Second Sunday of Advent

One of my sisters died this past year.  Knowing that she would soon die of cancer, she wrote her own obituary, a practice I heartily recommend. (Why leave this to someone who doesn’t remember significant events or persons and is focused on favorite hobbies and sport teams?)  But more than this, she wrote a eulogy to be read at her funeral which contained the people, beliefs, and values that bound her life together.  I think that it is a highly commendable exercise to become conscious of the desires and hopes that moved our life, the unity underlying the narrative of our lives which so often get scattered   into bits and pieces of coping with events.  What have we hoped for?  What are the disappointments which challenged that hope? How did we meet them? Erik Erikson has said that one of the earliest struggles of life is for autonomy in the face of shame and doubt.  I am what hope I have and can give.

 Luke presents us with two worlds in the Gospel.  The first description is of the organized world, political and religious.  This world thrives on power and dominance to achieve stability.  It has no patience for inner autonomy or independence.  Its willingness to supply immediate satisfaction is a correlative of its hegemony and monopoly on defining what it means to be human.  Religion is at the service of private needs and satisfaction.  It becomes absorbed by the entertainment industry which happily consumes your time and money and expects your thanks.  It is a world of meetings and filled stadiums while churches and schools are emptied because they no longer meet a felt need. We are gently informed of our real need to be disabused of futile illusions.  It is hard to get past this mind-numbing wall of important personages as described by Luke.

The other world is the world of the desert.  This is no place to build a city of human achievements.  It is sterile, infertile, and useless gound.  It is unfriendly if not outrightly hostile to human comfort and survival.  You might not meet anybody here.  But it is a great teacher.  Its barrenness, stillness, silence all expose how dependent we have become on definitions of being human that political and economic worlds have drilled into our psyches.  These scripts are revealed as necessary illusions to adhere to structures that ask our worship and adoration.  The confession we are called to is the admission of how we have misspent and misplaced our hopes and the way we have invested our energies in impulses and obsessions which infallibly disappoint us.  A baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  A new way of seeing the world which frees us from the definitions which restrain and bind us to cycles of repression and obsession.

The desert is very inhospitable to illusions which blind us to reality, to the smog and pollution we create by our clever technology.  The word comes to us in the desert.

Paul writes to the Philippians from prison, from the confidence that rises from a hope which matures in affliction and disappointment.  The confinement of the prison becomes the pulpit from which he preaches the gospel of conversion and metanoia.  John went throughout the whole region, proclaiming a baptism of repentance.  It is a gospel of a love which hopes all things, endures all things.

His last will and testament is a prayer that your love may increase ever more and more in knowledge and every kind of perception, to discern what is of value, so that you may be found blameless and pure for the day of Christ. This takes time, patience and endurance, is not concerned about results or evidence but only about the worth and value of what is being done.  It is the discovery of the one who has begun this good work in us and will continue to complete it until the day of Christ.  This is a hope that can afford to wait.  It is a hope joined to the Christ who continues to ask us to live in His hope, to do this in memory of me.