After the storm
Commentary
Object:
What difference does my life make for others around me? What difference does anyone’s life make? It’s always a question related to parenting. Parents make choices which affect the manner in which their children form their identities. Harry Chapin put it well in his song “Cat’s in the Cradle.” When he was a young father he was too busy making a living to be bothered by his son. But when he was finally old enough to enjoy time with the family, his son had learned to be too busy for him!
Of course, the other side of the story is just as true. Maurice Boyd remembers one incident that sealed the impact of his father on his life forever. His father worked in a shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland. During the Depression work dried up. Times were tough, and for three years his father was out of a job.
Then one of his old bosses at the shipyard approached him. The important man would find work for Mr. Boyd. He would guarantee it, no matter how much worse things got. All Mr. Boyd would have to do would be to buy a life-insurance policy from the man. It would work to their mutual benefit: the boss’s income would increase, and Mr. Boyd’s work income would be guaranteed!
It was a great deal except for one thing: it was illegal. Maurice Boyd remembers his father sitting at the kitchen table with the whole family surrounding him. There at the table his father counted the cost. He reviewed their desperate financial situation. He ticked off the outstanding bills, and the money he ought to be making... could be making, if only he’d say yes to his boss.
His father wrote it all down on a sheet of paper: the gains and the losses; what he could make and what he could lose. Then he wrote down a category that Maurice Boyd will never forget: integrity! What did it matter if he gained the cash to pay the rent, but lost his ability to teach his children right from wrong? What did it matter if he gained the dignity of a job, but lost it each morning when he looked at himself in the mirror and knew that the only reason he could go off to work instead of someone else was because he cheated? Says Maurice Boyd: “He discovered that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent, and that one way you can keep your soul is by refusing to sell it. He realized that whatever else he lost, and God knows he lost enough, he didn’t have to lose himself.”
And when the One of integrity arrives, this world must change. This is why we celebrate Advent over and over, until the coming again of God’s anointed One. When Bill Moyers interviewed Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, she told him how it was for her. Dr. Remen has founded several institutes for the care of cancer patients. She said that sometimes she has a much greater sense of integrity within during those times when she isn’t feeling all that well physically. Bill asked her what she meant by “integrity,” and she replied “That I am what I am...” She said that even with her wounds and her weaknesses, “there’s an essence and a uniqueness and a beauty” about her life that is whole and complete. Integrity. Pure in heart. The Peaceable Kingdom that we feel in part now, but long for following the storm of cleansing judgment still to come.
Isaiah 11:1-10
A young girl was watching a parade with her parents when the Scottish bagpipe band came by. As her dad explained how the pipes worked, pointing to the bags under the arms of the players, the girl put her hands over her ears and shouted above the shrill sound: “Maybe if they stop squeezing, the bags will stop screaming!”
Sometimes we avoid the biblical prophets because all we hear is their piercing jeremiads. Yet if we take the time to meet them in their historical context, the prophets bring us back to divine messages we desperately need. There is an inherent consistency of message and focus among all of these diverse religious ruminations and rantings. First of all, the prophetic sermons are invariably rooted in the web of relationships created by the Sinai covenant. Israel belongs to Yahweh, and her lifestyle must be shaped by the stipulations of that suzerain-vassal treaty. Obedience to Yahweh triggers the blessings of the Sinai covenant, while disobedience is the first reason for Israel’s experiences of its curses -- drought, war, famine, enemy occupation, destruction of cities and fields, deportation, etc. For this reason the prophetic writings are laced with moral diatribes that carry a strong emphasis on social ethics.
Second, the function and message of prophecy was very political. For Israel to come under the domination of other nations was always seen as a divine scourge resulting from the application of the covenant curses because of Israel’s disobedience. How Israel handled its international relations showed plainly whether she trusted Yahweh, or had otherwise become enamored with power and politics rooted in lesser gods. Constantly the prophets asked whether Israel was Yahweh’s witnessing people, or if she was merely another nation with no particular mission or divine purpose. Israel’s self-understanding was thus always very religious, and at the same time very political.
