!” It’s not just that Isaiah is telling God that he has failed the nation; he says it’s inevitable that people lose faith in a God who fails them in a time of trouble. If we pray and get no answer, who will waste their time praying? If God never does miraculous things any more, why would we worship? If we stop worshiping, how will we know when we have overstepped our bounds with God?
Isaiah is basing his comments on a part of the Law we seldom pay attention to today: Leviticus 5:1-8a, which talks about our need to take responsibility for our own actions. If a call goes out for witnesses to a particular event, we must respond and speak up if we saw anything. If we accidently touch something ritually unclean, we are still as unclean as if it were deliberate. If we swear an oath carelessly, we have sinned, even if we didn’t realize at the time that it was an oath. In other words, we are responsible for our actions, whether we think so or not. When this has been brought to our attention, we have to pay the penalty for our actions. The penalty is a stiff one, too: the sacrifice of a female lamb, which means we lose a producing member of a flock, and all the future lambs she might have borne, not to mention the milk she would have produced during her life. (There was an option for the poor, who could bring two pigeons for the sacrifice, but if they had no money to buy the birds, they remained sinners. It was this group that Jesus constantly reached out to and protested on behalf of.)
Likewise, without the Temple and the priests, there could be no sacrifice for sin. This is the crux of the problem Isaiah puts before the Lord. If the people stop coming to the Temple, they will remain in their sins. If they stop believing in God as intimately involved in their lives, they will remain in their sins. The longer this goes on, the less the people feel the need for worship and even for God. It is out of this emotional pit that Isaiah calls on God: “All of us have become like one who is unclean” (v. 6).
This produces an endless downward spiral, where people have less and less sense of their own spiritual failure. It results in a society of no responsibility, people who are intensely focused on material gain at any cost and attending only to their own pleasure, often at the expense of others. It is out of this sort of spiritual emptiness that we get people mocking one another publicly; men boasting about their ability to lay hands on women and children in any way they choose; people insisting on their right to shoot one another over a traffic mishap, or out of fear of someone different from themselves walking on their lawn or even down their street. A life filled with fear inevitably becomes violent.
It is for this reason that Isaiah begs God not to ignore the people called by God’s name. He reminds God that God has made us, like a potter works with clay, making us “all the work of your hand.” Will God be angry forever, or remember that we are the work of his hand (v. 9)? [Compare this with Romans 9:20-21.] It is this question that starts off our season of waiting, and causes us to cry with the prophet: “Come, Lord Jesus! We need you to be the Light of our world once again.”
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
The testimony about Christ Jesus has transformed the people of the church at Corinth. They took in the words of Paul and Sosthenes, and put them to work in their lives. As a result, they have all the spiritual gifts they need, and are eagerly waiting for the Lord Jesus to come back. “He will keep you strong to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
This ought to lift our hearts too, since we now understand that we are held responsible for whatever we do that corrupts us, whether or not we understood the situation. Here we learn that God will keep us strong “to the end” so that we do not need to fear the Judgment (another term for The Day of the Lord).
We who call ourselves by the name of Christ ought to gladly do our best to do the right thing always, because we prefer to do good rather than evil. Even so, we all make mistakes. Sometimes we let our temper, or our resentment, take over, and we do what we should not do. We ruin relationships. We lose loved ones. We say things that demean those we disagree with, we do things that leave dirt on our souls and the souls of others. What to do?
1) Apologize -- to that person if possible, to God for certain. We don’t keep our apology to ourselves unless to go and apologize would only make things worse for that person. (The fact that we dread what they might say is no excuse for not making the effort. On the other hand, if our attitude is still defensive, or if we know that the person we hurt wants nothing to do with us, going to them to apologize can be an act of ego. It ought to be unnecessary to say that if there is a restraining order in place, stay away.)
2) Make amends -- repay, repair, make good what we have spoiled. If we have stolen, repay. If we have stolen someone’s reputation, apologize publicly.
3) NOW we can go to God and confess our sin and accept God’s forgiveness. No further sacrifice is necessary, Jesus has put all that to rest.
4) Express gratitude and get on with life. There is nothing to be gained by going back over and over the ways in which we have failed ourselves and others. Nor does the Bible anywhere tell us that we are lower than worms and need to flagellate ourselves forever for our shortcomings. Remember, the meaning of the word “sin” in Hebrew is “to miss the mark.” In Greek, it’s “to fall short.”
