2 Advent A December 8, 2013
Is. 11:1-10
Ps.72
This week the world lost a great man and not
because he thought so, in fact, Nelson Mandela was one to point out his own
imperfection and he was one quick to credit lots of other people who suffered
and sacrifice to end apartheid in South Africa.
One can hardly imagine the strength of spirit to endure twenty seven
years in prison and to use that time for discipline and study. He became famous when his captors tried to
make people forget him. Upon his release from prison he was elected to be
president of South Africa, and he governed through forgiveness and reconciliation. His life represents the achievement of what
was thought to be impossible.
I sometimes
wonder if we read and perhaps misuse the utopian visions of the Isaian
prophet? Sometimes life seems so cruel and unjust; it
is a life of the predator and strong exploiting the weak. We often use the Genesis account of a
causatively absolute fall of humanity into such depravity that rather than
being realistic about the true freedom that is in our world, we are ready to
throw in the towel and say this creation is just a failed experiment of the
Creator and so we challenge the Creator to intervene and remake creation to be
a totally innocent universe where there is no longer freedom and the
consequences of freedom. Wouldn’t it be
nice if wolves and lambs played together? Wouldn’t it be nice if babies would
play with vipers? Wouldn’t it be nice if
this knowledge of the Lord were some robotic orientation towards goodness and
harmony such that we could not be anything other than innocent? Is this utopian world, a world without
genuine freedom, one that we really want? It
sounds nice but such views also can encourage a passivism. If Nelson Mandela was sitting in prison
wishing for the end of the world or a magical re-making of human nature to be
receptive to a multi-racial society, one could understand such a vision for
temporary comfort but it would be unrealistic to the actual conditions of the
world.
So we need to
be careful not to read utopian worlds or an apocalyptic interventionist end of
the world as presenting literal futures;
such a literalism is a giving up on this world and it also is an offense to
freedom. Even if we want God to come and
end the world right away how can anyone be so sure that we are worthy for God to intervene
for us and our view of life? Does suffering and oppression
automatically make people holy or better than others or are they people who don’t
abuse power because they don’t have power to abuse? We really need to be aware of the logical consequences
of the apocalyptic views if we hold them in literal ways.
The Isaian
prophet also longed for one who was from the line of Jesse. David as the youngest son of Jesse was the
improbable king of Israel. His greatness
could not be predicted but it happened and David gave Israel its only golden
period, even though it got idealized as much better than it was because the
literature about it was written in the periods of later suffering.
The Isaian
prophet wished for greatness in a similar way that we wish for a Nelson Mandela
kind of greatness to happen again. In
the Hebrew religion, the notion of greatness was found in messianism. This was a belief that God energized,
divinized, anointed human beings to accomplish great things. Many kings of Israel were anointed with oil
but most were not great in the way that they actually performed.
As Christians
we are similar to the Isaian prophet who hoped for greatness to be the evidence
of God’s Spirit anointing human beings.
This is not a violation of freedom; this is not wanting God to be a
powerful judge at the end of human history; this is not wanting us magically to
become a world full of automatic innocence; this is looking for God to help us human
beings toward excellence in incremental steps of improvement through education,
or the religious term for education, repentance.
In the
Christian liturgy of baptism we pray for the seven fold gifts of the
Spirit. The seven-fold gifts were
inspired by this Isaian passage. We
anoint with Chrism, the oil of baptism, because we hope that God’s Spirit will
anoint us with a Spirit of excellence to do what is right for ourselves and for
our world. In the baptismal liturgy, we
pray that each one of us can partake of the Spirit of greatness of the Messiah. Baptism is a practice of group messianism;
we pray to be a collective messiah in the world because God’s Spirit is invoked
upon our lives.
Biblical
literature of apocalyptic intervention or magical realism is wonderful
literature of comfort for people who need visualizations in their pain
management, but to honor the actual conditions of freedom in our world, we need
to promote the value of education.
The word
which John the Baptist used for education is the word repentance. Repentance means a renewal of our minds. It means taking on transforming information
which helps us to act better today than we did yesterday. We know that institutions can take good
knowledge and make it so rote and routine that it becomes unable to inspire
actual change. This is the argument
which John the Baptist had with the religious establishment of his time; the
way in which the religion was practice did not educate people to change their
lives towards understanding what obvious creative love and justice meant. The great Law of Moses was about love and justice;
how come so many people in Palestine missed out upon law and justice under the
regime of the religious authorities. John
and Jesus were educational reformers; there were too many people left behind by
the prevailing religious establishment.
I think the
season of Advent is a messianic season; not because we hope that the world will
end soon, but because we hope that the messianic grace which we all prayed for
in our baptism would rise to greater effect in our lives and in our world. Our religious view is not functional, if we
simply want to wish away the actual world of freedom and feed our minds upon
utopian visions and apocalyptic endings of the world.
We need greatness in our world; we have
greatness in our world but it is most often wrongly directed. We have highly paid geniuses to develop
financial schemes of hedge funds, Ponzi schemes, bundling of bad loans and sold
fraudulently, future and derivatives schemes for increasing the concentration
of wealth in the hands of the few. What
would happen if the total human genius of the world was directed toward solving
hunger, social, political and economic injustice? It is easy to wish away the world in utopian
vision, to wish for a great Messiah to zap us to be angelic people; but how
about the messiah of our baptismal anointing?
How about messianic greatness as the direction of human genius towards
the approximation of love and justice? We
need messianic greatness as something like a portion of the Spirit of Mandela
to work creatively with free conditions of our world to persuade us towards
more hope, love and justice for more people in our world.
The harshness
of the message of John the Baptist is needed in our world today, not because
greatness does not exist but because greatness and creativity is directed toward
greedy goals.
Let us be
messianic people today. Let us heed the
message of John the Baptist to repent?
Let us baptize any human greatness toward the direction of love and
justice for all. And let persuade others
to do the same.
John the
Baptist was telling people that their creativity was being used for the wrong
end. Repent, renew the mind, and let us
be creative, great and excellent as we have the vision of what is loving and
just in our world. Let us wish for the
greatness of Mandela to be present in our world; let us wish for the repentance
of John the Baptist to be our education and let the Spirit of the Messiah give
us proper direction for the great energy of freedom in our lives. Amen.
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