Third, as the epochs of Israel’s political fortunes unfolded, the message of the prophets became increasingly apocalyptic. There was a growing sense that because things had not gone the way they should have, producing heartfelt and ongoing national repentance and covenant restoration, Yahweh will have to intervene directly again, in a manner similar to that which happened during the time of Moses. When Yahweh interrupts human history the next time, however, along with judgments on the wickedness of the nations of the world Israel will also fall heavily under divine punishment. But because Yahweh is on a mission to restore the fallen world, this next major divine intervention will be paired with a focus also on establishing a new world order, even as the old is falling away under the conflagration. In this coming messianic age, everything in both society and the natural realm will finally function in the manner the Creator had intended in the beginning. Furthermore, because Yahweh is faithful to promises made, Israel will not be forgotten, and a remnant of God’s servant nation will be at the center of all this renewal and restoration and great joy.
This increasingly forward-looking thrust of prophecy leads some to think of it as primarily foretelling, a kind of crystal-ball gaze into the future. In reality, however, the nature of prophecy in ancient Israel is more forth-telling, declaring again the meaning of the ancient Sinai covenant, explaining the mission of Yahweh as witness to the world, and describing the implications of the morality envisioned by the suzerain-vassal treaty stipulations.
By the time the seventh century BC rolled around, the prophets were rarely welcome in the royal palaces, even though all that was left of once proud and expansive Israel was the tiny mountainous territory of Judah. During the 600s, although Assyria kept threatening Jerusalem, it was increasingly occupied in defending itself against its rebellious eastern province of Babylon. During these years, while Jeremiah developed his gloomy diatribes in the heart of capital city, the messages of all the prophets had coalesced into an imminent intervention of Yahweh in the increasingly common term “The Day of the Lord.” Yet this global penetration of heaven’s power would not be entirely destructive. As Isaiah often noted (including in today’s reading), Yahweh’s cleansing judgments are but the prelude to restoration and renewal, pointing to a future when the fortunes of Yahweh’s people would be made full once again. Isaiah’s words are the basis for all Advent celebrations: in a darkened world where the ways of God are no longer known, God will rescue the covenant community, restore their joys, and provide a light of grace that shines through them, beckoning the nations to enter the messianic celebration with them.
The true LIGHT, of course, would be Jesus, even though Zephaniah could not have apprehended at the time exactly how the divine message through him would be fulfilled. We, on the second Sunday of Advent, know exactly what God had in mind, and now wait in expectation for Jesus’ culminating return to fully and perfectly realize the grandeur of the messianic kingdom. Someday the prophetic bagpipes will no longer be squeezed, and the music of the angels will shout the “Hallelujah” chorus.
Romans 15:4-13
Paul may well have had to wrestle his way through the problem of divine election (Romans 9-11) at least in part because of the mixed Jewish-Gentile makeup of the Roman congregation. This possible tension seems to reassert itself again in Paul’s applications of Christian behavior in the chapters that follow. First, Paul urges a lifestyle of service rooted in sacrifice to Jesus (12:1-2), shaped by spiritual giftedness (12:3-8), and energized by love (12:9-21). Then Paul makes this servant behavior even more specific, by nodding to its public expressions (Romans 13): obey the government as a tool of God’s care in the restraint of evil (13:1-6), and live as good neighbors who glow with the righteousness of God in some pretty dark neighborhoods (13:8-14). Finally, Paul revisits the issues surrounding the matter of the purchase and consumption of meat offered to idols (Romans 14:1--15:13), just has he had probed it in 1 Corinthians 8:1--11:1. Here, though, the overt tensions between legalistic and licentious extremes of Christian behavior seem less consuming than they did when Paul wrote to the Galatians and the Corinthians. Instead, his instructions flow more gently out of his social ethic of love and service.
Of course, all of this social ethic is based on just one thing for Paul: Jesus has come to change our darkness into light, our sadness into joy, and our selfishness into a grand paradise of caring good will. While the effects have only begun, during Advent we pray for the fullness of God’s good pleasure to transform both ourselves and our society.
