Second Sunday of Advent: Embracing Sabbath and the "Way" of Jesus

Over the last three or four weeks I have been working on or giving presentations for a Women In Faith group in my parish. It dealt with our foundational vocation to become authentically human and the ability to be free and rest that our embrace of such a vocation results in.  I have the concluding half of all of this to do on Tuesday and so, it has been on my mind. Specifically, I will do a presentation on Sabbath as the "great equalizer", the day (period) when, in  God, we embrace the identity God gives and calls us to and allow ourselves to truly rest from all those "'essential' roles and burdens" the world defines us in terms of. On Sabbath we let go of competitiveness, workaholism, consumerism, and so many other ways in which we are set against our true selves and one another and we simply rest in who we are in God. The title for the second part of the presentations will be "Be still and know that I am God" from psalm 46:10. The title for the first half of the presentations reverses this to, "Know that I am God and be still". The two are inextricable from one another and together they present a symbol of the freedom of authentic humanity.

Additionally, last Sunday as part of the first Sunday of Advent I prayed with the ecclesial community of a couple of friends of mine who celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary during the week and who renewed their vows last Sunday. As part of the celebration they asked me if I wanted to renew my own vows and I did. As part of  doing that I had to compose a renewal formula which led me to thinking once again about  the term "stricter separation from the world" and how I would say that for a community who would be likely to misunderstand the canonical phrase in terms of a rejection of God's good creation. I borrowed the  overall structure of the formula from that of the Sisters of the Holy Family, and for the c 603 elements of my commitment, including "stricter separation from the world," I promised to: "devote myself to the service of God and all God holds precious in stricter separation from anything resistant or antithetical to God's love, in the silence of solitude, and in assiduous prayer and penance."

In both of these activities what canon 603 calls "stricter separation from the world" played an important role. Sabbath itself is a way of  standing aside from "the world" which often holds us bound by its values and perspectives, its way of viewing God, ourselves, and others, while making commodities of them (cf., Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance); it is a way of resting in God and both being and becoming the ones we are called to be in God. It is a symbol of freedom and is given to us as gift and responsibility in the Decalogue, the charter of freedom and covenant in the OT. but this freedom plays off against the bondage of something canon 603 calls "the world" --- again, that which is resistant or antithetical to God's love.

Pharaoh's Egypt was, for Israel, the very epitome of "the world" canon 603 calls me to separate myself from more strictly. The Jewish people were made to toil endlessly without even time to pray or worship. When they sought the time and space to worship their God, they were punished and the toil they were made subject to became even more demanding, even less fulfillable, and even more dehumanizing. Hours were long, food and time for rest short. Relationships deteriorated as did the Jews' own sense of their own dignity. Their behavior likewise deteriorated then and they fell into the kinds of things we expect among the dehumanized and starving: unhealthy competitiveness, theft, covetousness, dishonesty, murder, the failure to honor one's inheritance as one born with infinite dignity or to honor others in the same way, etc. In short, this bondage and dehumanization marked by endless toil and insufficiency was incapable of putting God first, resting in God's love, and loving oneself and others in God as a natural consequence. Israel became bond to an ethic of idolatry (for this was the Pharaoh's system and Pharaoh was a divine figure) and dehumanization --- an ethic resistant and even antithetical to God's love. (These two elements, idolatry and dehumanization, always go together.)

What I recognized is that quite often today we buy into the same bondage and the same forms of dehumanization. We buy into "the world" and in fact, we build that same "world"  and our own self-definition upon it. We do this in the form of a system that makes commodities of us all--- objects which can be bought and sold, used and disposed of as easily as one would do to a shirt or pair of pants. We become workaholics whose value is tied up with what we do rather than who we are, or shopaholics who fail to be in touch with the really new (kainetes) God is doing in our lives every day and substitute the merely new in time (neos) --- something which has to be replaced almost as soon as we have purchased it, or we become those who treat others in the same way through competitiveness, elitism, classism, an unhealthy capitalism, etc etc. What we are called to instead is the way of Jesus, the way of the Kingdom of God, the way which honors and delights in God's good creation but is also the world of Sabbath and the Ten Commandments, the world of the Great Commandment -- that is, the world of the love of God and all that God holds precious.

When I renewed my vows to live as a diocesan hermit under canon 603 last weekend, it was the all-too-common  but destructive meaning of "the world" I rejected and the "way of Jesus" I embraced again more intensely. As we enter more fully into Advent what I want to suggest is that this is the same commitment the Church and God are asking of each us --- not as hermits perhaps, but as those who recognize the Kingdom of God in our midst at the same time. I would encourage you to look carefully just as I am doing, at the way the canon 603 sense of "the world" plays a defining role in your own life, and that you build in real Sabbath rest where you allow yourself to rest in God and be just who he had made and calls you to be.  

