Second Sunday of Advent (#1)

Where our hearts are impenetrable

I'd like to continue making proposals, primarily to me, but I hope they're helpful for you, to mount a kind of rescue mission for Advent to keep it from being absorbed and lost in the frenzy of these days before Christmas... And I think this year the rubric for doing that is the one that was in the readings last Sunday; namely, trying to figure out where our hearts are impenetrable... to find some aperture through which God can enter our lives.

Today's readings are a little odd in that this passage from Isaiah needs a good deal of explanation. This is the beginning of the fortieth chapter of Isaiah which all the scholars believe is a quite different person from the person who wrote the first thirty-nine chapters. The first thirty-nine chapters were preached by this man in Jerusalem, or thereabouts because they were under assault by the Babylonians, and the war went on for some time, and finally around 587 the Babylonian Empire, as it did most of the ancient Near East, conquered the Kingdom of Israel. And most of the people were deported; all the politicians, all the pooh-bahs were shipped off to Babylon. And the words of the so-called first Isaiah had been words of warning, I mean: "We're in bad shape..." They had this vision of things whereby if people were not faithful to God then they would suffer consequences..., and he read these consequences as the captivity of these people by the Babylonians... It is out of this context where many of the leading Jews were in Babylon where you get these extraordinary words: "comfort..., comfort..." So here were people who were utterly dispossessed; I mean, the land that was supposed to be theirs, their election by God, everything that had made them what they thought they were was simply destroyed. And it's in that context that we hear this extraordinary voice talking about "comfort..., comfort..."

But then we have to look at that word comfort. I don't know what the Hebrew is, but it's always translated in the translations I know by this Latin word "comfort." Most of us think of comfort food, or a comfortable chair, or comfortable shoes... I think these are the first connotations that the notion of comfort has; something in which I can relax, and something within which I can turn of any kind of anxiety that I may have about the rest of my life. In other words, it is a sort of escape from all the travail of my existence and of momentary respite. But, that's not what comfort means. The Latin word that is also related to comfort is "fortitude"; the root is the same, comfort and fortitude come from exactly the same thing. In other words, to be comforted is "to be made strong," precisely not to be worn-out by life. To be comforted, and that's why this context is really important, is precisely not to despair of the reality of God. And that's what's really important because there is so much religious talk today which precisely proposes that religion is a great anodyne for life's problems, a sort of "cosmic aspirin," or "prozac" is probably better... That's not what religion is supposed to do... That's not what religion is supposed to be. And it is interesting that the partner reading is about this mysterious figure, John the Baptist, who is also going to figure in next Sunday's Gospel. If you think about whatever we know about him, and it's not a great deal, the last thing you would say about John the Baptist if you had to live with him is that he was a comfortable person: "Oh, let's have John over for a beer tonight..."

So where does all this end? Where does this fit into the Advent agenda that I'm proposing for myself, and I hope for you? It raises the question: "What makes me comfortable? Where do I seek my comfort?" Comfort in any sense because there is a moderately rescuable sense of the notion of comfort as in "comfortable shoes" here because, if I feel that I am able to face life, if I feel strengthened--that's what the word "fortis" means, then that does give me a special kind of relaxation in the world... But it's not the kind of relaxation of a warm bath; it's a relaxation that comes from the sense that somehow I will be able to manage with God. Of course that's exactly where the issue arises: is my comfort understood in that way? With God, am I comfortable?

It is from there that I find the wherewithal to live as generously as I can... To pursue this extraordinary vision which we've talked, and that the readings talk about next week too, where the world is going to be filled with righteousness--not with all the distractions that I think make life bearable for so many of us, so much of the time, but that the comfort that we have will come from the vision of the world which is filled with righteousness.

So, again, it is a fairly modest proposal that I'm making. If I could ask myself this question on these daily times-out for myself: "What is the source of my comfort and what does it do for me?"

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