2nd Advent, 1997 (#1)

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2nd Sunday of Advent, 1997 (#1)

Where is home for me?

I think one of the largest obstacles with observing Advent is not only its commercialization but rather the pace at which we live, a pace that accelerates almost to the point of madness around the Christmas season. And so, it is very hard to try to figure out what it is we really do hope for, simply because we are sort of battered by all kinds of things coming at us from every direction. With this in mind, I would like to try to extract meaning from the readings today in order to try to come to grips with these fundamental questions: What do I really hope for in my life? What do I really want? What am I really expecting, or anticipating?

The three readings are full of promises. Baruch, who was a prophet, but also the secretary of the prophet Jeremiah, talks about good things happening to Jerusalem: "hills being made low" and "valleys filled up". And then in the Psalm, interestingly enough, there is actually a reference to that happening: "The Lord restoring the fortunes of Zion". We are going to come back to what that entails. Then Paul, of course, is talking about his confidence that God is going to be faithful, that when people started the following of Jesus God is going to transform us in such a way that we all become a real community. Of course the figure of John the Baptist, as the great Karl Barth put it, is one great big finger pointing to the future.

Going over these texts, I was finally struck by something that underlies each of them that may be more helpful than what they say on their surface levels. Baruch was writing in the sixth century before our era, and when he was talking about Jerusalem it was a desert, it had been devastated by the Babylonians. The Temple, the absolutely single, central place of worship for the Jews, was destroyed by the Babylonian invasion in 587. Most of the Jews, certainly the prominent Jews, had been deported. You might remember that Psalm, "By the waters of Babylon we sat and hung up our harps and our captors asked us to sing a song of the Lord and how can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land". So all this glad-talk that "Israel may walk safely in the glory of the Lord" is absolutely counter-factual. There is nothing, there is no sign of glory at all! It looked like God had abandoned everything. And if we do not know that that is the historical moment out of which all this glad-talk and these great, glorious promises come, we seriously miss the point.

Paul wrote the Letter to the Philippians when he was in jail, as he was frequently in his life. Paul, of course, as we know, ultimately was executed because he was a troublemaker; he was politically disruptive, just as Jesus was. And it is fascinating to observe that the Letter to the Philippians is also the most buoyant of Paul's letters. The word "joy" comes up more often in the Letter to the Philippians than in any of the other Pauline correspondence. But, the fact is he was in jail and really close to facing the death-sentence. And it is out of that situation that he says, "My God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Christ, Jesus, and this is my prayer that your love may overflow more and more with knowledgeable insights so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless having produced a harvest of righteousness".

When John the Baptist shows up, what was the political situation in Palestine? Palestine was, as it was through most of its history, from the time of the conquest under the reign of David a thousand years before Jesus, an occupied country. For most of its history, the Jews lived under the Assyrians, Persians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans, and here is Paul talking about the coming of the Kingdom of God. In other words, all of this talk comes from an enormously dark, dark place. I was struck by this because of the fact that, although for centuries we Christians have walked away from it, we are basically an offshoot of Judaism. We are a form of Judaism, that is what Christianity is. It is only because we won, in the fourth century when Constantine thought it politically expedient to become Christian and, therefore, declared Christianity legitimate and made it an official imperial religion, that we got to be in charge. Then we could start beating the Jews on the head, which we had been doing, anyway, for a long time. But basically, we have lost this Jewish sense of homelessness. Because that is the characteristic experience of the Jews. For the year 70 of our era, when Jerusalem was destroyed again, this time by the Roman armies, until 1949, the Jews were literally homeless, so that the figure of the wandering Jew which flows in and out of European literature is an absolutely standard one.

What I would like to suggest that we attempt to garner out of all of this is a sort of urgency to that question: What do I think is home for me? What do I want? What do I hope for? Where is home for me? The notion of homelessness is not part of our consciousness. We Christians are in charge, although, this situation is fading rapidly, but basically, we are still in charge socially, culturally, politically, even if the vestiges are, as I said, getting dimmer and dimmer. But I do not think we have this sense of homelessness. Remember that familiar saying: "The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests and I don't have anywhere to go". This is very hard to talk about in the church, especially the Roman church, which has for much of its history become so comfortable with the powers that be that we are politically, socially, and culturally respectable. And so I keep worrying, in my own behalf, "What has my Christianity cost me?" And I say, in absolute candour, "Very little".

I do not know, for sure, where to go with this because I think I have been asking, for much of my life, the wrong questions. And the right question, especially at this time before Christmas, is, "What do I really hope for?". And unless that hope comes out, as Paul will say, against a case of hopelessness, it is not going to be hope, it is just going to be some brainless optimism. So, where are we oppressed? The Jews have plenty of experience, and that may be the most important thing about our Jewish heritage that we have walked away from, for many reasons. The music we are going to play at the Communion is written by a great, very self-consciously Jewish composer, Ernst Bloch. Listen to it carefully. It is simply called "Prayer". This passionate, intense, almost manic sense of yearning in this music grows out of a sense of homelessness.

This is a funny kind of sermon in a sense, but I think for me, because I first of all have to preach to myself, it is the most apt one. Because unless I really examine, "What do I really look for? In what sense am I really alien? Where am I away from home? What do I see as being home?", I am not going to do it. And the collateral question is, "What has made me dark?". I am not in Baruch's position, I am certainly not in Paul's position, and I am not in John the Baptist's position, and again, Palestine was a Roman province. I do not have that experience of oppression, but maybe that is because something is wrong with my head and my expectations - - I am looking for the wrong thing, I have misidentified this business.

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RT 1/14/98