BILLTESKA

Lectionary texts: http://divinity.library.vanderbilt.edu/lectionary/BAdvent/bAdvent2.htm
Collect:
Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.



The point is that everything will be changed. Everything. Every valley exalted, every mountain and hill made low. Nothing will be as it was. Everything ordinary will be reversed. The crooked straight and the rough places plane. The messengers of God are always trying to get our attention, to stimulate our imagination, to get us to look up, to imagine something new, to stop staring at the ground and to look up to the sky, to wake up. They prepare the Way of the Lord by insisting that we think anew, by warning us to think again, to re-pent to think the unthinkable.

Advent is a penitential season, but it is not exactly the same kind of penitence as Lent. It is not about overcoming our deathly preoccupation with ourselves, exactly, it is about getting us to imagine more. The purple of Advent is trimmed with gold: royal as well as mournful. I have baptized you with water; but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. The purple of Advent is tinged with fire.

One way of looking at it is to think of the Baptism of John as like throwing cold water on sleepers in order to wake them up. The “Baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” may be understood as a sign of willingness to think anew, washing away every distraction and preoccupation that causes us to miss the mark of remembrance of God. John’s Baptism prepare(s) the Way of the Lord by opening our consciousness to the Infinite. This means that we have to relinquish our attachment to things as they are – and to our most cherished notions of our own identity.

Things are not as they seem, and we are not who we think we are. Reality is much more than meets the eye. Human history is not the endless, meaningless cycles of rising and falling tides, waxing and waning moons, and alternating seasons. Neither is human life an endless succession of birth, death, and rebirth. Some find comfort in such notions, but Advent calls us to think again – to re-pent. Because something is coming Someone is coming Who has not been seen before. Prophets come and go. Teachers appear and repeat the message, but this One is different. This One the greatest of divine Messengers is unworthy to serve as footman. But in order to entertain such a One – even to imagine Him, we have to repent. We have to give up our ordinary way of thinking about things, including ourselves. We have to forsake our habits of thought, our old paradigm, our distracting notions, our sins.

Human history is the story of consciousness advancing in the knowledge and love of God. But no spiritual advance ever comes without leaving something behind – forsaking something. Forsaking everything, really. Abram and Sarai have to forsake their well-to-do, comfortable life in Ur of the Chaldees in order to become Abraham and Sarah, to become the parents of Isaac and Ishmael, and of the whole human race, spiritually speaking. Moses has to forsake his princely status in Egypt and run away to Midian in order to see the great Shekinah of the Lord – the Bush that burned and was not consumed, and he had to turn aside from his chosen path in order to see it. The Children of Israel had to forsake the security to which they had become habituated in Egyptian slavery and go out into the foreboding desert in order to accept the promise of God. David had to forsake his whole way of life as a shepherd in order to follow the destiny to which God called him through the Holy Prophet Samuel. God’s Messengers are always demanding that we forsake something – something near and dear – something the Collect for today calls our sins.

Oh yes, we must be sorry for our sins. But in addition to that, we have to give up our whole limited way of thinking about ourselves and reality in general. That opening of consciousness, that vigilance, that awakening is the prerequisite for greeting our Liberator with Joy. We just love our imperfections, our little neuroses and distractions and beloved habits of slave-consciousness. We think that they are what make us who we are. We cling to them, and hold them tight. Like Esau, we settle for too little, we miss the mark, we are eager to sell our birthright for a mess of pottage.

But we are NOT our imperfections, our neuroses and distractions, and habits: we are the Image of God, and we WILL be separated from our dearly beloved false identities whether we want to be or not. For He is like a refiner’s fire. And He will purify the sons of Levi. We can forsake our sins now, and then rejoice to behold His appearing, or we can continue bemused by them and then suffer a fairly shocking purgation.

Things are not as they seem. We are not who we seem. All flesh is grass, which withers and fades, but the Glory of the Lord is about to be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. For the Mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. We are not just flesh, born to wither and fade and die. We can forsake that illusion right now, we can repent, think again, think anew, and hasten the Day of the Lord, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved. Everything will be changed. There is no way to imagine it but in the ecstatic poetry of prophecy or the fantastic terms of apocalyptic literature and modern science fiction, pointing to the new heavens and a new earth where justice is at home, and where the Son of David will feed His flock like a shepherd…gather the lambs in His arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead them that are with young.