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Advent | Day 4
Daily Reading: Matthew 24:40-44
When I was a boy, I loved to play baseball — and I was pretty good at it, too. Tall for my age and lean, the coaches decided one day at midseason to move me from the outfield, where I tended to drift in and out of conscious awareness of the game I was playing in, to first base in the infield where a long span from toe to the tip of my glove would ensure an advantage for the force out.
I had to re-learn how to play defense in that transition from the outfield to the infield: where outfielders are expected to have the hand-eye coordination to know where a fly ball would land, the infielder is expected to anticipate fielding a hit before the bat is even swung. Where outfielders are expected to have a strong arm with generally good aim to get a base hit back to the infield before a runner can get into scoring position, the infielder is expected to be able to respond quickly and pivot, turning a throw with pinpoint accuracy to the appropriate base. Even our posture was different: where the outfielder stood erect and ready to run fast, the infielder stood on his haunches, bouncing on the balls of his feet with his weight slightly forward.
As we press into the season of Advent, it’s good to ask ourselves what Jesus means by keeping watch. Is he talking about having the most accurate theological position on the immanence of his return, or is he referring to the daily posture of his disciples? Striking a balance in the relationship between orthodoxy (believing well) and orthopraxis (living well) is vital to living into our role as the Body of Christ in the world. For some, orthodoxy is king, and this season is about polishing and affirming our belief system. For others, orthopraxis is king, and this season is about appreciating the moral of the Jesus story and seeking to live in response to that. Perhaps this season can be a meeting of those two planes as we seek to make Jesus king, and choose his kingdom as a spiritual reality that frames for us a fundamentally different way of being consumers, of being in community, of being human.
“Because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”
No one calls on your name
or strives to lay hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us
and made us waste away because of our sins.
- Isaiah 64:7-8Yet, O LORD, you are our Father.
We are the clay, you are the potter;
we are all the work of your hand.
“It always looks darkest just before it gets totally black.”
- Charlie Brown
Today’s Reading: Isaiah 64:1-9
Prophetic Repentance, or Good Grief
I’ve been through enough pastoral counseling scenarios to confirm the truthiness of that pop psychology axiom, “there are two kinds of pain: the pain we learn from, and the pain we fail to learn from.” When I was a youth pastor, I was fond of paraphrasing it this way: in this life you will experience pain, and there’s no getting around it. What you must choose is whether that pain will be stupid and pointless, or whether you will learn from it, redeem it, and make it beautiful.
Spirituality is related to physicality like bone is related to muscle. Our interior life is a dynamic skeletal foundation that supports and gives animation to our external reality. So the analogy of a bone fracture serves this discussion fairly well — the pain of a break has the potential to be either redemptive or stupid, depending on whether you allow the bone to be reset and heal up. What’s interesting about fractures is that we instinctively hold the extremity close to our bodies, and the last thing we want to do is feel the momentary pain of setting the bone, even though the alternative would bring greater unhealth in the long-run.
Given the conscious choice between stupid pain and redemptive pain, Israel is opting for the latter. In effect, Isaiah is saying, “look, we realize that Yahweh is an awesome and wrathful God, but he’s our awesome and wrathful God.” We’d rather go against our instincts and opt for pain now, health later.
This stands in contrast to the overarching narrative of our industrial age, which preaches a gospel intolerant of any kind of pain. We run frantically through life like Alice chasing the White Rabbit through Wonderland, treating symptom after symptom following the unending barrage of dosage instructions:
“Eat this.”
“Drink this.”
“Watch this.”
“Read this.”
“Buy this.”
And, like Alice, we find the situation gradually becoming more surreal and untreatable. This is what life looks like in spiritual exile — holding against our bodies these fractured hopes and dreams of spiritual vitality, we do life under the tyrannical rule of self, which is in reality the lawlessness of being ruled by nothing, thus being ruled by whatever is being marketed to us.
Would we choose this Advent season to be aligned with One greater than Self, which is the only path to the revelation of our true Selves, as “clay… the work of [Yahweh's] hand.”
