Advent couldn't be more out of step with the doings of the dominant culture. Against the inflation and distortion of the commercial powers hyping their seasonal wares, it sets a spirit of barebones simplicity: John the Baptist, in domicile, diet, dress, putting an axe to their bloody roots.
Against the manufactured and well-targeted desire for things, Advent invokes that single-minded hunger--a yearning truly for God alone. Against the awful clamor and din that silences all contenders, this season sets that Word irrepressible. Against the grandiose and pretentious pose that goes with empire, it posits the hidden and unexpected. Over against despair that has become the emblem of political rule in our day, it utters a hope that thereby becomes freedom. Against dissipation and distraction, by which we are also controlled, Advent commends spiritual alertness. As the readings from Isaiah will suggest, Advent reminds us that we are exiles and resident aliens in a strange, strange land.
For all that, it is a season to make the heart sit up and take notice. In fact and practice, Advent exemplifies the characteristic attitude of believers approaching scripture itself: an urgent expectancy, a patient watching, and attentive listening for the coming of the Word.
Bill Wylie-Kellermann, a Sojourners contributing editor, was a United Methodist pastor and the author of Seasons of Faith and Conscience (Orbis, 1991) when this article appeared.
November 28: Pray for Disruption
Isaiah 63:16-64:8, 1 Corinthians 1:3-9, Mark 13:32-37, Psalm 80:1-7
To begin, in Advent we pray for the end.
Isaiah's prayer has the smell of exile all over it: a sanctuary ruined, a dream too long deferred, and a people trying to remember who in hell they are. Is God absent or are they absent-minded? Who has abandoned whom? Overwhelmed by the culture, they confess becoming like those whom God has never ruled (63:19).
The confession is, however (as all confessions are), virtually an act of faith. It is a wake-up call. Against amnesia, they recollect themselves as children belonging to God. So the prayer ends and begins (63:16, 64:8). Hope awakens in memory and its choices.
Such prayer is the prophet's work, or at least half of it. Bonhoeffer writes that to intercede is to feel another's need so deeply that you simply pray their prayer. The need of the people is in the prophet's heart and bones; Isaiah prays in the first person plural.
At the center of the prayer (64:1-4) is a plea for a tearing of the heavens, a break in history, an intervention that shakes the foundations of the world: a prayer for the big disruption. Business as usual has become intolerable. In prayer the fault line is imagined and foreseen. Such is an act of hope.
In the apocalyptic parable from Mark 13, God is similarly experienced as absent. Memory and fidelity are marked here by being awake and awatch. And the coming at time unknown is also connected to the collapse of a social world: "not one stone left upon another" (13:2). Even Paul's prayer, in its thanksgiving for the Corinthian congregation, invokes the end (1:8), the very coming of the One who is the end and the beginning.
December 5: Making a Way Out of No Way
Isaiah 40:1-11, 2 Peter 3:8-15a, Mark 1:1-8, Psalm 85:8-13
With the word "Comfort," the book of Isaiah begins a distinct collection of writings (chapters 40-55) commonly called Second Isaiah, which stems from the period in which Cyrus the Persian was piling up victories against Babylon. History was shifting; the empire trembled. Might it indeed collapse? Could the mighty arm of God be moving?
The poet in Babylon is discerning and alert. Isaiah is repatriated in the spirit, transported to Jerusalem with a living word of comfort and with hot news. To speak in the voice of God, after all, is the work of the prophet, or at least half of it.
The Hebrew behind "good tidings" (40:9) and the Greek behind "gospel" or "good news" (Mark 1:1) mean essentially the same thing. The Word travels and with effect, yet it feels as though Isaiah speaks tenderly to Jerusalem, for the sake of those still captive in Babylon. Remember home. Imagine the good news there.
Hence this famous "way" that seems to be something of a two-way street. On it God comes, a sovereign processing royally into the captured city. But it is for the exiles also a way out, the way home, the route of a new exodus straight through the wilderness, every obstacle overcome.
Now the first obstacle is neither distance nor rough place, it is the captive mind and heart that cannot imagine the way. Look! the prophet shouts: A highway! If you can't see it, you can't walk it.
There are elements of a prophetic call in this passage, so it's no wonder that John the Baptist should find a "vocation" here, living into it as his signature text. John, however, faces a similar problem in an opposite form: The people are home in Judea and Jerusalem, but they think like captive exiles. Could Jerusalem become Babylon?
John thinks like Second Isaiah. He shouts. Imagine a way and come out. In Mark we shall see "way" become a synonym for discipleship, a metaphor for the movement. John's marginal life and renegade ritual provoke the imagination: They summon and prepare that movement for the One who comes.
December 12: A Troublesome Joy
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11, 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24, John 1:6-8, 19-28, Canticle: Luke 1:46b-55
In liturgical tradition, this is a Sunday associated with joy. However, we are not talking about the ersatz variety hawked by our own culture like a marketing device attached ephemerally to things. That joy, so called, proves itself empty and without substance, a commercial fiction. If these readings are any clue, however, Advent joy has content about which we may be scandalously concrete.
