First Sunday in Advent December 2, 1979
Jeremiah 33:14-16; Thessalonians 3:12-4:2; Luke 21:25-28, 34-36.
Our age has come to expect satisfaction. We have grown up in an absolutely unique period when having and possessing and accomplishing have been real options. They have given us an illusion of fulfillment and an even more dangerous illusion that we have a right to expect fulfillment -- and fulfillment now -- as long as we are clever enough, quick enough, and pray or work hard enough for our goals.
We believe that we are energized by the bird in the hand; but believe it or not, the word of God and the history of those who have struggled with that word would seem to tell us that we are, in fact, energized much more by the bird in the bush. God's people are led forward by promises. It is promises, with all their daring and risk, that empower the hearts of people.
God's people are called through the enticement of the call itself, much more than through the direct vision of God's face, the certitude of God's answers, or the unfailing presence of God's joy. The Lord is "Our Justice" not by fulfilling us, but by calling us from where we are. God restores us not by making it happen, but by promising that it will. God tells us who we are by telling us who we are to become. Somehow that is enough. It works! At least it works for those who can learn how to believe: "Blessed is she who believed that the promises made to her would be fulfilled."
All wishful thinking to the contrary, it is not fulfillment which drives and calls and enriches humankind, but we are undoubtedly called forth by the mystery of what-could-yet-be. It is dreams that drive us and hopes that make us happen. And so God has given himself to us in a way that we could receive him and also benefit from him, even though we fail to see it as a gift or to praise him for the giving.
After all, they are just promises. And we believe only in the deed -- now -- in front of us. "Promises, promises!" has become a cynical and very understandable retort from a people who have grown tired of marketing, lies, and mere politics.
But God seems to have been around for a long time and does not take the momentary deed so seriously. God does not bother calling it the fulfillment of the promise. The Lord is apparently the Lord of the long haul. He has been making promises to David and Jeremiah, and promises to disciples for 2,000 years. To be absolutely honest I am not sure, from my very limited vantage point, that God has kept some of them to this day: Is David or even David's line "a just shoot"? Is Judah "safe"? Has Jerusalem ever really "dwelt secure"? Why did Jesus key up his contemporaries for some eschatological battles that we are still trying to get keyed up for?
The question is, precisely how does the Lord restore his people? How is "the Lord our Justice"? How does he make us, after initial creation, into ourselves?
I think we become like God by feeling with God; we become whole by becoming God's. I suspect that God knows the product pretty well. God knew that we would get sloppy through satiation. God knew that the numb would never notice and that the fulfilled would not feel. So our God has "tormented us with dissatisfaction" and only thrown us a few promises. But they are enough to live on, and their deeds are the deeds of the saints.
Second Sunday in Advent December 9, 1979
Baruch 5:1-9; Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11; Luke 3:1-6
How odd it is that God's salvation is so seldom recognized. How strange that what God is offering is so rarely experienced. We have presented salvation so poorly that much of the world does not even take it seriously. Oh yes, we want help, we want solace, we want magic, but I am not sure that we recognize or even want the scary freedom that God calls salvation.
It is first of all a problem of seeing. We need to be taught how to see. Just as an artist must learn again what she is seeing in terms of edges, focus, perspective, colors and shadings, parts and whole, so the believer must go back to the beginning and start seeing anew. In order to see clearly the believer must learn how to "re-member": He or she must bring the pieces back together again.
Memory is very often the key to understanding. Memory integrates, reconciles, and puts the individual members into perspective as a part of the whole. It seems that God has drawn out love for us in a medium that we call time. For us to recognize what God is doing and therefore who God is, we must pray like Paul "that your love may more and more abound, both in understanding and wealth of experience." Love, in terms of good will, is not enough. For love to happen effectively it must be ordered and timed and cut to fit the receiver. I think this is how God loves us! But we will never know it unless we re-member.
Our remembrance that God has remembered us will be the highway into the future, the straight path of the Lord promised by John the Baptizer. Where there is no memory, there will be no pain, but neither will there be hope. Memory is the basis of both the pain and the rejoicing. We need to re-member both of them; it seems that we cannot have one without the other. Do not be too quick to "heal all of those memories," unless that means also feeling them deeply and taking them all into your salvation history. He seems to be calling us to suffer the whole of reality, to remember the good along with the bad. Perhaps that is the course of the journey toward new sight and new hope. Memory creates a readiness for salvation, an emptiness to receive love, and a fullness to enjoy it.
Strangely enough, it seems to be so much easier to remember the hurts, the failures, and the rejections. One almost wonders if we like the pain. We have grown comfortable with evil and have made friends with sin. And until we have learned how to see, it comes to us easily and holds us in its grasp. In a seeming love of freedom God has allowed us to be very vulnerable to evil.
Only in an experience and a remembering of the good do we have the power to stand against this death. As Baruch tells Jerusalem, you must "rejoice that you are remembered by God." In that remembrance we have new sight, and the evil can be absorbed and blotted out.
It takes a prophet of sorts, one who sees clearly, one who has traveled the highway before, one who remembers everything, to guide us beyond our blind, selective, and partial remembering: "Jerusalem, take off your robe of mourning and misery; put on the splendor of glory from God forever." Choose your friends carefully and listen to those who speak truth to you and help you remember all things, "so that you may value the things that really matter, up to the very day of Christ."
Ask the Lord for companions (sometimes Jesus alone!) who will walk the highway of remembering with you, filling in the valleys and leveling the mountains and hills, making the winding ways straight and the rough ways smooth. Then humankind shall see the salvation of God.
The repentance that the Baptist calls us to is one of remembering, and of remembering together, and then bearing the consequences of that remembrance. It is no easy matter, for the burden of re-membering is great. But we must try for the sake of truth, and we can try within the protective walls of church.
So "Up Jerusalem! stand upon the heights; look to the east and see" your whole life. See what God has given freely. Your hope lies hidden in the past. "And rejoice that you are remembered by God."
Father Richard Rohr, O.F.M., a contributing editor for Sojourners, was pastor of the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati, Ohio when this article appeared.
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