We Started Without You: 2nd Sunday in Advent: Year B

Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8

This Second Sunday in Advent in Year B is the best: Christmas like we remember it. Isaiah proclaims comfort to the people who have waited for so long. What more beloved verses than these, used for half the Christmas portion of Handel’s Messiah? “Prepare the way of the Lord”; “Comfort ye my people”; “Rejoice Daughter of Zion”; “He will feed his flock like a shepherd . . .”

Perhaps The Elves cherry-picked verses 1 and 2 of Psalm 85 so we wouldn’t think God’s Kingdom might be established without first forgiving our “sin.” But what is “sin” really? Breaking the rules? What are the rules? In parable after parable in the past year A, Jesus broke or subverted as many Roman rules as he could. But the rules he never broke or subverted were God’s rules. “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.” And what is that Word? Distributive justice.

Unfortunately, by the time the leader of the Christian community in Rome wrote the letter in Peter’s name, the “rules” had been watered down to “holiness” and “godliness,” whatever that meant. “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” right? So, is a holy life one with lots of baths?

God’s time is not our time, the writer reminds us. As the hymn says, “A thousand ages in God’s sight are like an evening gone.” The best we can do is lead lives of “holiness and godliness” and wait. In the portion not read we are advised to shore up the belief (faith) in the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection “with goodness, goodness with knowledge, knowledge with self-control, self-control with endurance, endurance with godliness, godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love” (1:5-7). This is not a bad list, it just leaves out the kind of radical abandonment of self-interest that Jesus embodied, and avoids the conundrum of retributive versus distributive justice.

The prophet who created “Second Isaiah” had not yet confronted the reality of conditions back in Jerusalem once the exiles would return from Babylon. The hope was still strong for distributive justice-compassion, and the return to living in God’s realm under God’s rule. But by the time the letter called 2nd Peter was written – in an interesting time lapse of a thousand years later – the leadership had begun to figure out ways to continue life in a still-untransformed world. The excuses are all there: “God’s ways are not our ways.” We have to learn to go on and maintain hope in the face of enormous doubt and disappointment. In 1:4-5, the writer reminds the people that through the promise of Jesus, if they forgo the corruption that comes with lust, they may yet attain immortality. Presumably those who made it would wait for the Lord in heaven. Earth is a lost cause.

Psalm 85 personifies the qualities of righteousness (justice-compassion), peace, faithfulness, and love, and says they go before God like heralds or a vanguard before a king. Yes, the words seem to echo Mark’s use of Isaiah 40, which literalizes those qualities in the person of John the Baptizer. But suppose the Psalm means that before the world can be transformed, the people in it must live their lives from distributive justice-compassion? Forget about saving your soul from hell. The only “hell” is the “hell” of retributive, pay-back, conditional “justice,” which is not justice at all, but revenge and reward for those caught in the seemingly inevitable normalcy of civilization.

These words are beginning to flow too easily from my mind through the keyboard and into cyberspace. Just as glib as the writer of 2nd Peter in his diatribe found in Chapter 2: “They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for people are slaves to whatever masters them. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, for the last state has become worse for them than the first” (19-20).

The “normalcy of civilization” and “the defilements of the world” are not petty trespass, such as not sharing your toys, or plaigerizing term papers from the internet, or being unfaithful to your marriage. These are all symptoms of the corporate sin that traps everyone in systems that start with the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number, but end in debilitating, disempowering Communism on the Left (tyranny of the majority), and Fascism on the Right (tyranny of the minority).

The hard part is – as we have learned through two millennia of waiting for Jesus to come back and finish what he started – it’s really up to us to establish the kingdom. The writer of 2nd Peter couldn’t imagine such an outrageous and terrifying idea. Neither can significant percentages of humanity today. We look outside ourselves for salvation, for hope, for meaning, and we fight to the death over the metaphors.

Second Isaiah was written from exile in Babylon. The Gospel of Mark was written in the 60s to 70s C.E., in the context of the destruction of the Jewish Temple, and a second kind of exile. The 2nd letter of Peter was written from the Christian community in Rome, near the end of the first Century, C.E., when everyone who had known anyone who had known Jesus was dead – yet another kind of exile from the spirit of the original Jesus, and his particular revelation of the kingdom of God.

Two thousand years later, the exile has become so complete that the homeland is alien territory. Scholarship, including the search for the historical Jesus, the work of the Jesus Seminar, and Matthew Fox’s reclaiming of the mystical, creation-centered tradition provide maps, but the signposts and trail markers are not what most Christians expect or want.

Nevertheless, Priests for Equality (The Inclusive Psalms) translate Psalm 85 using present and future verb tenses, with the result that the metaphor speaks to the call for Christians to participate in the ongoing work of distributive justice-compassion. Because “[l]ove and faithfulness have met; justice and peace have embraced[,] fidelity will sprout from the earth and justice will lean down from heaven. Our God will give us what is good, and our land will yield its harvest. Justice will march before you, Adonai, and peace will prepare the way for your steps.”

If Christianity is to have any relevance to spiritual truth in the post-modern world, we must let go of the idea of divine intervention, past or future, and find our confidence in the order of the universe that surrounds us. Then, as Rhineland mystic Hildegard of Bingen sang in the 12th Century, we may experience the Cosmos as “limitless love, from the depths to the stars: flooding all, loving all . . . the royal kiss of peace.” [Gabriele Uhlein, Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen (Bear & Co., 1983)]. With that confidence, we can perhaps find the courage to radically abandon self-interest – as Jesus taught us – and join the ongoing struggle for justice and peace among humanity.

“A voice cries out: In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord . . . and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.”

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