Ps 72:1-7,18-19 Isa 11:1-10 Mt 3:1-12 Rom 15:4-13
pastor Arta Skuja
There is no need to hurry. All of creation teaches us this, yet the space and time that surround us want us to do the opposite – toward the end of the year we ramp up the pace so much that we march into a new beginning exhausted and despairing, unready for the renewal God desires. The earth cools and tries to grow still, only under the influence of ecological change this happens a little more slowly and reluctantly each year. In darkness and silence the earth nurtures the seed, and the felled tree still lives. Perhaps this seed, this beginning, looks weary and lifeless, but in due time it will be reborn. Something dies in the darkness, and something will rise to new life.
Advent is a time when we learn to wait, to meet our deepest longings and at the same time to stand with both feet on the ground of the present and the everyday. The Benedictine writer Joan Chittister says that this month of waiting, between two “ordinary” stretches of the Church year’s seasons, should be allowed to blossom into various depths of meaning that revive, challenge, renew, and sustain us on the journey ahead.
The first meaning, of course, is the awaiting and celebration of Jesus’ birth – God enters and dwells in the world with us. But once Jesus’ birthday has been celebrated, what then? If everything personally and familially warm, shaped by our skilled thoughts and hands for the Advent season, is taken away – what remains of our faith, so that it can grow and be perfected together with the God who became human?
Another coming reveals itself in Christ’s presence among us already now, and this is the soul’s call to recognize anew, to feel out, and to respond to this presence – it is not abstract. God reveals himself among us both in easily discernible and in unimaginable ways.
Advent reminds us anew of Christ’s coming again – the full revelation of God’s glory, the fulfillment of the Kingdom. Hidden here are the deepest hopes and longings of all souls, yet rarely do we dare to live, hope, and truly believe in this dimension. Isaiah’s prophecy in today’s text about a flourishing shoot from the stump of Jesse speaks precisely of such a revelation of the fullness of God’s glory – in time and beyond time. Now and not yet now.
We long and pray for peace in the world and can hope to experience the days when the cow will graze together with the bear, the wolf will dwell with the lamb, the panther and the kid, the lion cub and the ox – all these incompatible and mutually hostile pairs of beasts will rest peacefully side by side. None will do harm. But not yet – not here, not now. Here we can glimpse something of the kind in healing and comforting visions and dreams, if God grants someone such a gift. Yes, and in the prophetic texts that conjure before our eyes scenes that seem as surreal as fairy tales, challenging the breadth of our faith’s vision.
Reading the prophetic texts, the Advent season reveals itself as a test precisely of our hope – am I able to believe that such fullness, calm, and peace are possible? Does its absence draw me into deeper longing for the fulfillment of time and the revelation of God’s glory beyond time, and lead me to dwell in God himself in this present time, and thereby to a deeper dwelling with my neighbor? Or do I rather lose hope for anything, because everything real and tangible is so muddy, trampled, dirty, and dark?
Reflecting on hope – God in his grace loves us and grants us eternal comfort and trustworthy hope (2 Thess) – the poet and theologian Olga Sedakova says that what frightens her most is faith without hope, because then faith no longer has tenderness, sensitivity, mercy. Watching the events thickening in politics, it can seem that the whole world has set itself against hope. And if one believes this, if one accepts it as truth, then cynicism gradually takes over everything.
Hope is the guardian of meaning, and even if (and, of course, it is so!) the full understanding of meaning is inaccessible to us, then in spite of everything we must somehow – groping and struggling – nevertheless continue to respond to hope, not to fail it. How else can one survive? If we say that there is no meaning at all – no meaning to anything and for nothing – then we betray hope, and in betraying hope, we betray these three: faith, hope, and love. And can we then still call ourselves human beings, created in the likeness of God, who believe not only in the meaning of the little child Jesus’ birthday celebration, but also in the overturning of all the customary and accepted order, in the capacity of God’s glory and love to spread and transform everything?
Isaiah shows that the passage from the perspective of fear, insecurity, and cynicism to a world at peace begins with the seemingly hopeless – with the remains of a felled tree, from which the last drops of life’s sap trickle out, from the dimming and the abandonment. From nothing.
From the stump, on which a small, unpromising shoot begins to push forth, we come to the river. There today John the Baptist calls and says: “Come, wash and be immersed in the Jordan River!” Perhaps the sin to be bleached and repented of in the current is the smothering and loss of hope?
All will not be well. No – all cannot be well, as we tell people in our confusion when we do not really know what to say in cases of great upheaval and loss. That is an illusion. There will be no such Christmas miracle wrapped up as a gift under the tree, that everything will be mended, replaced, set right, and that great wings of peace will descend upon the world to sweep away all that is dark and evil. But, paradoxically, all will nevertheless be well – recalling Julian of Norwich – because our hope is Christ: yesterday, today, and forever. In the manger of Bethlehem, in God’s presence and works among us in all that is beautiful and pure that we are able to discern, reflect, give, forgive, mend, and turn to good, and in the Eternal – which will one day be revealed to our eyes in all its fullness, in all of this there is the seed of hope.
It is still dark. A little more time must pass before the sun graciously adds a few short moments of light. Now, when we are in the darkest time of the year, let us not lose hope, even if we feel withered, trampled, as if buried in the depths of the earth. Let us confess before God where we are, and let us give God what we have – our haste and our hesitation, our oversaturation, our dullness and our deep longing, our hopelessness and our hope, the part of us that wants to receive and the part that wants to give, the part that resists and the part that ardently draws near to God. Let the lamb and the wolf, both stirring within each of us, lie down in peace. Let truthfulness and honesty of heart become our return to the path of waiting – the turning of our gaze once more toward the God of hope.
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Illustration: Arta Skuja