Matthew 3:1-12
Matthew’s purpose for his gospel and the progression of his parallel lives -- Israel and Jesus -- is a clear script for the first seven chapters. Jesus relives the life of ancient Israel, but succeeds at what they were not able to do: bring fully the Kingdom of Heaven that will transform the earth.
It is in this intentional narrative that John the Baptist emerges as the consolidated voice of all of the Old Testament prophets. John the Baptist shouts his message to the crowds from Jerusalem who come to see his odd ministry at the Jordan River. The hardest thing to do in life is to maintain our integrity, he declares. Sin has entered the human soul precisely at this point. We are not, most of us, evil people. We’re rather nice, aren’t we? There’s much that we do that’s good and fine and noble and kind and wise, and no one can deny that.
But here’s the problem: whatever else sin might do in our lives, it first and foremost perforates the lines of our hearts, and lets us tear off a piece here and a piece there, till we find ourselves segmented, fragmented, torn apart in separate snippets of self. It isn’t that we become blackened by sin in large stroke. It isn’t that we turn into some hideous monsters of greed and cruelty. It isn’t that we dissolve the Dr. Jekylls of our personalities into dastardly Mr. Hydes. Instead, we keep most of our goodness intact, but we make small allowances in certain little areas. We cheat on our taxes a little, maybe... or we turn our eyes from the needs of someone we could help... or we compromise our communication till we speak from only our mouths instead of our souls.
The fragmentation of our lives makes us less than we should be, less than we could be. It makes us less than the people God made us to be. It is precisely because we and our world have lost our integrity that the great Prophet of God must come and set things right.
There is a powerful scene in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. The story is that of Sir Thomas More, loyal subject of the English crown. King Henry VIII wants to change things to suit his own devious plans, so he requires all his nobles to swear an oath of allegiance which violates the conscience of Sir Thomas More before his God. Since he will not swear the oath, More is put in jail. His daughter Margaret comes to visit him. “Meg,” he calls her, with affection. She’s his pride and joy, the one who thinks his thoughts after him.
Meg comes to plead with her father in prison. “Take the oath, Father!” she urges him. “Take it with your mouth, if you can’t take it with your heart! Take it and return to us! You can’t do us any good in here! And you can’t be there for us if the king should execute you!”
She’s right in so many ways! Yet her father answers her this way: “Meg, when a man swears an oath, he holds himself in his hands like water, and if he opens his fingers, how can he hope to find himself again?”
You know what he means, don’t you? When our lives begin to fragment, it’s like holding our lives like water in our hands, and then letting our fingers come apart, just a little bit. The water of our very selves dribbles away. We may look like the same people, but who we are inside has begun to change.
This is why John comes pointing the way to another Kingdom. Here there will be no separation between the impulse of the heart, and the thought of the mind, and the word of the mouth, and the action of the hands. Somehow, everything about the coming Kingdom is integrated. That’s the meaning of the word “integrity,” isn’t it? Pure in heart!
Application
Jesus raises the banner of heaven’s royal claims over both Gentile and Jewish territory, and thus is the source of political allegiances that supersede temporal boundaries. This is very good news during Advent, when the nations of the earth conspire against one another, and only the Christian Church can effect a transnational celebration of the politics of grace: The Peaceable Kingdom.
Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist and professor at Harvard University who likes to try to figure out why we do the things we do. In his book The Call of Service he wonders about people who try to make a difference in life; people who seek to reform themselves, even with the tenacity of sin that clings down deep; people who attempt to better society, in spite of the fact that it stubbornly refuses the challenge.
Why do they do it, Coles asks? The stories are all so different that it is hard to figure out a way to summarize them neatly in some framework. In fact, the people themselves often have a hard time defining what it is that makes them tick. One young teacher in an urban school gets challenged all the time. Street-smart students, weary of self-righteous “do-gooders,” put the question to him: “What’s in it for you?” they demand. And he really can’t say.
