We have two words from God is morning. The first, from the prophet Isaiah, is a vision of hope, the substance of all our deepest longings: the lived experience of the divine presence, a sense of wholeness - walking in God's ways, justice, peace through disarmament, unity among peoples.
Our second word is from Jesus: keep awake or you'll miss the coming of the kingdom. Contrary to what a lot of modern modern American Protestants think about these sorts of apocalyptic lessons, Jesus was speaking very concretely to actual people in a very specific socio-historical setting: Palestinian Jews under Roman rule in the first century. He is trying to warn them of the impending disaster towards which they are blindly walking, a disaster that actually befell them in 70 AD when the Roman legions destroyed the Temple and Jerusalem, killed thousands of Jews and deported thousands more. Jesus is trying to tell them: change your thinking and practice, don't kowtow as slaves but don't get yourselves wiped out. You are complacent about your ideologies, theologies, sociologies and political economies. You have accepted ways of being that actually oppress most, don't serve many, and prosper the very few. You think yourselves devout, but you live at a distance for god, hiding God within ritual and liturgy, buffering God with tradition and custom, mistaking the outward forms for the actual thing and therefore leading yourselves far for a personal and immediate experience of the ultimate truth and life. It's really no wonder most people turned their backs on Jesus.
We think we're more savvy than a bunch of illiterate Palestinian peasants with the Roman legions breathing down their necks. We think that we're not just awake, but wide awake, hyper awake. We know more, are better connected and informed, more efficient, more productive, more just about everything than any people ever before in human history, except spiritual health. What if this hyper awareness is actually a self delusion? A self hypnosis? What if all of our hyper activity is actually putting ourselves to sleep spiritually? How might Jesus' warning to keep awake apply to us?
I have been thinking about these questions this week, which is sort of a strange thing to do over Thanksgiving. I'd like to share some symptoms of spiritual sleepiness or sleep walking from my life. I am not complaining. Nor am I judging you if you have these symptoms. I am just trying to keep awake and these are my challenges.
First, it seems to me that my life is a blur at least 360 days a year, from 5 in the morning until 9 at night, seven days a week. There is just so much going on in an endless stream of prescheduled alerts going off on my IPhone. Most weeks I cannot remember what I've done by the end, let alone savor or celebrate it. I have at least three primary agendas competing for my devotion: my family (within which I have the sometimes competing agendas of husband and father), my ministry/work, my self, that my devotion to God can feel like an added burden sometimes, like the straw on the camels back. To all the people who struggle to find time for church, I know.
Since I brought up my IPhone, let's get right to the information and technology age we live in. We have more information at our fingertips, greater aids to our efficiency and productivity than ever before in human history. I love it. I can answer all of my boys' questions accurately right on my phone. I haven't even begun to tap into the potential for ministry. However, I also see the dangers. We can exceed the capacity of most human minds to benefit from these tools. We can't think fast enough, process thoroughly enough, and we get psycho-intellectually washed away on the flood of information. There is so much information that we don't know what to make of it. When we look around at our social discourse, there seems to be a strong tendency to prefer uninformed, gut feeling opinion, "honesty," to fact based, reasoned judgement. Most people I know are slightly befuddled.
Speaking of feeling washed away, when I was undergoing psychological evaluation for ordination, the psychiatrist's first observation after reviewing my profile was, " did it ever occur to you that everything you like to do for recreation does not involve, even excludes, other people, Maxwell?"
"Is that a problem?" I asked, knowing full well where she was going with this and not really having a rational leg to stand on. "You are planning to be a pastor in a church, which involves other people, and you say here you would like to be married and have children as well, which means even more other people, right inside your house..." After trying to rationalize my way out of her point, I finally said, "I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. For now, all the fishing, kayaking, hiking, and reading feed my soul." I am well across the bridge now and I have learned in the many years since which have been filled with other people, church people and family people, is how important it is to feed our souls regularly. Most of us get so busy striving towards our professional goals that we leave no time or energy for feeding our souls and we end up feeling empty and dried up, like a raisin, desiccated by the life of our dreams.
And finally, although by finally I don't mean that I have exhausted the list of symptoms, but this is the end of the ones I have been thinking about this week, what to think about current events, political ideas, economics, finance, science, and how to act. Never before have we had access to so much information, so much good information and so much misinformation. I am a pretty educated person with a few degrees, but there are times when I think I need about five Ph.D.s to know how to invest my money and plan for the future, understand global politics and economics, the latest scientific insights and what they mean for me and for the world. I feel like, because I have access to all this information I ought to behave responsibly and in an informed way. But it is too much. It is actually isolating. What I find myself doing when I listen to some expert is first listening with my blinders on, as in my preexisting worldview and outlook, and then either agreeing or disagreeing on the basis of feelings rather than reason, because I just am not informed enough to make a decision. Whenever I hear anyone who says they're an expert on this or that, I think they mean that they have very strong feelings. The big questions like overpopulation, global warming, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction seem somehow beyond me, which is not a good feeling.
So those are my symptoms, my challenges. I feel hyper awake, but I wonder whether I am awake at all or just sleepwalking through life. And the question is what to do? What to think? How to stay awake?
Which is where Isaiah's vision of hope comes in. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hope in its verbal form means “to entertain expectations of something desired; to trust, have confidence; to expect with desire or desire with expectation; to anticipate.” In the midst of our very real lives which seem to be very really rushing away with us, we need to set our sights on something to desire, something to trust or have confidence in, something worth expecting enough to make it the fulcrum of our lives, something above and beyond and yet also more fundamental and earthy than all this ruckus of our daily lives. That something is Isaiah's vision, Jesus' Kingdom of God, which we are meant to use as an interpretive lense for looking at our world and an agenda for prioritizing our own activity.
First, the divine presence at the center of life and our individual lives. All of us long for that inspiration, restoration, consolation which we have known at particular special moments in life, moments when I would say each of us have been directly in touch with God. To feed our souls, delight our spirits, nurture our creativity, empower our ability to love....to have that as our center is something to hope for. When we look at our calendars and have to choose, shall we choose walking with God in the now or running solo to tomorrow?
To walk in God's ways? What is wrong with love, forgiveness, humility, sharing with others, caring for others? That's all Isaiah is pointing to, a behavioral skill set to practice day in and day out.
Justice determined by love, forgiveness, humility, sharing with others, caring for others rather than justice determined by the arbitrary and self serving interested of the most powerful? What's wrong with that? We look at everything in the world and ask ourselves, is this really just for all, or just good for me, my community, my party?
Unity among all peoples, all of us steaming uphill towards love, forgiveness, humility, sharing with others, caring for others? I love the image of streaming uphill because water doesn't stream uphill and nor do we. Left to our own devices, we go with gravity, away from God, away from our neighbors. It isn't easy working for unity.
And finally, peace through disarmament? When you look at the world and all the problems we face, can we imagine what we could do to begin fixing those problems with the $1.7 trillion which were spent on weapons and warfare worldwide last year? I am not even talking about stopping the killing and destruction, but that kind of money would end hunger, poverty, illiteracy and all the rest of the seemingly insurmountable problems of the world. Every country in the world skims the huge excess of cream off of the top of our wealth and dumps it into weapons.
So, this first Sunday in Advent, we ask ourselves: how's this working for us? And if our answer is "just fine, thank you very much," we have to question the value of our self interest with that of the whole. The good news of the hope before us is just that, it is right before us. It is ours to grasp and to live. It is ours to sift the wheat of our lives from the chaff with. It is ours to guide us through the darkness into the light. It is right before us and that is good news.
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