Malachi 3.1-4; Luke 3.1-6
On the second Sunday of Advent, the liturgy of the Church directs our attention to the Hebrew prophets. Not to any particular prophet, but to that great era in salvation history when God’s ancient people were waiting for the promised messiah. At that time, the prophets foretold a future age when God would establish his kingdom of justice and peace upon the earth, as they also levelled sharp criticism against the injustice and idolatry of the present age.
This morning, I want to say something about the fundamental human desire to be addressed, to be spoken to from beyond ourselves, and the way in which Advent helps us to properly celebrate the surprising newness of the word that comes to us at Christmas.
The prevalence of social media usage, and the desire for ‘likes’, is just one symptom of the human longing, that we all share, to be recognized and seen by others. All of us carry in our hearts a concern that our lives should matter to someone. That who we are and what we do has been registered, and has had some impact on our immediate environment. We all desire a certain feedback
from the world, an address by which we are spoken to from beyond ourselves. We might even say that we want to be judged, whether for good or ill.
Because of the uniquely human talent for self-deception, our desire to be addressed by another can generate all sorts of idolatry. Whether it is wealth, reputation, power, health, or pleasure, we create all sorts of idols that can only repeat back to us our own fantasies of what we think we want to hear about ourselves. But these idols do not really address us from beyond ourselves. They are simply forms of self-reflection and projection. They are gods made in our own image.
We might think that as people of faith we are immune from this sort of thing. I’m afraid that this is not the case. As we see repeatedly in the scriptures, the prophets reserve their harshest criticism for those who claim to be worshipping God, but, in reality have exchanged the living God for the work of their own hands. Is it not the same with us, every time we make God into a vehicle for our own agendas of self-fulfilment?
This is why we need the gift of Advent. As Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, once put it: ‘In Advent we become Jews once more and re-learn the lessons of the first covenant.’ In other words, in Advent we need to learn, again and again, that we cannot make God from out of our own resources. We need to learn that our desire to be spoken to, and addressed by, that which is genuinely other than ourselves cannot be fulfilled by anything that we ourselves manufacture. It is a voice that must truly come from outside of ourselves and surprise us, even ‘ambush’ us, to quote Rowan Williams again.
What this means is that the season of Advent, as well as being a time of joyful expectation, must be a season of poverty. A time of realisation that even our holiest longings cannot reach to the heavens without the help of God’s grace. As the collect for today puts it, we are ‘grievously hindered’ by our sins in running the race that is set before us, and need God’s ‘bountiful grace and mercy’ to ‘speedily help and deliver us’.
This is why the voice of John the Baptist, crying out ,‘Prepare the way of the Lord,’ must be a voice that cries out in the wilderness. It is only as we embrace the wilderness and poverty of our human condition that we are made ready to hear the voice of hope that speaks to the darkness of this world and its many moral outrages. Only once we have come to the end our tether, and given up all sense of self-sufficiency, can our hearts be the good soil that can receive the word of God’s grace.
Of course, we celebrate this season of Advent on the other side of the word that has already been spoken to us. The word that came down from heaven in the babe at Bethlehem, who shattered all the idols of what people thought God might be like. But there is such a danger that this unique and surprising word of God can become all too familiar and stale. We can all too easily think that, now we have Jesus in our pocket, we can carry on relating to God and one another in the same idolatrous and self-serving ways.
We need Advent if we are going to resist this temptation. We need the Advent discipline of watching and waiting with the prophets in the wilderness, in order to let this word remain new and surprising. The Advent discipline of letting God be God. So that we can be prepared to truly celebrate Christmas as the earth-shattering event that it was when shepherds beheld a chorus of angels singing of the glory of God, as a child was laid in a manger. For the word of God comes to open a new world for us. This is not the basis of a new religion in the ‘old dispensation’, but the opening up of a new horizon to our lives, that will suddenly appear in its fullness when history turns upon its axis at Christ’s return in glory. As the prophet Malachi put it, ‘the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.’
And so, Advent is a time to embrace the wilderness of our own poverty. A time to watch and wait with the prophets of long ago for the word that comes to us from God. So that our longing to be addressed and spoken to is not fulfilled by what merely lies at hand, but instead by the surprising divine word from above, which is the very source of our being.