But this he and all the rest of them can say: sometime earlier in their lives, each of them ran into a crisis situation, a situation that tested their identity and their willingness to do something about it; and in that crisis situation, each of them encountered someone who put his life on the line... someone who taught them the meaning of service... someone who gave of herself in a way that bucks the trend of selfishness and of self-preservation. And the influence of that someone else made it possible to be greater than each of them had previously considered. Enter the Peaceable Kingdom, where things change because we have brushed against the holiness of God, and Jesus becomes our savior and mentor.
Years ago, when radio station WXYZ in Detroit was the big news in broadcasting, people spent hours each night listening to the latest episodes of The Green Hornet and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Nearly every year the station brought out a new dramatic hero.
Station manager George Trendle often suggested the main ideas for these characters. In fact, he was the inspiration behind one of the most famous figures they ever created: the Lone Ranger. Trendle said this about the man he had in mind: “He’s a sober-minded man with a righteous purpose. Make kids look up to him.”
But that’s easily lost on us. When Thomas Naylor was teaching business management at Duke University, he asked his students to draft a personal strategic plan. He reports that “with few exceptions, what they wanted fell into three categories: money, power, and things -- very big things.”
In fact, said Naylor, this was their request of the business faculty at Duke: “Teach me to be a moneymaking machine!” A moneymaking machine! A machine with no heart! That’s the fragmentation of our lives taken to the extreme.
So here we are, in a sense, on the brink of another year, the liturgical year, the year of expectation of God’s doing something good once again, the year of the coming of the Kingdom announced by John. As they say, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life!” Let’s imagine that there are 365 new days thrown back onto the credits side of the ledger. What do we do with them?
Alternative Application
Isaiah 11:1-10. Even though we like laughter and enjoy praise and celebration, especially at this time of year, it doesn’t always come easily. One fellow tells of his work as a hospital volunteer. He couldn’t believe the pain and suffering he saw there. Burn victims. Deformities. Terminal cancer. He watched the little ones cry. Some were so lonely: their parents couldn’t take the trauma, so they never came to see their own children. How horrible!
He decided to get a clown’s nose and a pair of oversized shoes. Then he painted his face and pulled on a wig. When he went to work dressed like that the next day, some of the children were scared, some were captivated, and some even showed hints of a smile for the first time in ages.
But others couldn’t stop wailing. They were consumed by agony. What could he do for them? The next day the clown brought along some popcorn. When he came to the side of a crying child, he took a kernel of popcorn, placed it against the child’s cheek, and soaked up the cascading tears with its fluff. Then he popped that kernel into his mouth and ate it.
It was a stroke of genius. The only time some of those children stopped crying was the moment they knew that somebody else cared enough to swallow their tears.
Advent brings us to a place like that. It takes us, at the end of our journey, to the “sanctuary” of God for a time of praise. “Sanctuary” is refuge, fortress, safe house, security, arms of love, a place where someone cares enough to swallow our tears and protect us from the worst that could harm us. This, certainly, is what the scenes of our Isaiah reading are all about.
Madeleine L’Engle paints a picture of such a sanctuary in one of her children’s books. She tells of a young couple on a desert journey through wilderness in a rough caravan. They’re on their way to Egypt. Someone is after them; someone wants to kill their little boy.
The journey is a rugged one. The desert is alive with ferocious beasts. All eyes cast about uneasily as darkness settles. There’ll be little sleep in the camp tonight. They build a great fire to drive back the shadows and keep away the world that belongs to monsters with glowing eyes. Suddenly they start in terror; a great lion appears at the bonfire. The mother reaches for her child, desperately trying to draw him to safety.
But the child stands and laughs. He opens his arms wide to the lion. The lion lifts his front paws and hops around on his hind legs. He’s dancing! And then, from the desert, come running several little mice and two donkeys and a snake and a couple of clumsy ostriches. Three great eagles swoop in from the purple skies. From the other side of the camp a unicorn emerges, and a pelican, and even two dragons.
They all bow before the child and then dance together round and round him. He stands at the center of their great circle, laughing in delight. It’s a dance in the desert, as L’Engle calls it. In essence, it’s the sum and substance of our worship here on earth, pilgrims passing through the wilderness of ghastly beasties and mournful hurts.