The Canticle from Luke, a psalm not of David but of Mary (and which never comes up as a Sunday gospel lection in the three-year cycle!), is the most revolutionary anthem in the Bible. Here is joy, in expectation of Jesus' birth, whose substance is a world turned upside-down. No mincing words: It sings a complete transformation of political and economic order.
The "good news" of the Isaiah reading is a joy from beginning to end. It is like the very oil of gladness that blesses those who mourn in lonely exile here (61:3). Or like the smiles of prisoners who circle their outdate and see it now closely come. It is a joy outrageously specific in content.
For the exiles this litany of liberation is about homecoming. Hence, for example, the repair and rebuilding of ruined cities (61:4). It is the joy so concrete you purchase a hammer and a saw. Imagine this good news in Gaza or Sarajevo, south central Los Angeles or southwest Detroit.
It might be recalled that when Jesus preached on this text to inaugurate his ministry (Luke 4:16ff), he was driven not only out of the pulpit, but out of town. The plan was to stone him. We ought thereby to be mindful that not everyone shares this joy. The captors and binders and debtholders, the rich and the ruiners of cities, the mighty on thrones and the proud in the imagination of their hearts--in short, all those invested in the present order--find this joy to be a trouble.
Just so, the priests and Levites are sent out by the Jerusalem authorities to scrutinize and size up John (1:19). His vocational reply must surely mystify them, like a claim to be the voice of prophesy itself. And his troubling conviction, that the one who comes stands already in their midst, must drive them up a wall. Yet for us it remains a present and abiding joy.
December 19: A Ready Faith
2 Samuel 7:8-16, Romans 16:25-27, Luke 1:26-38, Psalm 89:1-4, 19-24
There is wonderful irony in the Davidic covenant of 2 Samuel 7. The king, having built himself a sumptuous palace, has decided that God ought to have a "house" as well. The prophet Nathan concurs, but then can't sleep well. His fitful night yields God's all but sarcastic reply: Do I need a house? Haven't I lived without one since I brought you out of Egypt? I am the God who walks in tents. And not only that, but I will make David (that peasant shepherd boy) a house that will last forever. Now this, of course, is not house as in self-constructed palace of cedar, but house as in "the house and lineage of David," a human chain of generations through which God's faithfulness is enacted.
On the promise of a prophet's midnight dream the faith of a nation has hinged. In this text are rooted generations of theological and political reflection. In times of exile or occupation, when the line appears broken or forced underground, such reflection tends toward the subversive.
As such a time it was, the conversation between the angel and the peasant woman in Luke is politically loaded. To speak of the Davidic line is to incite sedition. But then Mary is the sort who can as easily sing the Magnificat as say hello.
Given the weight of social realities, exalting those of low degree or raising up a peasant child to the throne of David might seem as impossible as a virgin bearing child. Given the risks and the costs, we could be understanding if she thought better and declined. Mary, nevertheless, believes that God is able and her readiness to join the chain bodily and become the house is the epitome of Advent faith.
December 26: Public Facts and Freedom
Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Galatians 4:4-7, Luke 2:22-40, Psalm 111
This is a day for praise, though if Isaiah has his way that joyous sound will be openly linked with justice. Righteousness and praise (61:11)--too seldom wed in our theological factionalisms--are declared to be shoots from a single root. They spring forth before the nations.
This text echoes and overlaps the lection of the third Sunday of Advent, as if we ought to say it again in a new light. The anticipated joy of homecoming now turns into a full-tilt party. And a public one at that, in the face of kings. The prophet proclaims a festival of God's sovereignty in history.
In Luke, Mary--along with her husband Joseph--takes the child up to Jerusalem. The babe becomes a public fact. Under the law, she dedicates him by a sacrifice--the two turtledoves--which is the special provision for those who are poor (Leviticus 12:8). And Jesus is there confirmed in praise by the prophet Anna. She is a widow, the first of many in Luke/Acts (4:25; 7:12; 18:3; 20:47; 21:2; 6:1; 9:39) who exemplify the vulnerability of poverty hand in hand with the intransigence of faith.
She and Simeon are the first ones to affirm publicly the incarnation as a mighty act of God, done in the sight of all the nations, but as yet recognized only with the eyes of faith. It seems unlikely they were waiting and watching for a baby, probably something much greater that would in truth be much less. And yet they have both the gift and the freedom to discern in this child that everything has changed.
For Simeon the public fact gives personal assurance. In praise he declares his freedom now to die. I hear his canticle in evening prayer or as sung by the monastics in Gregorian chant at compline just before bed. It is a faith in which one may both risk and rest. That personal assurance is what John Wesley so earnestly desired and what he named as the very distinction between the faith of the servant and the faith of the son or daughter (Galatians 4:7): an inheritance of true freedom.
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