Paul is acutely aware of the power of Savior Jesus to wipe out our shortcomings. He has constantly before him the fact that he formerly pursued Christians relentlessly, arresting and imprisoning them. That all stopped when he met Jesus on the Damascus road. It took him a long period of study after that event to prove to himself that the scriptures upheld the teachings of Jesus. This is partially why his testimony is so persuasive. That, and his witness about the change that God worked in him as he came closer to Christ.
Many years ago I was teaching a Bible class, and I remarked that God didn’t so much send his son as he came himself. That’s the meaning of Christmas, I said -- that God came to us in the form of a baby. No one to be afraid of, someone to love and cherish. One of the women in that class said, “You mean, that baby was God?”
“Yes, that’s the meaning of Incarnation -- God in human flesh, in carne. The three Persons of the Trinity might be better said to be three persona, like the theater masks used by the Greeks and Romans. The same actor can play different roles -- that is, take on a different persona, depending on the play.”
“But why,” she asked, “would God take on such a huge risk? I mean, Herod was after that baby practically the minute he was born.”
“And that,” I said, “is the truth about Christmas: God came into our world, took on human flesh, and lived among us. God let us do our worst, and we did it, eventually. But the Good News is that we cannot kill God. And we cannot stop God from loving us, no matter how awful we can be. God may be angry. There will be consequences. But we are always God’s children, and the consequences are what we might expect to follow from the stupidity of our actions.”
“That,” she said, “is amazing. I have to do some thinking on that.” Indeed.
Mark 13:24-37
This passage is part of the “Little Apocalypse” which appears in all three of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke, who all look at Jesus in much the same way, and share large portions of their material). The apostles had been in the Temple with Jesus, where he had been observing the activities there and preaching. As they exited the Temple, the apostles were impressed with the enormous stones that had been used in the building, and the beauty of the decorations. But Jesus said: “You see these stones and these buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another” (13:2). When they got to the top of the Mount of Olives, which affords a wonderful view of the Temple Mount even today, Peter, James, John, and Andrew (his first four disciples, the fishermen) asked him privately to tell them when these things would happen. “The fact is,” he finally said, “no one knows when these things will come about, not even the Son. Only God the Father knows when the end of the age will come.”
There is an important thing here for us to note: Jesus does not say that the signs he gives his disciples will be the end of the world. Rather, they are signs of the end of the age. If we pay attention to history, the things Jesus points to happen at the end of every age (or stage) of history. War, famine, a return to old ideas, a shaking of the foundations of societies -- all can be seen at the various times when one culture or superpower in the world is falling apart. Sometimes these changes are abrupt, such as the social changes that took place in Europe at the time of the First World War, or with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We may rejoice at the end of a social system if it benefits our country and our system, but these events are always tragic for those living through them. Back in Jesus’ time, the fall of Jerusalem was bad for the Jews, even the Jewish Christians, but their forced exodus from the Holy Land helped spread the new Jesus movement, putting it in the direct path of the rise of Constantine and the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire.
Many today are looking for the end of the world because we see many of these signs, but what is going to end, either now or in the future, is our way of life, perhaps our governmental system. Perhaps even life as we know it -- mammals and a temperate climate over the whole globe -- will end. If it does, humankind will surely perish as well. Earth has undergone many extreme changes, yet still exists -- though it would be unrecognizable to any life forms that lived in, say, the Cretaceous Period, or the great ice ages when the world was essentially covered in mile-deep glaciers.
However, Jesus was not concerned in this discourse with the extinctions that have occurred from time to time. He was concerned to prepare them for the end of the life they had known, and the necessity of being prepared to flee their homes and even their homeland when they could see the signs that the end of an era were at hand.
Those who have tried to pinpoint the time of the Day of the Lord have searched the Bible and other books that talk about such things, and from time to time they have claimed to know not just the general time in which the day of reckoning will take place, but to be able to point to the exact date. So far, as Jesus foretold his disciples, every one of these predictions were wrong. But that doesn’t mean that the end of the present age is not ever going to happen. Jesus has given us the one thing we need to remember: Keep awake! Pay attention. When we see unrest and chaos beginning to mount, it is time to be ready for change -- not necessarily for the end of the world, but certainly the end of what we’re used to.