This is the second Sunday in Advent. Christmas seems close, but we are not there yet. We still spend time in the dark alongside those who wrestle with demons and shadows and beasties. But because of Advent confidence, we see the Light and clap our hands in celebration of the Child who comes to dance around our fires.
Of course, the other side of the story is just as true. Maurice Boyd remembers one incident that sealed the impact of his father on his life forever. His father worked in a shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland. During the Depression work dried up. Times were tough, and for three years his father was out of a job.
Then one of his old bosses at the shipyard approached him. The important man would find work for Mr. Boyd. He would guarantee it, no matter how much worse things got. All Mr. Boyd would have to do would be to buy a life-insurance policy from the man. It would work to their mutual benefit: the boss’s income would increase, and Mr. Boyd’s work income would be guaranteed!
It was a great deal except for one thing: it was illegal. Maurice Boyd remembers his father sitting at the kitchen table with the whole family surrounding him. There at the table his father counted the cost. He reviewed their desperate financial situation. He ticked off the outstanding bills, and the money he ought to be making... could be making, if only he’d say yes to his boss.
His father wrote it all down on a sheet of paper: the gains and the losses; what he could make and what he could lose. Then he wrote down a category that Maurice Boyd will never forget: integrity! What did it matter if he gained the cash to pay the rent, but lost his ability to teach his children right from wrong? What did it matter if he gained the dignity of a job, but lost it each morning when he looked at himself in the mirror and knew that the only reason he could go off to work instead of someone else was because he cheated? Says Maurice Boyd: “He discovered that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent, and that one way you can keep your soul is by refusing to sell it. He realized that whatever else he lost, and God knows he lost enough, he didn’t have to lose himself.”
And when the One of integrity arrives, this world must change. This is why we celebrate Advent over and over, until the coming again of God’s anointed One. When Bill Moyers interviewed Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, she told him how it was for her. Dr. Remen has founded several institutes for the care of cancer patients. She said that sometimes she has a much greater sense of integrity within during those times when she isn’t feeling all that well physically. Bill asked her what she meant by “integrity,” and she replied “That I am what I am...” She said that even with her wounds and her weaknesses, “there’s an essence and a uniqueness and a beauty” about her life that is whole and complete. Integrity. Pure in heart. The Peaceable Kingdom that we feel in part now, but long for following the storm of cleansing judgment still to come.
Isaiah 11:1-10
A young girl was watching a parade with her parents when the Scottish bagpipe band came by. As her dad explained how the pipes worked, pointing to the bags under the arms of the players, the girl put her hands over her ears and shouted above the shrill sound: “Maybe if they stop squeezing, the bags will stop screaming!”
Sometimes we avoid the biblical prophets because all we hear is their piercing jeremiads. Yet if we take the time to meet them in their historical context, the prophets bring us back to divine messages we desperately need. There is an inherent consistency of message and focus among all of these diverse religious ruminations and rantings. First of all, the prophetic sermons are invariably rooted in the web of relationships created by the Sinai covenant. Israel belongs to Yahweh, and her lifestyle must be shaped by the stipulations of that suzerain-vassal treaty. Obedience to Yahweh triggers the blessings of the Sinai covenant, while disobedience is the first reason for Israel’s experiences of its curses -- drought, war, famine, enemy occupation, destruction of cities and fields, deportation, etc. For this reason the prophetic writings are laced with moral diatribes that carry a strong emphasis on social ethics.
Second, the function and message of prophecy was very political. For Israel to come under the domination of other nations was always seen as a divine scourge resulting from the application of the covenant curses because of Israel’s disobedience. How Israel handled its international relations showed plainly whether she trusted Yahweh, or had otherwise become enamored with power and politics rooted in lesser gods. Constantly the prophets asked whether Israel was Yahweh’s witnessing people, or if she was merely another nation with no particular mission or divine purpose. Israel’s self-understanding was thus always very religious, and at the same time very political.
