A Belated Advent Meditation

A local church invited me last week to be guest teacher in their young adult Sunday School. They invited me to choose my own topic or text, so I decided to submit myself to the lectionary, specifically the Old Testament reading, Isaiah 65.17-25. I thought I might pass on in this forum a few of the thoughts that struck me as I studied.

Note, first of all, the PLACE of this promise. “I create new heavens and a new earth.” In the next verse, and in the one after that, the prophet locates God’s peaceable kingdom in Jerusalem. For those of us reared on notions of Heaven as a place we go to, this language invites the contemplation of Heaven as a place that comes to us. For those of us reared on the notion of Heaven as a place we create, this language invites the contemplation of Heaven as a place made for us.

Trevor Carpenter, pastor of Baptist Temple in McAllen, Texas, delivered the final chapel address of the semester here at the South Texas School of Christian Studies. We’d been talking about Christian responses to death and dying and I asked Trev to take us one step beyond - to God’s ultimate response to those temporary interlopers. He took us to Revelation 21 and I couldn’t help but notice how John invokes the imagery of Isaiah: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away . . . . And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.”

For fundamentalists, who often think of earth as ultimately expendable, Scripture here reminds us that God loves all he creates and will address its groans with ultimate healing, a redemption somehow bound up with our own (Ro 8.22-23). For liberals, who tend to think of Heaven as a sort of Earth 2.0 with all the bugs of the beta version purged, Scripture here humbles us with the assertion that every attempt to reach Heaven from the ground up simply recreates the cacophany of Babel.

So that’s first - the place of the promise. Notice next the PROMISE itself. At least three things mark the community of glorified creation. The first is longevity - a zero infant mortality rate and youth ministers catering to centegenarians. But the idea here is more than mere time. Our society has already come perilously close to achieving extended biological function. I wrote recently about the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, or “NICE,” an outfit that recently determined a man dying of cancer wasn’t worth the money it would take to prop him up for another half-year or so. One reader emailed to ask me if I meant to imply that a privatized health care system would show more compassion. I admitted that I do not; an Oregon man recently heard that his insurance company wouldn’t cover the cost of his cancer treatment but would gladly pop for the assisted suicide drugs available to him by law.

I don’t mean to criticize medical professionals devoted to fighting disease, and I don’t mean to act as if difficult ethical choices are in fact simple. I mean to contrast our blundering efforts at extending life with Scripture’s promise of eternal life. I think that what God promises here is not just extended biological function but life, and a community that knows how to value it.

The second part of the promise is prosperity. Again, notice that this is about more than just everybody having lots of stuff. In fact, abundance of stuff isn’t even the issue. What we have is a connectedness, an organic relationship between what one does and what one has. True enough, no more Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and no more Grapes of Wrath. But it goes deeper: the homeowner builds his own house, whether with his hands or his labor; the one who eats has some understanding of the origin of the food. This implies not just a right amount of material possessions, but a right relationship to them.

In my last post I quoted Martin Sorrell, CEO of the advertising firm WPP. Asked about the current financial crisis, he observed that “the real world won’t change for the better until 2010 when greed has overcome fear yet again.” That’s the world’s economics: a needle-point adjustment between greed and discouragement, two of the seven deadly sins. In fact, the recent presidential election (like all presidential elections; like all elections) can be viewed as an argument over which candidate can best walk that tightrope. Set aside which of the two had the better plan. The essence of each campaign was a claim that their man could keep us just frightened enough to behave ourselves but just aquisitive enough to feed the beast.

And what troubles me is that, to watch how we operate, that’s the best that many Christians think we can do until Jesus comes again. This is what Dallas Willard, in The Divine Conspiracy, calls a “gospel of sin management,” in which

the Christian message is thought to be essentially concerned only with how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects. Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is included only marginally.

Contrast this with an observation - really a confession of faith - made recently be a Benedictine monk from California. After the Tea Fire in Santa Barbara wiped out his monastery Brother Joseph Brown told a reporter that “One of the hazards of monasticism throughout the centuries is we become attached to what we have or where we are. This is simply a reminder that what we are called to is not our stuff. This is a cleansing by fire.”

