ADVENT SUNDAY A 2007

2nd December 2007 : Advent Sunday : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 2:1-5 : Romans 13:9-21 : Matthew 24:36-44

Many of us have seen the movie Home alone, possibly even the two sequels. For those who haven’t, Home alone is the highly-unlikely story of a precocious young boy, something of a misfit in his large, unruly family, who is accidentally left behind when sed family goes on vacation. This sets the scene for a series of slapstick antics as the kid proceeds to outwit a couple of would-be robbers, ingeniously using only the materials he has at hand.

The first movie worked well. We didn’t know the outcome. The kid was very cute despite his precociousness. We had tension, we had sympathy. Durn-it-all, we were rootin for the kid from the get-go and his triumph over evil and disaster was OUR triumph over evil and disaster.

Home alone was a masterful piece of cinema manipulation that drew us into acute identification with the poor abandoned brat, ultimately playing on our own deep fears – maybe fears of abandonment also; fear of attack; fear of threats of one kind or another; fear of an assault on whatever it is we delude ourselves into believing fundamentally holds us together as human beings.

Before I continue let me say that I am indebted for much of what follows to the website Girardian reflections on the lectionary[1] The site’s name comes from the anthropologist René Girard, whose study of society and religion led him to conclude that what drives us is desire, which may lead either to cooperation or conflict. It’s far more complex than that so that will have to do for the moment – or until we find someone who understands it well enough to explain it clearly!

Meanwhile, back at the sermon …

The Church has long, though I suspect not “always” played on people’s fears of rejection and abandonment in order to gain adherents and keep captive the fearful faithful. We all want to belong, to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to feel in some way accepted. Such is our desire for belonging and acceptance that we willingly abandon our most fundamental principles and sense of personal integrity – at least in the short-term – in order to achieve it.

As one particular kind of example, this is how extremist groups of every colour, religion and political persuasion gain and retain followers. From the outside these groups may seem obviously dodgy – but offer someone who feels rejected a sense of home, a sense of belonging, a sense of likemindedness – and they willingly become yours. Once that happens it’s relatively easy to manipulate them and keep them for long periods of time.

It’s exactly this dynamic that operates in the conservative dogma of the so-called Rapture, a non-biblical term that has many different shades of interpretation based on selective and sometimes twisted interpretations of a handful of biblical texts. The basis of Rapture theology is that at some point before, during or after the last days – a time of terror known as the Tribulation – Jesus will descend from heaven and lift up the “saved” from earth and meet them in the sky, ushering them into eternity. Those who remain on earth still have a shot at salvation but they will have to suffer some or all of the horrors of Tribulation.

Well … who wouldn’t want to belong to the select group of the “saved”? And who, believing they were “in”, wouldn’t want to do everything they could to ensure they stayed “in”?

As far as that basic scenario goes anyone and any group can play the game – and who hasn’t? The Church is a past master at it. The Church has for centuries set up and demanded adherence on the basis of what Richard Rohr calls “questions of belonging, membership questions; who’s in – and who’s out”.

Part of the problem is that this was never Jesus’ message. He didn’t offer “membership” based on strict and coded principles. One of the reasons the established religion feared him was because he threw out their rule book. He not so much re-wrote their cosy constitution as tore the whole thing to pieces.

How? By allowing anyone and everyone to be members of his organisation! He threw wide the doors. He sed even the blind, the lame, the deaf, the mute – even SINNERS for goodness’ sake!! – could come in and receive God’s welcome and forgiveness. For those of us who like churchy words, it’s called GRACE.

Grace flows freely from a loving God and it sez to anyone who can hear the offer, Come on down!

It’s a totally different – and liberating – attitude from the one that sez These are the rules; you can stay as long as you obey them. If you don’t obey, we kick you out and abandon you to your fate.

Who among us really wants to be “abandoned to our fate”? I know I don’t!

No wonder people likewise are terrified at the prospect of being among those who are “left behind”. It’s what ancient and not-so-ancient peoples did to the elderly and infirm: left them behind under a bush or on an ice-floe or in a C-class hospital (read “nursing home”). No thank you!

One of the problems is that we don’t have to translate the text the way we actually find it. For instance, the word for “taken” could validly be translated as “swept away” or “kidnapped” or “taken by force”. The Latin translation gives us the English word rape and the French version – ravissement – sounds enough like its English equivalent to need no translation.

Is this REALLY what God is going to do to those who belong to the right club, the Salvation Club?

On the other hand, the word that translates as “left behind” occurs commonly in the Christian scriptures, has several different meanings also, and could be rendered forgive. It’s actually the same word sitting ingenuously behind Father, forgive them for they know not what they do; and Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

And when we consider that Noah was “left behind” while the rest of the world was “swept away” in evil and violence we start to get a different picture. And do we really need to guess how topsy-turvy the view is when we look at the most well-known of all people ever to be “left behind” – a certain Jesus of Nazareth, abandoned on the cross, soaked in the violence of humanity, refusing to abandon his faith, innocent victim of the world’s evil – and raised from the dead on the third day by the Living God!

The point is we do not need to fear being left behind. Being left behind may actually be the true sign that we are people of faith, people who maybe do not “belong” according to the rulebook, but people who have accepted God’s grace – the only thing we need to do.

It is exactly the same grace operating as Mary of Nazareth enters the final month of her third trimester. Humankind does nothing – can do nothing – to deserve or warrant the coming of Jesus into the world. God sends Jesus in an act of faith as an act of grace.

We who are left behind to meet him need only ask one question – will we truly receive God’s offered grace this Advent Season and understand it at the Christ Mass?

[1] http://girardianlectionary.net/index.html and http://girardianlectionary.net/year_a/advent1a.htm