But for this liturgy on this morning of the Second Sunday of Advent I want to stay focused on the work of the day as we light that second candle on our wreath.
There is a common Christian misperception that has been repeated so many times that people sometimes assume it must be true. In fact, when a second-century theologian named Marcion began saying it, the Church rightly declared him to be a heretic (which is simply to say, wrong. You don’t need to burn heretics at the stake to simply say they got it wrong!)
Marcion believed that the God of the Old Testament was a god of judgment and the God of the New Testament was a god of mercy. If he had had his way, we would not claim the Old Testament to be “the Word of God.” Yet the core testimony of ancient Israel, in what we call the Old Testament, is that YHWH is the maker of heaven and earth and that creation is good. We are created of the earth and God says we are very good. That very same God is a God of steadfast love and mercy, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. These claims are repeated over and over again in the prophets and in the psalms, because over and over again it is Israel’s experience that that when they fall short of the mark and fail to hold up their end of the bargain, God responds with amazing grace.
I’m not saying that there isn’t violence and judgment in the Old Testament or that God isn’t sometimes portrayed anthropomorphically as getting impatient, hurt, and even angry. I think we do drive God to vertigo sometimes. I simply want to say that these things are in the New Testament as well, and the reason for that is that both Testaments are not about a fantasy world, but real life.
The core testimony of both Old and New Testaments is of one God who is steadfast and merciful: the one whom Israel called Creator of heaven and earth and that Jesus called Abba. The Nicene Creed gets this right, of course, and sets the contours of orthodoxy over and against our Marcionite tendencies: We believe in one God…We believe that the Abba, the Father Almighty, is the maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen; which is to simply to say that we believe the Creator we meet in Genesis 1 is the very same God who is “with the Word” in the first chapter of John’s Gospel.
Are you with me so far?
Some of us here, especially
those of us raised in more Protestant traditions, were taught to contrast the
“law” of the Old Testament with the “grace” in the New Testament. We have some un-learning to do when we approach the
Scriptures, because only in un-learning that false dichotomy can we begin to
truly embrace the Old Testament in all of its richness. After all, what we call
the Old Testament was the only Bible that Mary and Joseph and Jesus and the
disciples and Paul ever knew. Jesus learned to call God “Abba” from the Law and
the Prophets, the Psalms and the Writings, and it does us some good every now
and again to be reminded that he did not carry around a leather-bound King
James Bible that had all of his lines written out in red.
All of Holy Scripture was written for our learning, and both Testaments are meant to point us to the living Word—to Jesus the Christ. The Bible is one drama, told in two acts. I don’t need to belabor this point, but Advent is as good a time to remember this as any because in Advent we seem to get readings intended to subvert our Marcionite tendencies. Two weeks in a row now, we have heard extraordinarily “good news” from the prophet Isaiah, which some Christian Biblical scholars have nicknamed “the fifth gospel.” And, as it happens, both weeks the gospel readings seem to have a sharper edge to them: winnowing forks and axes and judgment and wrath to come…
The vision given to the prophets, including Isaiah, is of God’s shalom: of a peace that passes all understanding. It’s not just an inward spiritual peace, but a yearning for the restoration of all creation and the healing of the nations. Last week we heard about how swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, and I tried to suggest that this language inspires hope that unleashes energy that allows us to roll up our sleeves and to do the work God has given us to do. This week we hear once again from Isaiah, now speaking of the peaceable kingdom, of predators and prey living together in shalom.
If you want to look for differences between the two Testaments, that difference is not about the nature of God. God is one. But there is an important difference worth noting and it has everything to do with the readings before us today: it’s about verb tenses. It has to do with how we tell time. Isaiah lived in very difficult times: a time of war and rumors of war. In the eleventh chapter, he is looking toward the dawn of a new day. But he sees that future on a distant horizon. He looks to a day when the wolf will lie down with the lamb and the leopard with the kid. But all of his verbs, notice, are future tense and given the realities of his day that is understandable: it doesn’t seem like it will be anytime soon:
- A shoot shall come from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow;
- …by righteousness he shall judge the poor;
- …the wolf shall live with the lamb;
- …the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
- …a little child shall lead them;
- …they shall not hurt or destroy on all God’s holy mountain…
Someday. But not yet. It was the same with last weekend’s reading from Isaiah: “in days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established…” In those days, people will study war no more. (Isaiah 2:1-5) Someday. But not yet. In the meantime, we live in the “real” world that seems bent on destroying itself, sometimes even in the name of God.