Happily, Mark, Matthew, and Luke all point to a glimmer of hope, the Light at the end of the tunnel. No matter how bad things may get, God is still watching over us. This is what Advent is all about. Do not lose hope. God is still available to come to our aid. When the time was right -- when Roman roads made travel from Egypt to Mesopotamia to India and even to the wilds of Europe possible; when ships sailed the Mediterranean and even the Atlantic coast, even as far as the North Sea, making it possible to carry this story around the world: God came to Earth in the form of a human baby to bridge the gap that separated us from the love that a parent has for their own child.
This is the beginning of the journey we are on, toward our repatriation to our Home in God. This is the beginning of our advent -- our moving toward the loving God Jesus talked about. The journey of Advent ends with the celebration of Christmas, of the realization that God has been with us, and will be with us, forever.
Perhaps we expect too much magic from the holidays: We ought to be unrelentingly happy. Presents need to be “perfect” for the person to whom we give them. Meals must be the biggest, most calorie-laden, and beautiful we can think up. And there are the treats needed to go to the office (and maybe two, if both spouses have a job), school classrooms, and yoga class; the cards have to be addressed and sent; and if they don’t stop playing “Santa Baby” every hour, I’m going to scream!
This is exactly why Advent is so necessary to us Christians. We need some time to reflect on the meaning of Christmas. Not the “it’s the darkest time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and we need some fun and light!” reason -- rather, the “it’s the darkest time of the year, the world’s a mess, and I need a drink” reason. Our hearts need the Light of God. Our psyches need a boost. We need to be reminded that the emptiness we feel is a God-shaped space that will not stop hurting until we acknowledge our emptiness, recognize that we cannot fix ourselves, and turn to God to be made whole. This is the purpose of Advent: to slow down rather than speed up; to take time to renew ourselves spiritually; and finally, to acknowledge our dependence on God for our sanity and stability. Welcome to the quiet time of Advent that precedes the storm that we know as Christmas.
Isaiah 64:1-9
Isaiah is harking back to the events at Mount Sinai, when God stood on the mountaintop and the ground shook at his appearing. The Mount Sinai experience has not been repeated down long centuries, Isaiah complains, and the people need to be revitalized. “Where are you, God? No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you because you have hidden from us. We are wasting away because of our sins!”
We often think that the people of ancient times were vastly different than us. They lacked our sophistication. They were credulous, easily fooled by stories of God on a mountaintop or a man rising from the dead. They sought out the holy priests for them to tell the future or interpret their dreams. They believed that they could make the gods -- even the Hebrew God -- forgive their sins by roasting the meat of lambs or goats so that God could smell the aroma and draw closer.
But substitute a few equivalent words, and they sound very modern: Moses climbed Mount Sinai because the mountain was shaking and howling, and clouds were gathered around the summit while lightning danced all around. He was hoping to get a word of guidance from God. And when he came back down, he had Ten Words carved in stone, the most basic rules for the people of God to follow. People today call psychic hotlines and read their horoscopes every day in the morning paper, hoping to avoid trouble and find happiness. As for a man rising from the dead, well -- Pilate didn’t believe it; the High Priest said that his disciples had come and stolen the body; and the disciples did not believe it until they met the risen Jesus.
In today’s passage, Isaiah is telling God that the nation needs a new visitation, a new vision. “No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you because you have hidden from us. We are wasting away because of our sins!” It’s not just that Isaiah is telling God that he has failed the nation; he says it’s inevitable that people lose faith in a God who fails them in a time of trouble. If we pray and get no answer, who will waste their time praying? If God never does miraculous things any more, why would we worship? If we stop worshiping, how will we know when we have overstepped our bounds with God?
Isaiah is basing his comments on a part of the Law we seldom pay attention to today: Leviticus 5:1-8a, which talks about our need to take responsibility for our own actions. If a call goes out for witnesses to a particular event, we must respond and speak up if we saw anything. If we accidently touch something ritually unclean, we are still as unclean as if it were deliberate. If we swear an oath carelessly, we have sinned, even if we didn’t realize at the time that it was an oath. In other words, we are responsible for our actions, whether we think so or not. When this has been brought to our attention, we have to pay the penalty for our actions. The penalty is a stiff one, too: the sacrifice of a female lamb, which means we lose a producing member of a flock, and all the future lambs she might have borne, not to mention the milk she would have produced during her life. (There was an option for the poor, who could bring two pigeons for the sacrifice, but if they had no money to buy the birds, they remained sinners. It was this group that Jesus constantly reached out to and protested on behalf of.)
