BLOGGING-THOMAS

The role of the prophet was an impossible one.  Prophets were called to speak truth to power, to name human folly, and to declare to those living in comfort in the middle of prosperity that God’s preferred residence was actually at the margins.  The prophet was tasked with afflicting the comfortable.

As a result, prophets were usually on the outs with leaders of church and state who had taken it upon themselves to let God know their expectations, and to demand that God meet them.

The prophets role was to remind us of the folly of our human expectations — that if God is on our side, we will prosper, our nation will have a preeminent place in the world, and our religion will protect us with God’s special favor.

“All people are grass,” Isaiah wrote; “their constancy is like the flower of the field” that withers and fades. And so the prophets of Israel were the ones to speak up and remind the people that God did not exist to meet our expectations.

The prophet’s role, however, was even harder to live out.  After Israel fell to conquest and the people were sent into exile in foreign lands, it was the prophet’s role, as well, to comfort the afflicted and to remind them that God remained faithful to them, even when they were allowed to suffer the consequences of unjust living, of human unfaithfulness in loving God and their neighbor.

Isaiah had, before their exile, called the people to account for their expectation that God would continue to bless them with military and monetary success, however little justice their lives displayed.  Now, at the far side of that time, the prophetic voice that we will hear on The Second Sunday of Advent turns the other cheek:

“Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her, that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid …”  God will “feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”

This is not the voice of God to the triumphant privileged, but to the sheep who have been ravaged by wolves, some of which they  have invited into their own folds.  It is the voice announcing that God will be their shepherd, doing for them faithfully what they had refused to do for one another — show mercy, compassion, forgiveness to those who live at the margins.

It was Isaiah’s job to declare not only that God  had chosen deliberately not to live up to their former expectations, but also that God doesn’t plan to live up to their expectations in the future, either!

Why?  Because  God has something better in mind.  The world will one day be turned on its head.  The margins will become the center of God’s life-giving presence.  The last will be first.  “The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together.”

In a word, the Messiah is coming.

And in that Blessed One, all of creation will discover God’s expectations for us, to be seen in the face of a poor child, born on the margins.

So wait.  And watch.  And stay awake.   For throughout the Advent Season, God is coming towards us already, with unanticipated mercy and compassion and love.

Whoa!  It’s Advent already!

Happy New Year (the church calendar began anew this past Sunday)!

I first ran into Advent … head on, as it were … when I was 21 years old and serving as the lay minister of a tiny United Methodist Church in Crawford, MS.   I had no training, just the fearlessness of youth when you don’t know enough even to say “No.”  I was asked to take on the job so this country church wouldn’t have to close.  There was nobody else.  So I said those fateful words: No Problem!  Well, obviously the problem was that I had no idea what I was doing.

Each Sunday I had to preach twice at 11:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m.   Since the same people attended both services, I had to have two sermons.   And when I looked up the biblical lessons assigned for those Sundays in Advent only weeks after I’d begun the job, they turned out to be about The Second Coming of Christ (as we called it in Mississippi in 1971).  What the h……….???!?!  I expected them to be about Christmas.  So I was shocked to have to try to make sense of why these stories were about the return of Jesus at the end of time, rather that Jesus showing up the first time in the manger.

Years later I discovered that both of these sets of readings shared a motivation to shake us up, to challenge our expectations about what God is like, what the story of Jesus is about, what it means to be a follower of Christ, where we think the world is going, what we think matters most.  And they certainly had accomplished that!

My experience gave me a lasting appreciation, as I grew up and later joined the Episcopal Church, for the importance of Advent and it’s themes of expectation, anticipation.  The significance of the prophets’ longing for a Savior, John the Baptist leaping in his mother’s womb at the news of Jesus’ forthcoming birth, and much of Jesus’ own ministry is to challenge us to look at our own lives and ask questions like:

• What are you hoping for?
• What are you longing for?
• What really matters to you most?
• What fulfills you in the deepest way?
• Where do you think your life is taking you?

As it turns out, no one was quite expecting what they got in Jesus — he was too poor, too lower class, lacking too much in connections and power, to be “the Savior of the world” — at least as people had long expected the Messiah to be.

Each Advent, I recall the Gospel lesson from Mark this past Sunday, and Jesus’ words that ring with challenge for me now, just as they must have to his first hearers:  “Stay awake!”  Pay attention.  For God is at work around you already in ways that you are not yet willing to see.  When God came in Jesus the first time, and when God creates the heavens and earth anew “at the end of time,” it probably won’t be what we expect — it’s probably not what we’re waiting for when we check the mail, or the stock market, or the newspaper headlines, or even the unfulfilled longings of “our selves, our souls and bodies.”

And so each fall season, I find myself being challenged anew, as I have come to hear the question that Advent poses for me:  “What are you waiting for?”