Notice, however, what happens when John the Baptist arrives on the scene in the New Testament: he proclaims that a new day is about to dawn. John declares that “the kingdom of heaven has come near.” He insists that “the time is at hand.” No longer is it a distant future. There is a sense of urgency in John’s message, because the time is Now. And then notice what happens when Jesus comes on the scene. All the verbs become present tense:
- Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, for theirs IS the kingdom of heaven; (Matthew 5:1-12)
- When Jesus walks into the synagogue one Sabbath day to read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, about good news being brought to the poor and release to the captives, about recovery of sight to the blind and the oppressed going free his commentary is simple: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:18-21)
- St. Paul picks up this same theme in his letter to the Church in Corinth: he too quotes from Isaiah and then says, “NOW is the acceptable time; NOW is the day of salvation.” (II Corinthians 6:2)
What has happened? One might be tempted to think that the world somehow changed overnight when Jesus stepped on the world stage, that in first-century Rome all of a sudden there was a regime change and no more chariots were built; instead there was a lasting peace dividend and swords were beaten into plowshares. But of course we know better than that. The world was probably not much better or worse in the time of Jesus than it was in the time of Isaiah, and probably not much better or worse today than it was in either of those two times.
It’s tempting to make it all spiritual: since we can’t ever have peace on earth, we can have it in our hearts. Since we can’t have true community on earth, at least someday we’ll all die and go to heaven. But this, too, is in the spirit of Marcion. This is heresy. This too, discounts the entire witness of the Old Testament; not to mention the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray: thy Kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven. God’s shalom is cosmic and material; not merely spiritual.
Jesus teaches us to live today as if the Kingdom of God is already here. To live today into our calling as Baptized people by becoming salt and light and yeast that not only bear witness to the world but that begin to transform the world by making it saltier, lighter, and yeastier. We are called to become the change we yearn to see, to become the change that God yearns to see. As we light that candle for peace, the very next words on our lips, St. Francis taught us, need to be for today: “Lord, make us instruments of your peace…” When we pray for peace on earth, we pray, “let it begin with me.” Let it begin now.
To be the Church means to be part of a community that dares to live against the grain of the dominant culture, right now in this moment. Not someday. It means that we live as if the time is Now; because we believe it is. It’s precisely because we live in the midst of warring madness, that we not only ask God to cure that warring madness, but that we also pray for the strength and courage to embrace our calling to make peace wherever we are. Not someday, but right Now.
If we mean to follow Christ, we will do it Now. We can help move ourselves and others away from fear by building trust. We can begin to live more peacefully now as we faithfully use and claim our power, not as lions who eat lambs but as people ready to live and act as servant-ministers. We cannot afford to delay until someday; because it is this day that the Lord has made and it is on this day that God means for us to follow Jesus, and it is on this day that we are called to love God and neighbor.
In Greek there are two different words to capture these two different notions of time. Chronos, from which we get our word chronology, is about linear time. Something happened yesterday or it happens today or it will happen tomorrow. History is chronological, even when it repeats itself. Kairos captures a different aspect of time: sometimes we speak of the fullness of time, or of the moment arriving: it’s the right moment, the moment of fruition, the time when something significant happens. We live, of course, with both aspects of time, even when we only have one word for it in English. Advent unfolds chronologically, over the four weeks that lead up to Christmas. But at its core, Advent is about kairos time. Advent is about present-tense verbs: it’s not about hope and peace and joy and love “someday”—but about embracing these signs of the kingdom in our midst right now, proleptically, even if only as tiny mustard seeds or as four little lights shining in the darkness.
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