Third, as the epochs of Israel’s political fortunes unfolded, the message of the prophets became increasingly apocalyptic. There was a growing sense that because things had not gone the way they should have, producing heartfelt and ongoing national repentance and covenant restoration, Yahweh will have to intervene directly again, in a manner similar to that which happened during the time of Moses. When Yahweh interrupts human history the next time, however, along with judgments on the wickedness of the nations of the world Israel will also fall heavily under divine punishment. But because Yahweh is on a mission to restore the fallen world, this next major divine intervention will be paired with a focus also on establishing a new world order, even as the old is falling away under the conflagration. In this coming messianic age, everything in both society and the natural realm will finally function in the manner the Creator had intended in the beginning. Furthermore, because Yahweh is faithful to promises made, Israel will not be forgotten, and a remnant of God’s servant nation will be at the center of all this renewal and restoration and great joy.
This increasingly forward-looking thrust of prophecy leads some to think of it as primarily foretelling, a kind of crystal-ball gaze into the future. In reality, however, the nature of prophecy in ancient Israel is more forth-telling, declaring again the meaning of the ancient Sinai covenant, explaining the mission of Yahweh as witness to the world, and describing the implications of the morality envisioned by the suzerain-vassal treaty stipulations.
By the time the seventh century BC rolled around, the prophets were rarely welcome in the royal palaces, even though all that was left of once proud and expansive Israel was the tiny mountainous territory of Judah. During the 600s, although Assyria kept threatening Jerusalem, it was increasingly occupied in defending itself against its rebellious eastern province of Babylon. During these years, while Jeremiah developed his gloomy diatribes in the heart of capital city, the messages of all the prophets had coalesced into an imminent intervention of Yahweh in the increasingly common term “The Day of the Lord.” Yet this global penetration of heaven’s power would not be entirely destructive. As Isaiah often noted (including in today’s reading), Yahweh’s cleansing judgments are but the prelude to restoration and renewal, pointing to a future when the fortunes of Yahweh’s people would be made full once again. Isaiah’s words are the basis for all Advent celebrations: in a darkened world where the ways of God are no longer known, God will rescue the covenant community, restore their joys, and provide a light of grace that shines through them, beckoning the nations to enter the messianic celebration with them.
The true LIGHT, of course, would be Jesus, even though Zephaniah could not have apprehended at the time exactly how the divine message through him would be fulfilled. We, on the second Sunday of Advent, know exactly what God had in mind, and now wait in expectation for Jesus’ culminating return to fully and perfectly realize the grandeur of the messianic kingdom. Someday the prophetic bagpipes will no longer be squeezed, and the music of the angels will shout the “Hallelujah” chorus.
Romans 15:4-13
Paul may well have had to wrestle his way through the problem of divine election (Romans 9-11) at least in part because of the mixed Jewish-Gentile makeup of the Roman congregation. This possible tension seems to reassert itself again in Paul’s applications of Christian behavior in the chapters that follow. First, Paul urges a lifestyle of service rooted in sacrifice to Jesus (12:1-2), shaped by spiritual giftedness (12:3-8), and energized by love (12:9-21). Then Paul makes this servant behavior even more specific, by nodding to its public expressions (Romans 13): obey the government as a tool of God’s care in the restraint of evil (13:1-6), and live as good neighbors who glow with the righteousness of God in some pretty dark neighborhoods (13:8-14). Finally, Paul revisits the issues surrounding the matter of the purchase and consumption of meat offered to idols (Romans 14:1--15:13), just has he had probed it in 1 Corinthians 8:1--11:1. Here, though, the overt tensions between legalistic and licentious extremes of Christian behavior seem less consuming than they did when Paul wrote to the Galatians and the Corinthians. Instead, his instructions flow more gently out of his social ethic of love and service.
Of course, all of this social ethic is based on just one thing for Paul: Jesus has come to change our darkness into light, our sadness into joy, and our selfishness into a grand paradise of caring good will. While the effects have only begun, during Advent we pray for the fullness of God’s good pleasure to transform both ourselves and our society.
Matthew 3:1-12
Matthew’s purpose for his gospel and the progression of his parallel lives -- Israel and Jesus -- is a clear script for the first seven chapters. Jesus relives the life of ancient Israel, but succeeds at what they were not able to do: bring fully the Kingdom of Heaven that will transform the earth.
