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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.
Julie Clawson, uberblogger and Fe-mergent author wrote in a post entitled America, Race and the Church perfectly my own sentiments, albeit with greater skill and dexterity. Please, if you haven’t read this yet, take the time to do so. Barack Obama’s relationship with UCC and the broad response of American evangelicalism provides a litmus test for allegiance.