One tradition of Advent, by the way, is to give one’s home a thorough cleaning, including setting aside unused items for donation to those who can actually use them. Brother Brown does not actively construct his abbey’s devastation in this light (the fire actually hit toward the end of Ordinary time), but I can’t help see the connection. He and his brothers let go of greed, and in turn found themselves freed from fear. This sounds to me a good deal more like Kingdom economics than Mr. Sorrell’s formulation.

Third, the passage promises a sound ecology: wolves grazing with lambs instead of on them, lions and oxen eating straw instead of lions eating oxen. “They shall do no evil or harm in all my holy mountain.” Whatever all of this says about animals before the Fall or animals after the Second Coming (for some interesting speculations on both, see C. S. Lewis’ chapter, “Animal Pain” in The Problem of Pain), it says that a restored world will know perfect ecological balance. And notice that the animals come last - after humanity has its act together.

As I write, rebels in Congo slaughter gorillas and sell their body parts on the black market to fund the war. The rangers who once protected these endangered primates now languish in refugee camps, driven from their posts by the fighting. The United States Supreme Court recently ruled that the Navy can continue to test sonar off the California coast despite the danger such high decibels pose to various species of whale. Again and again, our inability to live with one another comes at the cost of creation’s inability to live at all. When Our Lord finally plants the flag of peace in the rebel heart of humanity, all creatures will feel the change.

So the place and the promise; look now at the PERSON on whom it all rests. If the language of Isaiah 65 sounds familiar, it is because the prophet quotes himself, reprising an old sermon the way any preacher would do. Isaiah 11.6-9 gives an extended vision of the Peaceable Kingdom of God’s Holy Mountain. Note a couple of things about this fact. First of all, the original version comes in the first major section of the book, chapters 1-39, that deals with the eighth century BCE and the coming Babylonian judgment. The reprise comes in the latter portion, chapters 40-66, which speak to the restoration from captivity, a century and a half later. Indeed, so complete is the distinction that many scholars believe this second section to be the work of a different person, a prophet of the Isaiahic school who lived during the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Whatever the truth of that theory, I am more concerned here with the similarities than the differences in these passages - one similarity, really. Isaiah 11.1-5 contains one of the clearest prophecies of the coming of Messiah. Isaiah 65 makes the same connection. When Messiah comes all will be set right. Now, consider a couple of things.

Before the fall of Jerusalem, Isaiah looked to the coming of Christ to make all things right. After the fall, Isaiah looked to the same source. All the horrors of history and the failures of God’s people only deepened his faith in the One who was to come. Then suddenly, in Mark 1.15, we have Jesus announcing, in Greek perfect tenses, that the time and the kingdom have arrived in him. In Luke 4 the Lord strolls into the synagogue at Nazareth, quotes one of Isaiah’s messianic masterpieces and declares that “today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

And then what? Two millennia march by. Professing Christians with crosses on their shields spill blood bridle-deep in the Holy Land. We underfeed the poor and overheat the planet. We confess with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Christmas day, 1863 as the wholesale slaughter of the Civil War raged around him, “And then in shame I bowed my head. / There is no peace on earth, I said, / For hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men.”

So what’s to be done? Well, we remember that Advent looks two ways: we remember that the Christ has come, and we remember that the Christ is coming. And we dare to imagine the world he brings and to begin living in it today. So the real question, the honest theodicy of Advent ceases to be questions about why the Lord permits untimely death and economic injustice and ecological disaster. The question instead becomes,

Whose life have I lengthened, whose being have I strengthened, today in light of the Lord’s return?

Whose prosperity have I increased, what oppression have I decreased, today in light of the Lord’s return?

How have I nurtured God’s good creation today in light of the Lord’s return?

If your response to any of these seems too small, rejoice - we’re told we can’t get the job done anyway and must rely ultimately on God’s promise to complete it. If your response seems unimportant, beware: having seen the world that comes to replace this present one, we do well to learn to live in it.

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