It is in this intentional narrative that John the Baptist emerges as the consolidated voice of all of the Old Testament prophets. John the Baptist shouts his message to the crowds from Jerusalem who come to see his odd ministry at the Jordan River. The hardest thing to do in life is to maintain our integrity, he declares. Sin has entered the human soul precisely at this point. We are not, most of us, evil people. We’re rather nice, aren’t we? There’s much that we do that’s good and fine and noble and kind and wise, and no one can deny that.
But here’s the problem: whatever else sin might do in our lives, it first and foremost perforates the lines of our hearts, and lets us tear off a piece here and a piece there, till we find ourselves segmented, fragmented, torn apart in separate snippets of self. It isn’t that we become blackened by sin in large stroke. It isn’t that we turn into some hideous monsters of greed and cruelty. It isn’t that we dissolve the Dr. Jekylls of our personalities into dastardly Mr. Hydes. Instead, we keep most of our goodness intact, but we make small allowances in certain little areas. We cheat on our taxes a little, maybe... or we turn our eyes from the needs of someone we could help... or we compromise our communication till we speak from only our mouths instead of our souls.
The fragmentation of our lives makes us less than we should be, less than we could be. It makes us less than the people God made us to be. It is precisely because we and our world have lost our integrity that the great Prophet of God must come and set things right.
There is a powerful scene in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. The story is that of Sir Thomas More, loyal subject of the English crown. King Henry VIII wants to change things to suit his own devious plans, so he requires all his nobles to swear an oath of allegiance which violates the conscience of Sir Thomas More before his God. Since he will not swear the oath, More is put in jail. His daughter Margaret comes to visit him. “Meg,” he calls her, with affection. She’s his pride and joy, the one who thinks his thoughts after him.
Meg comes to plead with her father in prison. “Take the oath, Father!” she urges him. “Take it with your mouth, if you can’t take it with your heart! Take it and return to us! You can’t do us any good in here! And you can’t be there for us if the king should execute you!”
She’s right in so many ways! Yet her father answers her this way: “Meg, when a man swears an oath, he holds himself in his hands like water, and if he opens his fingers, how can he hope to find himself again?”
You know what he means, don’t you? When our lives begin to fragment, it’s like holding our lives like water in our hands, and then letting our fingers come apart, just a little bit. The water of our very selves dribbles away. We may look like the same people, but who we are inside has begun to change.
This is why John comes pointing the way to another Kingdom. Here there will be no separation between the impulse of the heart, and the thought of the mind, and the word of the mouth, and the action of the hands. Somehow, everything about the coming Kingdom is integrated. That’s the meaning of the word “integrity,” isn’t it? Pure in heart!
Application
Jesus raises the banner of heaven’s royal claims over both Gentile and Jewish territory, and thus is the source of political allegiances that supersede temporal boundaries. This is very good news during Advent, when the nations of the earth conspire against one another, and only the Christian Church can effect a transnational celebration of the politics of grace: The Peaceable Kingdom.
Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist and professor at Harvard University who likes to try to figure out why we do the things we do. In his book The Call of Service he wonders about people who try to make a difference in life; people who seek to reform themselves, even with the tenacity of sin that clings down deep; people who attempt to better society, in spite of the fact that it stubbornly refuses the challenge.
Why do they do it, Coles asks? The stories are all so different that it is hard to figure out a way to summarize them neatly in some framework. In fact, the people themselves often have a hard time defining what it is that makes them tick. One young teacher in an urban school gets challenged all the time. Street-smart students, weary of self-righteous “do-gooders,” put the question to him: “What’s in it for you?” they demand. And he really can’t say.
But this he and all the rest of them can say: sometime earlier in their lives, each of them ran into a crisis situation, a situation that tested their identity and their willingness to do something about it; and in that crisis situation, each of them encountered someone who put his life on the line... someone who taught them the meaning of service... someone who gave of herself in a way that bucks the trend of selfishness and of self-preservation. And the influence of that someone else made it possible to be greater than each of them had previously considered. Enter the Peaceable Kingdom, where things change because we have brushed against the holiness of God, and Jesus becomes our savior and mentor.