Likewise, without the Temple and the priests, there could be no sacrifice for sin. This is the crux of the problem Isaiah puts before the Lord. If the people stop coming to the Temple, they will remain in their sins. If they stop believing in God as intimately involved in their lives, they will remain in their sins. The longer this goes on, the less the people feel the need for worship and even for God. It is out of this emotional pit that Isaiah calls on God: “All of us have become like one who is unclean” (v. 6).
This produces an endless downward spiral, where people have less and less sense of their own spiritual failure. It results in a society of no responsibility, people who are intensely focused on material gain at any cost and attending only to their own pleasure, often at the expense of others. It is out of this sort of spiritual emptiness that we get people mocking one another publicly; men boasting about their ability to lay hands on women and children in any way they choose; people insisting on their right to shoot one another over a traffic mishap, or out of fear of someone different from themselves walking on their lawn or even down their street. A life filled with fear inevitably becomes violent.
It is for this reason that Isaiah begs God not to ignore the people called by God’s name. He reminds God that God has made us, like a potter works with clay, making us “all the work of your hand.” Will God be angry forever, or remember that we are the work of his hand (v. 9)? [Compare this with Romans 9:20-21.] It is this question that starts off our season of waiting, and causes us to cry with the prophet: “Come, Lord Jesus! We need you to be the Light of our world once again.”
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
The testimony about Christ Jesus has transformed the people of the church at Corinth. They took in the words of Paul and Sosthenes, and put them to work in their lives. As a result, they have all the spiritual gifts they need, and are eagerly waiting for the Lord Jesus to come back. “He will keep you strong to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
This ought to lift our hearts too, since we now understand that we are held responsible for whatever we do that corrupts us, whether or not we understood the situation. Here we learn that God will keep us strong “to the end” so that we do not need to fear the Judgment (another term for The Day of the Lord).
We who call ourselves by the name of Christ ought to gladly do our best to do the right thing always, because we prefer to do good rather than evil. Even so, we all make mistakes. Sometimes we let our temper, or our resentment, take over, and we do what we should not do. We ruin relationships. We lose loved ones. We say things that demean those we disagree with, we do things that leave dirt on our souls and the souls of others. What to do?
1) Apologize -- to that person if possible, to God for certain. We don’t keep our apology to ourselves unless to go and apologize would only make things worse for that person. (The fact that we dread what they might say is no excuse for not making the effort. On the other hand, if our attitude is still defensive, or if we know that the person we hurt wants nothing to do with us, going to them to apologize can be an act of ego. It ought to be unnecessary to say that if there is a restraining order in place, stay away.)
2) Make amends -- repay, repair, make good what we have spoiled. If we have stolen, repay. If we have stolen someone’s reputation, apologize publicly.
3) NOW we can go to God and confess our sin and accept God’s forgiveness. No further sacrifice is necessary, Jesus has put all that to rest.
4) Express gratitude and get on with life. There is nothing to be gained by going back over and over the ways in which we have failed ourselves and others. Nor does the Bible anywhere tell us that we are lower than worms and need to flagellate ourselves forever for our shortcomings. Remember, the meaning of the word “sin” in Hebrew is “to miss the mark.” In Greek, it’s “to fall short.”
Paul is acutely aware of the power of Savior Jesus to wipe out our shortcomings. He has constantly before him the fact that he formerly pursued Christians relentlessly, arresting and imprisoning them. That all stopped when he met Jesus on the Damascus road. It took him a long period of study after that event to prove to himself that the scriptures upheld the teachings of Jesus. This is partially why his testimony is so persuasive. That, and his witness about the change that God worked in him as he came closer to Christ.
Many years ago I was teaching a Bible class, and I remarked that God didn’t so much send his son as he came himself. That’s the meaning of Christmas, I said -- that God came to us in the form of a baby. No one to be afraid of, someone to love and cherish. One of the women in that class said, “You mean, that baby was God?”