Separate yourself more strictly from that false and idolatrous world. Let go of the consumerism, competition, division, striving to achieve (including religious striving(!),  and all of the other "-isms" that so represent the idols of our day, and try to do this in a focused or dedicated way for at least one entire day each week. After all, this is what the fourth commandment requires of us. Reject Pharaoh's ethic of ceaseless toil and embrace Jesus' ethic of God's gratuitous (and ultimately unearnable) love. Embrace "the great equalizer" of Sabbath which allows everyone and everything to rest and be the ones God calls them to be, the world of  genuine respect for all of creation, and of loving collaboration and unity in the Love of God.  I believe it will change the season for you and help it be what it is meant to be, but also, over time, it can change family life, life in our faith communities, and even the larger world in which we live.

Sunday #2: Preparing the Way of the Lord, A bit of Advent Reading and Writing

R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths: All flesh shall see the salvation of God.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.

 

We all choose what is important for celebrating Advent well,--- what is necessary to prepare the way of the Lord, to make straight his paths, to ready ourselves to see (i.e., to receive, understand, and to be transformed and transfigured by) the salvation of our God in Christ. This year I am going back to focus once again on the Lord's Prayer as one key to this preparation. I am spending my mornings doing lectio, study, and writing on this prayer. It has always been an incredible source of life, insight, and strength for me; two of my favorite authors, Tom Wright and Gerhard Ebeling write especially about the prayer in terms of Advent and waiting on the Lord.

 

One of Ebeling's most striking observations in his work, On Prayer, The Lord's Prayer in Today's World is an insight that transformed my own theology and understanding of prayer when I first read the book as an undergraduate @ 1973. Ebeling was writing about the petition, "Hallowed be Thy name," and said: [[. . .we ought not to tone down its amazing, and indeed offensive, aspect or reduce it to a mere act of reverent adoration before the glory of God. For this is the most necessary petition. In other words it is concerned with the greatest need, God's need. . . .we must pray to God on behalf of God: that he would take up his own cause, that he would assert himself as God, that he would come, that he would appear, that he would reveal himself, that he would arise as God, that he would in very truth become God. This is the deepest source of prayer: God himself compels us to this intercession for God, to this passionate longing, that God will become God.]] In this passage I think Ebeling captures two senses of the meaning of waiting on God: 1) looking forward to God's coming and to the fulfillment of God's purposes with anticipation, and 2) serving God and allowing our lives to be defined by this service.

 

I am reading two other books for Advent. The first is a new book by John Haught, The New Cosmic Story, Inside Our Awakening Universe. As we hear in some of the readings of Advent, we look forward to a new Heaven and a new Earth, not merely to going to an otherworldly Heaven. Theologically this means that we must look at ourselves, our religion, and our world very differently than we have in the past. It is the Christ event, the exhaustive Incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth, that is the key to understanding what this means, namely, that we human beings are embodied Spirit and that our ultimate hope is that the entire cosmos will be fulfilled in Christ. Human beings are not meant or made to be disembodied Spirit. Our souls yearn to be embodied and our ultimate form of existence will be embodied. As Ratzinger once explained in his book, Eschatology, as our souls are the form of our bodies, so do they "build a body about (around) themselves," and, after death, yearn for what our creeds affirm as the resurrection of the body. Meanwhile, science has "given us" a universe which is unfinished; our faith tells us that in Christ human beings play a part in helping creation be brought to fulfillment as a "new creation", "a new heaven and earth" --- just as we have a part in God becoming God!

 

The second book is Pagola's,  Jesus, A Historical Approximation. I first read this five or six years ago and return to it from time to time, rereading a section or two, and sometimes more. It is a beautiful book in every sense; it introduces us to the historical Jesus and his world without being either heavily academic or skeptical. It reads like the book of someone in love with Jesus even as it is informed by contemporary scholarship; certainly it can help with the preparation of one's mind and heart for the coming of Jesus. Especially, as I pray and work with Jesus' prayer, it is a book that can remind me of who Jesus was/is and how he related to his Abba --- it is a work that helps me see what the fulfillment of embodied Spirit (or embodied Word) is and does --- and thus, by participation in Christ, to the incarnation I am called to realize during Advent and beyond.

 

Meanwhile, Advent and Christmas are seasons when I sometimes do more outside the hermitage --- specifically, every couple of years or so I go to the movies two or even three times if there are good things showing or to a concert or ballet. (Sometimes I will go alone, but more often it is something I do with friends as a holiday celebration.) A week ago Friday my delegate and I met for about an hour and a half, had a light lunch, and then we went and saw the movie Wonder. We stopped for hamburgers (well, fillet o' fish) on the way home --- all (except for meeting together) things we do very rarely; it was an excellent day! I will try to write more about the movie separately, I think, but let me say here it was wonderful: inspiring, moving, and incredibly appropriate for the beginning of Advent (the scandal of the Incarnation and Isaiah's, "A little child shall lead them," comes to mind here!). My delegate's characterization was exactly right, I thought; she commented that what she most appreciated, "was everyone had their journey to make because of the presence and impact of this unique child!!!" And so, this wonderful story helped set the tone and prepare our hearts to meet Christ anew as we entered the season of Advent.