Happy New Year!
I know. There isn’t any Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians playing “Auld Lang Syne.” There isn’t Dick Clark counting down to the ball drop at Times Square.
But it’s still the new year. Our new year. The Church’s new year. God gives the church the opportunity to be ahead of the curve. We don’t live in a dream world. We live in a reality that is, but is not yet. Rather than the world’s bombastic major key, we live our lives in a minor key because we know what life is about.
Our year begins with expectation and waiting in the midst of despair. It then moves to the incarnated presence of the one who was promised, who was born not in the pomp and grandeur of a Pollyannaish world, but in a real world where immigrants and aliens constantly cross borders and where racism, ethnicism, sexism, ageism, and all manner of other “isms,” ideologies, and idolatries are the order of the day, where oppression is the only game in town, where lies and half-truths are a way of life, where violence reigns, and where hope is bombed to smithereens.
The underdog survives in spite of the machinations of the powers that be. A calling is fulfilled, a ministry is begun and carried out. The vengeful response of those who cowered in his spiritual shadow results in his arrest and execution. Death does not triumph. Resurrection breaks out. A spirit empowers a people to persevere in readiness for the final consummation of God’s plan for creation.
That’s our year. It begins today.
We are caught in a time warp. The world is in a headlong rush for the manger: Black Friday, Small Business Saturday Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday. But the church recognizes that there has to be a time of preparation, a pregnancy so that speak. On Christmas Eve we will read the familiar words from Luke, “when Quirinius governed Syria,” and be back in the historical context of Jesus’ birth. But on this First Sunday of Advent, Jeremiah turns us forward to the future: “In those days and at that time.…”
In these days of Advent the future is not where our culture forcefully moves us. We resist a time that is nostalgic and immediate. Rather we hear the prophetic word, “In those days and at that time” God will decree justice and righteousness. Our culture encourages us to pass “Go” and to head for the finish line, sure that consumerism will deliver our fulfillment. But as a Facebook meme posted on Thanksgiving Day said, “If you are not content today, there is nothing you can buy this weekend to change that.”
The church is called to hear the prophets in this season, not for some “once upon a time” background music, but for an overture playing in real time, sounding themes to be developed going forward. “In those days” there will be “justice and righteousness,” peace and security.(1) Next week Malachi will pick up the tune of righteousness with the messenger who will be like a refiner’s fire (Malachi 3:1-4). On the third Sunday of Advent Zephaniah will declare that “the Lord is in [our] midst” (Zephaniah 3:17). Advent will end with Mary singing of God’s justice (Luke 1:50-56). The church may light its Advent candles to prepare for hope, peace, joy, and love, but the prophets resoundingly cry justice and righteousness.
In Matthew’s Gospel, “righteousness” is Jesus’ first word, spoken to John the Baptist: “Allow me to be baptized now. This is necessary to fulfill all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15). Righteousness is not an attitude or an absolute standard. It refers to conduct in accord with God’s purposes. It is doing the good thing and the God thing: right-doing as opposed to wrong-doing, and doing as opposed to being. Self-righteousness is the inflated ego of self-approval; righteousness is the humble ethic of living toward others in just and loving relationships.(2)
It’s the absence of that humble ethic that Jeremiah decries. If we stop with the last word of the prophet in the reading, “The Lord is our righteousness,” we might think that the rush to Christmas is all right. But Jeremiah is not so blasé. He continues, “The Lord proclaims, ‘I would no sooner break my covenant with day and night or the laws of heaven and earth than I would reject the descendants of Jacob and my servant David and his descendants as rulers for the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I will restore the captives and have compassion on them’” (Jeremiah 33:26).
This is not a free pass to salvation. Jeremiah’s audience is a people either facing impending exile or already suffering in it. Jeremiah offers that people a vision of a radically new way that their political and religious institutions will work in the future. A new generation of Davidic kings will act in ways that promote justice and righteousness, rather than exploitation, self-promotion, and violence. Even the Levitical priesthood will live according to the Sinai covenant, rather than continue their insistence on their own orthodoxies at the expense of inclusion, justice, and righteousness in faith and religious observance. Both king and priest someday may embody and lead the way into God’s bright new reality.
The biblical stories of Advent are not childhood favorites. There is no star in the east guiding devout magi, no choir of angels urging shepherds to go and see the babe, no harried innkeeper, no Hallmark moment of Mary pondering these things in her heart. Advent stories are dug from the harsh soil of human struggle and the littered landscape of dashed dreams. They are told from the reality that sin still reigns supreme and hope has gone on vacation. Advent is life in a minor key.
Advent is not a steady, rhythmic kind of time, a persistent drumbeat of day after day, year after year. Advent is unpredictable time, unsteady time. In this time-tumbling season, we look for a baby to be born while we know that the baby has already been born, and still is being born in us – this Emmanuel who came and is coming and is among us right now.
Advent is not well behaved, neat, decent, and orderly; it contorts time. Given the nature of Advent, it is no surprise that Jeremiah is its herald. Jeremiah speaks to hostages being seduced to start a new life in balmy Babylon. He tells a tough audience that, despite every sign to the contrary, “the time is coming,” time when God’s promises will be fulfilled. Jeremiah tells his kin that God’s future will come not by giving up on God’s promises and making the best of a bad situation – after all, “when in Babylon...” – but by trusting in the creative and redemptive and sure purposes of God: “The time is coming!”(3)
Heidi Neumark, a Lutheran pastor in the Bronx, writes:
Probably the reason I love Advent so much is that it is a reflection of how I feel most of the time. I might not feel sorry during Lent, when the liturgical calendar begs repentance. I might not feel victorious, even though it is Easter morning. I might not feel full of the Spirit, even though it is Pentecost and the liturgy spins out fiery gusts of ecstasy. But during Advent, I am always in sync with the season.The church longs for the days when there will be no immigrants, no refugees, no threat of walls or jingoistic exclusion, no internment because of fear based on perceptions of racial, ethnic, or national differences, no political rancor, no egotistical puffery, no despotism, no religious one-up-man-ship, no greed, no taught and learned hatred. The church longs for the final fulfillment of the created order that God began on those six epochal days so long ago.
Advent unfailingly embraces and comprehends my reality. And what is that? I think of the Spanish word anhelo, or longing. Advent is when the church can no longer contain its unfulfilled desire and the cry of anhelo bursts forth: Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus! O Come, O Come, Emmanuel!(4)
“The time is coming, declares the LORD, when I will fulfill my gracious promise.... In those days and at that time, I will raise up a righteous branch from David's line, who will do what is just and right in the land.... And this is what he will be called: The Lord Is Our Righteousness.”
Until then, our life is in a minor key. Thanks be to God. Come, Lord Jesus. O come, O come, Emmanuel.
(1) Deborah A. Block, “Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), Year C, vol.1, 2.
(2) Ibid., 6.
(3) Gary W. Charles, “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting, op. cit., 3-5.
(4) Heidi Neumark, Breathing Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 211.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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