13th December 2009 : Advent 3 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
Zephaniah 3:14-20 : Philippians 4:4-7 : Luke 3:7-18
Friday night I watched the movie The island. If anyone hasn’t seen it, it’s about a futuristic community of clones whose apparently warped genius creator has bred them in order to supply parts for rich clients in the event that something catastrophic should happen to them. Each client has a cloned copy of themselves, referred to disarmingly as their “insurance policy”.
The Island is a fiction that the scientist-controllers invent to give the clones – whom they refer to as “products” – a sense of hope, understood as “something to look forward to”. Whenever a client needs, say, an organ or body part, their clone wins a false lottery that purports to be their passport to The Island, sold as a paradise of tranquillity and joy.
The clones live on a mind-washing diet of constant lies and half-truths. Until of course one of them starts to show signs of increased neurological growth: his brain begins to allow him to think and question. He notices discrepancies. He begins to ponder what these things that don’t add up might mean.
And begins the unravelling and eventual destruction of this world of lies and duplicity.
It’s quite a contrast with the world we encounter this morning in Luke’s gospel. John the forerunner continues where he left off last week, clearly proclaiming a message of hope and good news that does not sugar-coat the unpleasant realities that are part of the world of the people who gather at the Jordan to hear his message and receive his baptism.
This is a world of fear and uncertainty, sometimes a place of sheer terror; in which few people – and not even the most powerful – can know what tomorrow and sometimes the next hour will bring. John the forerunner, on the banks of and waist-deep within the Jordan River, yells a message about someone who is coming to change this situation of uncertainty.
And he’s going to do so, not with lies and deception, not by promising an easy life free from pain and suffering, not by creating insurance policies that exploit and ultimately degrade other living creatures, but by showing us what it means to be human and connected with the Living God.
This "one who is to come" will teach us to live with God in this world – our world, our Camillo – not in some fictitious place that some manipulative megalomaniac spoon-feeds to us in order to control us for their own purposes. This one is the man we call Jesus – and what he does is radical in so many ways.
He tells us that we can connect with God, here and now. He tells us we don’t institutions or human mediators to do so. He shows us that it is possible – and natural – to find the Spirit in ordinary, everyday things and other human beings. He allows us to claim the power each one of us possesses and to use that power to make the world a better place, to help those most in need, to love the most unlovable, to go to and touch the hidden, the marginalised, the outcast and the untouchable.
This is what the message of Jesus, whom John the forerunner prefigured, is always about. At the risk of descending into understatement, Jesus’ message and manner show us how to live well in this world or whatever world we happen to be born into.
This is why neither Jesus nor John before him create a false world. They don’t have to. Nor do they have to jettison this world and make knowingly-duplicitous statements about places of harmony and joy.
Because we don’t eliminate suffering by avoiding it or passing it on to someone else. We do it by living with it and through it, by understanding it. This is what Jesus teaches us.
In Luke, John the forerunner offers advice to those who seek it. His words – wise words – speak of the here and now. They counsel frugality and sharing; they speak of a radical honesty and forebearance. What it adds up to is living well in the here and now.
What amounts to joy is joy in the face of pain because of our knowledge of God’s presence. Certainly we might feel a great rush of rejoicing if we are healed of a terrible illness or because we are offered the job we applied for. But these are not lasting experiences. If our joy is dependent on a particular event or thing, we cannot do anything with it but watch it fade away.
If, however, our joy comes from realising our connection with the Living God then we have a greater likelihood of that joy continuing, a greater likelihood of retaining that joy if things get worse rather than better.
Neither John nor Jesus ask us to live in a fantasy or a fantasy world. They both understand that we experience life here and now, and this life is the one we must negotiate and find meaning in. Nothing less and nowhere else will do.
If we look closer at the other readings we find similar insights: that although, in Zephaniah, rejoicing is couched in terms of victory in war and freedom from fear of further war, what is it – or rather WHO is it whose presence actually accomplishes these things? Paul to the community in Philippi makes it clearer – “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”
Paul is not calling us to rejoice because of some event or pleasing thing that has happened, often enough in spite of anything we think we’re doing. Rather, he sez: rejoice in the Lord. The one who does not abandon us no matter how many times we do the abandoning.
Our task, then, is to allow the Living God into our consciousness. We’re all good at assenting to the proposition that God is and that we claim sort of belief in this Being.
But we’re not talking about assenting to an intellectual proposition. As the scriptures say, even the satan believes in God. Our task is somewhat harder and we can only accomplish it by embarking upon a journey that willingly invites the Living God to share it with us. When we do that, we discover soon enough that God is already present.
When Columcille, better known as Columba, waddled off in his coracle not really knowing where he was headed, he eventually found the island of Iona. He at first thought it was a deserted piece of rock and soil but he learned that it was already holy ground. The Living God had already been there and was still present.
This is how we will experience God as well. God called and not called. The sign above the gate leading to Carl Jung’s home: Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit! Called and not called, God will be there.
What makes our task so demanding is not so much the business of paying attention to God in order to discover God’s ways, though that is hard enough. What makes it hard is deliberately, intentionally making and taking the time to do so. It cannot be done in any other way.
So as we remember that the word advent comes from the Romans and translates as comes towards (us, understood), let’s take and make the time we need to allow the Living God into our presence, so that we may then – and only then – discover that we are constantly in God’s presence already.
Our coracles run ashore on holy ground – the holy ground of our own soul, the rock and soil of our own being – where the Living God chooses to dwell, watching and waiting, even as we still consider and think and dilly-dally about whether we too will wait and watch for God. Let us not delay in taking every opportunity that is offered us to deepen our spirituality and grow closer to the Living God!
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