Mass readings for the 2nd Sunday of Advent:
Baruch 5.1-9 Psalm 126.1-6 Philippians 1.3-6, 8-11 Luke 3.1-6
The world can be very trying. National politics, international affairs, economic news is worrying. We can talk at the screen during a news program; when pictures of those in charge pop up, implore them to do what needs doing, or to stop doing what they’re doing, even as we know they can’t hear a word we’re saying—it’s frustrating. We the many, the anonymous of history are helplessly swept along by the current of world affairs. But are we helpless, we who as Christians say, “our help is in the Lord”?
What can we do? What can we do to any positive effect in this world where the levers of power are well out of reach, the important decisions regarding the fate of nations, the world economy, are not ours to make? Do we put our heads down, ignore the world as best we can? Do we maintain a tight focus on our personal lives as being just about all we can handle?
Well, you’ve heard me warn about getting caught up in media, the system that is supposed to be informing us, but really is designed to trap us into consuming information that makes us anxious, depressed, fearful and angry. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to keep abreast of what’s going on in the world; just don’t get absorbed by it all.
But if I am suggesting taking action, what is to be done? The response should not be the world’s remedies of violence, threat of violence, deception, manipulation, answering evil with evil. The answer is in deepening our commitment to Jesus Christ, and answering God’s call to service, whatever that might be in our day.
Our gospel starts out with a lot of historical detail. St. Luke want us to know who the emperor is, and in what year of his reign the following events begin. He wants us to know the other political players, who the high priests are at the Jerusalem Temple, despite the fact that we’re not going to be focusing on them at all. The story today is about John the Baptist.
This is typical Luke. He wants the context for the story he unfolds to be that of a world dominated by the political and religious authorities that for many are the shapers of events, the authors of history. And then he subverts all that by talking about those who were relatively obscure in their day; and that includes Jesus, and argues that it is with them, and the carpenter from Nazareth, that history is made.
History is important for a Christian and current events should be something we keep abreast of—we to have and exercise something known as historical consciousness. That’s having an awareness that our actions and the world in which they play out are conditioned by what has come before and what comes after will be affected by what we say and do.
How does that actually work? Isn’t history a matter of the words and deeds of a few exceptional personalities, or is it the aggregate of all the decisions and action of humanity as a great mass that really determines the direction of humanity through time? It’s part of an ongoing debate. Another dimension of the discussion is the question of whether we’re going anywhere in particular in this journey through time. The progressive theory of history sees humanity, almost despite itself, getting better every day; and we’re progressing through improvement of ourselves and our circumstances: fewer wars, less famine, greater cooperation among nations, plenty for all. And that happens by letting people just do their thing.
In contrast we have thinkers like Karl Marx, who believe we can analyze history scientifically and discover how it works; and in knowing how it works harness its energies, to transform humanity and keep it from a descent into inequality and oppression. This requires a great deal of social control: the few enlightened regulating the behaviour of the masses.
And then we have the Christian understanding of history which is humbler than its secular counterparts. We don’t arrogantly suppose that we modern folks have an exceptional appreciation of historical processes. We don’t hold with the idea that we’re smarter than our forebears, that we’re better than everybody who came before. We shouldn’t think that ancient peoples lived conscious only of the present, the immediate past and foreseeable future, that everything beyond that limited time frame was a fantasy of myth and legend that demonstrates their irrationality, superstitiousness, their stupidity. No, there’s ample evidence from their ancient monuments, and from ancient historians whose writing survive that people had a notion of the cause and effect of their actions through time; and that myth was recognized for what it was, but valued because it was a means of remembering important lessons of the past.
Christians look at history as a far more mysterious thing whose processes are affected by the evil we do, the righteousness we live by, that exceptional personalities can appear to alter its course, but through it all is the movement of God’s spirit in all events and happenings of a human story which goes mostly unnoticed and unrecorded. Within history we live by God’s providential spirit. So, what is most important for us is to be faithful to God’s call, to listen and respond to his voice in our time; and heedless of the processes of the world, what people tell us is the stuff of history: the succession of emperors, the appointments of high priests.
Consider John the Baptist, the son of Zechariah the priest. Where should he be at the outset of this story, in a world governed by the powerful, through institutions, government, that coerce and manipulate, threaten violence even as they offer the people the bribe of bread and circuses to quiet the complaining?
He’s supposed to be in the Temple, as the member of a priestly family that is his vocation by tradition. He’s to be apprenticing under his father, in the tutelage of those high priests who were mentioned. According to the world, according to the naïve theories of history, that’s where he should be to either passively serve the natural progress of things, or to accumulate power for himself in the inevitable struggles to come. But he isn’t there. He has gone where God has called him to be, to do work that no one would have expected him to do, to be a voice crying in the wilderness dressed in camel skins and looking like a wild man instead of in the temple, robed and dignified by his priestly office, and muttering prayers in the inner most sanctuary, to be heard by no one but God.
Many of us doubtless have expectations of what our role in the world is to be, what our place in the Church is to be, what the Church is to be; what the work proper to us is or has been, and these have been largely shaped by a sense that the world is unfolding as it will, even as it should. But do we believe that God is pleased with this? That unsettled feeling we may have when looking at world around us, that distress for the souls of the formerly faithful, for the lives of those ignorant of Christ, these are the prompting of the Spirit, and I hope they goad us all to ask, what is to be done? More importantly, what can we do?
Be faithful in this moment. Answer the call as best you can, and don’t limit your response according to what we believe is reasonable. John didn’t do that. There was nothing reasonable or expected in his desert wanderings, his ministry of baptism by the Jordan, his preaching to the people, his confrontation with the powerful; but it was necessary to God’s plan, indispensable to his providential care for us. So, when we consider in this Advent how we must prepare, it’s going to be something more than Christmas lights, and putting up the tree, it’s about readying ourselves to answer God’s call to action, whatever that may be, and answering in a manner that may disappoint the world, may seem inconsequential to the movement of history, but our answer will be what moves the world, opens a way for the lost to find their way home, makes a way for our God and our salvation.
Amen.