Years ago, when radio station WXYZ in Detroit was the big news in broadcasting, people spent hours each night listening to the latest episodes of The Green Hornet and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Nearly every year the station brought out a new dramatic hero.
Station manager George Trendle often suggested the main ideas for these characters. In fact, he was the inspiration behind one of the most famous figures they ever created: the Lone Ranger. Trendle said this about the man he had in mind: “He’s a sober-minded man with a righteous purpose. Make kids look up to him.”
But that’s easily lost on us. When Thomas Naylor was teaching business management at Duke University, he asked his students to draft a personal strategic plan. He reports that “with few exceptions, what they wanted fell into three categories: money, power, and things -- very big things.”
In fact, said Naylor, this was their request of the business faculty at Duke: “Teach me to be a moneymaking machine!” A moneymaking machine! A machine with no heart! That’s the fragmentation of our lives taken to the extreme.
So here we are, in a sense, on the brink of another year, the liturgical year, the year of expectation of God’s doing something good once again, the year of the coming of the Kingdom announced by John. As they say, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life!” Let’s imagine that there are 365 new days thrown back onto the credits side of the ledger. What do we do with them?
Alternative Application
Isaiah 11:1-10. Even though we like laughter and enjoy praise and celebration, especially at this time of year, it doesn’t always come easily. One fellow tells of his work as a hospital volunteer. He couldn’t believe the pain and suffering he saw there. Burn victims. Deformities. Terminal cancer. He watched the little ones cry. Some were so lonely: their parents couldn’t take the trauma, so they never came to see their own children. How horrible!
He decided to get a clown’s nose and a pair of oversized shoes. Then he painted his face and pulled on a wig. When he went to work dressed like that the next day, some of the children were scared, some were captivated, and some even showed hints of a smile for the first time in ages.
But others couldn’t stop wailing. They were consumed by agony. What could he do for them? The next day the clown brought along some popcorn. When he came to the side of a crying child, he took a kernel of popcorn, placed it against the child’s cheek, and soaked up the cascading tears with its fluff. Then he popped that kernel into his mouth and ate it.
It was a stroke of genius. The only time some of those children stopped crying was the moment they knew that somebody else cared enough to swallow their tears.
Advent brings us to a place like that. It takes us, at the end of our journey, to the “sanctuary” of God for a time of praise. “Sanctuary” is refuge, fortress, safe house, security, arms of love, a place where someone cares enough to swallow our tears and protect us from the worst that could harm us. This, certainly, is what the scenes of our Isaiah reading are all about.
Madeleine L’Engle paints a picture of such a sanctuary in one of her children’s books. She tells of a young couple on a desert journey through wilderness in a rough caravan. They’re on their way to Egypt. Someone is after them; someone wants to kill their little boy.
The journey is a rugged one. The desert is alive with ferocious beasts. All eyes cast about uneasily as darkness settles. There’ll be little sleep in the camp tonight. They build a great fire to drive back the shadows and keep away the world that belongs to monsters with glowing eyes. Suddenly they start in terror; a great lion appears at the bonfire. The mother reaches for her child, desperately trying to draw him to safety.
But the child stands and laughs. He opens his arms wide to the lion. The lion lifts his front paws and hops around on his hind legs. He’s dancing! And then, from the desert, come running several little mice and two donkeys and a snake and a couple of clumsy ostriches. Three great eagles swoop in from the purple skies. From the other side of the camp a unicorn emerges, and a pelican, and even two dragons.
They all bow before the child and then dance together round and round him. He stands at the center of their great circle, laughing in delight. It’s a dance in the desert, as L’Engle calls it. In essence, it’s the sum and substance of our worship here on earth, pilgrims passing through the wilderness of ghastly beasties and mournful hurts.
This is the second Sunday in Advent. Christmas seems close, but we are not there yet. We still spend time in the dark alongside those who wrestle with demons and shadows and beasties. But because of Advent confidence, we see the Light and clap our hands in celebration of the Child who comes to dance around our fires.