Why do you let us wander, O LORD, from your ways,
and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?
Today’s reading: Isaiah 63:16-19
Prophetic Hope and the Seedbed of Being
The God of Israel is enigmatic, as far as deities are concerned. Why does our creator hide from us? Why does this all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving God stand so often on the foul line of human history, allowing us to write our songs of lament, or worse, allow the sensuality of our pursuit to fade into the fog of history or be bled out by the crushing pressure of institutional religiosity?
The prophet asks the question, and Christians can rather neatly and effortlessly shout the answer back like a crowd of unruly teenagers hopped up on Mountain Dew waiting for the opening act at a Billy Graham Crusade:
“I-love-jesus-yes-i-do! I-love-jesus-HOW-BOUT-YEEEWWW?!?!”
But wait a minute. Advent gives us this unique opportunity to remove the tight-fitting dogmas from our heads in exchange for the cold, crisp open air of risk-taking faith in practice. This is the raw and irreligious faith of someone with the cojones to ask God where he’s been (and when’s the last time you’ve heard that worship chorus at church?). It’s the beautiful and tragicomic journey of an entire people who experience setbacks as well as victories, confusion alongside revelation.
Today, the Advent meditation isn’t so much whether we trust in the appearance of the LORD, but how. Our sense of being is wrapped up in faith like a plant is wrapped up in the sleeve of a seed, as yet unrealized. For a planting, we choose daily between the plastic platitudes of smug religious certainty that lives in a perpetual state of self-preservation, versus the rich earthy seedbed of existential experimentation into a radical new way of being human, which is characterized by risk, sacrifice and (above all) love.
If it’s any consolation, seeds tend to grow better in fertilizer than in plastic.
The holidays, for many of us, feels like that circus act in which a trapeze artist walks across the big tent on a tightrope. Balance is the name of the game.
How do we enjoy a great meal when we have to sit so close to the people who know best how to push our buttons?
How do we balance the horrors of AmerIndian history with the abundance and blessing of living in the most prosperous nation on the little blue planet?
How do we balance the heartfelt desire to provide gifts to our loved ones with a teetering financial crisis?
Yes, the holidays are a tightrope act. Part of the draw is waiting to see who will make it across to the other side with poise and grace.
Grace. It’s a term tossed around so liberally, I fear it’s lost a bit of its’ newness and shine. It’s an idea that desperately needs a volumizing conditioner — something to remind us of its’ mystery and beauty, something that will get it to bounce off our shoulders and turn some heads. Grace is classically defined as unearned favor. I’m beginning to realize that this, or any attempt at definition is far from adequate. And that’s because grace isn’t really grace until the hot glow of her presence has fallen on your own sorry disposition. Grace is merely a theological construct to well-fed, First-World consumers who don’t give a second thought to the fact that, this Thursday, they’ll literally eat like kings while others in this same world literally starve. Grace is a cheap vocabulary word to Americans who simply assume that they live in the greatest nation on earth and take as a matter of fact that God-shed-his-grace-on-thee without diving even momentarily into the complexity of our blessing and how it came about (largely through plague, genocide, slavery and unjust labor practices).
Being godawful and pathetic, selfish human beings doesn’t disqualify us from blessing. It makes us good candidates for grace – the kind of grace that Jesus was referring to when he said that we’re blessed when we’re hungry and thirsty for righteousness, because we will be filled.
Then there’s what happens when we become recipients of that grace: when we choose to stand in the shoes of “the last, the lost and the least” among us, and recognize that we ourselves are not exceptional specimens of humanity but rather lucky and mostly dishonest, we can appreciate with true humility and appreciation what grace has been afforded to us, and be a little more willing to extend that favor to people with whom we might otherwise feel don’t deserve it.
So the bad news is, you’re a member of the human family. The good news is, you’re a member of the human family. Have a Grace-filled Thanksgiving… remember to love the least like you’re one of them.
Because you are. And Father loves you extravagantly.