“Yes, that’s the meaning of Incarnation -- God in human flesh, in carne. The three Persons of the Trinity might be better said to be three persona, like the theater masks used by the Greeks and Romans. The same actor can play different roles -- that is, take on a different persona, depending on the play.”
“But why,” she asked, “would God take on such a huge risk? I mean, Herod was after that baby practically the minute he was born.”
“And that,” I said, “is the truth about Christmas: God came into our world, took on human flesh, and lived among us. God let us do our worst, and we did it, eventually. But the Good News is that we cannot kill God. And we cannot stop God from loving us, no matter how awful we can be. God may be angry. There will be consequences. But we are always God’s children, and the consequences are what we might expect to follow from the stupidity of our actions.”
“That,” she said, “is amazing. I have to do some thinking on that.” Indeed.
Mark 13:24-37
This passage is part of the “Little Apocalypse” which appears in all three of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke, who all look at Jesus in much the same way, and share large portions of their material). The apostles had been in the Temple with Jesus, where he had been observing the activities there and preaching. As they exited the Temple, the apostles were impressed with the enormous stones that had been used in the building, and the beauty of the decorations. But Jesus said: “You see these stones and these buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another” (13:2). When they got to the top of the Mount of Olives, which affords a wonderful view of the Temple Mount even today, Peter, James, John, and Andrew (his first four disciples, the fishermen) asked him privately to tell them when these things would happen. “The fact is,” he finally said, “no one knows when these things will come about, not even the Son. Only God the Father knows when the end of the age will come.”
There is an important thing here for us to note: Jesus does not say that the signs he gives his disciples will be the end of the world. Rather, they are signs of the end of the age. If we pay attention to history, the things Jesus points to happen at the end of every age (or stage) of history. War, famine, a return to old ideas, a shaking of the foundations of societies -- all can be seen at the various times when one culture or superpower in the world is falling apart. Sometimes these changes are abrupt, such as the social changes that took place in Europe at the time of the First World War, or with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We may rejoice at the end of a social system if it benefits our country and our system, but these events are always tragic for those living through them. Back in Jesus’ time, the fall of Jerusalem was bad for the Jews, even the Jewish Christians, but their forced exodus from the Holy Land helped spread the new Jesus movement, putting it in the direct path of the rise of Constantine and the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire.
Many today are looking for the end of the world because we see many of these signs, but what is going to end, either now or in the future, is our way of life, perhaps our governmental system. Perhaps even life as we know it -- mammals and a temperate climate over the whole globe -- will end. If it does, humankind will surely perish as well. Earth has undergone many extreme changes, yet still exists -- though it would be unrecognizable to any life forms that lived in, say, the Cretaceous Period, or the great ice ages when the world was essentially covered in mile-deep glaciers.
However, Jesus was not concerned in this discourse with the extinctions that have occurred from time to time. He was concerned to prepare them for the end of the life they had known, and the necessity of being prepared to flee their homes and even their homeland when they could see the signs that the end of an era were at hand.
Those who have tried to pinpoint the time of the Day of the Lord have searched the Bible and other books that talk about such things, and from time to time they have claimed to know not just the general time in which the day of reckoning will take place, but to be able to point to the exact date. So far, as Jesus foretold his disciples, every one of these predictions were wrong. But that doesn’t mean that the end of the present age is not ever going to happen. Jesus has given us the one thing we need to remember: Keep awake! Pay attention. When we see unrest and chaos beginning to mount, it is time to be ready for change -- not necessarily for the end of the world, but certainly the end of what we’re used to.
Happily, Mark, Matthew, and Luke all point to a glimmer of hope, the Light at the end of the tunnel. No matter how bad things may get, God is still watching over us. This is what Advent is all about. Do not lose hope. God is still available to come to our aid. When the time was right -- when Roman roads made travel from Egypt to Mesopotamia to India and even to the wilds of Europe possible; when ships sailed the Mediterranean and even the Atlantic coast, even as far as the North Sea, making it possible to carry this story around the world: God came to Earth in the form of a human baby to bridge the gap that separated us from the love that a parent has for their own child.
This is the beginning of the journey we are on, toward our repatriation to our Home in God. This is the beginning of our advent -- our moving toward the loving God Jesus talked about. The journey of Advent ends with the celebration of Christmas, of the realization that God has been with us, and will be with us, forever.
