Sarx

DVENT Is said to begin in the Western Church four Sundays before Christmas. (This year that’s the last Sunday in November – some years it’s the first Sunday of December.) It has not always been so, however: the older tradition of the Eastern Church makes Advent to begin on 15 November. It was once so in the West as well where Advent was originally called “St Martin’s Fast.” This began on the day after the Feast of St Martin, the 11th and the fast began on the 12th – about 43 days before Christmas although it is called Quadragesima Sancti Martini, the Forty Days of St Martin. In fact, this is the oldest custom, later adopted and adapted by the East (by the 8th century) – and entirely dropped in the West. (Advent is not, generally, considered a fast anymore – but neither is Lent – in much of the West.)

For much of the last 500 years, Advent in the Protestant tradition has been locked into this Four Sundays pattern. But with the revision of the Sunday readings in the Revised Common Lectionary, the Sunday lections, about now (being the Sunday before the 40 days begin), start to sound rather Adventy. The Revised Common Lectionary for this Sunday, the Sunday closest to November 9, gives us our first taste of this Advent flavour. There are themes of Justice and Eschatology popping up all over the place!

In the most current revision of the Church of England’s liturgical publications, Common Worship, the Sundays following All Saints’ Day are called “Sundays Before Advent” and the prayers assigned take on the Advent themes of Justice and Eschatological Hope. The Common Worship collect for Sunday 9th November is:

Almighty Father, whose will is to restore all things in your beloved Son, the King of all: govern the hearts and minds of those in authority, and bring the families of the nations, divided and torn apart by the ravages of sin, to be subject to his just and gentle rule; who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

(I note that the Episcopal Church of Scotland’s Liturgy 1982 weaves in Advent Themes next Sunday, following the Eastern Custom, rather than the Western one – even though she uses the same Lectionary.)

I think this collect, these readings and, most importantly, these themes of Justice and Eschatology are greatly to be desired as we look at the recent economic crash in the USA and around the world as well as in the recent American presidential election.

The election of Barak Obama on Tuesday resulted in a near-apocalyptic fervour among his disciples and supporters. It’s actually rather embarrassing. I swear to you: I’ve never heard the title, “president-elect” used so often. And quite a few people seem to forget that, according to the American Constitution (as Amended) the newly-elected President doesn’t take office until 20 January. It’s almost as if they expect the terrors of the last 8 years to end, today, now. Instantly. I jokingly noted, earlier today, that with 70 Days left until the inauguration all pious Progressives should try and keep Obamamass out of Obamadvent – even though the anticipation may be killing us.

But something has changed: some hope has come back.

As a friend emailed me today, quoting from a letter that he says was in the Washington Post 4 years ago,

I don’t know what grounds make an adequate foundation for hating Bush, exactly, but one might suggest that different people have different reasons for their animosity toward Bush. An African American may be outraged by what seem like continual assaults on hard-won voting rights in Florida. A gay voter may resent Bush’s attempt to write bigotry into the Constitution. A humanitarian may abhor the needless war deaths induced by incompetence or lies. An abortion rights advocate may loathe the use of breast-cancer disinformation to scare women about abortion. A civil libertarian may despise the denial of counsel to hundreds of people secretly locked up for months but never charged with any crime. Or a fair-minded American may be disgusted by a seeming personality trait — utter shamelessness — that links all these things…

And there is, thus, a sense that maybe we’re back on the right track. Close readers of my blog will know that I highly doubt that just now: for I think anyone smart enough to get elected to the Highest Office in the USA will be just another politician. My sense comes from my personal experience – one that I think we all share. After Nixon and Ford, the election of Jimmy Carter gave me much hope. I wrote him a letter and – through the magic of political mailings, actually received an invite to his Inauguration. Not that I could go, taking time out of my 6th Grade classes, but it made me a local celebrity! That hope fell through and four years later I was supporting Ronald Reagan. He, too, seemed like a good idea at the time: but turned out to be just another bully. Clinton’s first inaugural address made me cry and actually write the man a letter. But after 8 years, even though things were good, the man was as much a failure as anyone had been: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; the Defence of Marriage Act; WTO; NAFTA; and a number of scandals that have not been answered to my own satisfaction – as well as his actions on the recent campaign – prove him to be just another politician in whom I shouldn’t have placed as much hope as I did. And from all that experience, I’m sure Barak Obama will be the same. But I want to allow for a maybe, I want to justify my brief smirk of hope.

But while we’re all waiting for Justice to roll… I want to draw this caution from the prophetic reading:

Alas for you who desire the day of the LORD!
Why do you want the day of the LORD?
It is darkness, not light;
as if someone fled from a lion,
and was met by a bear;
or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall,
and was bitten by a snake.
Is not the day of the LORD darkness, not light,
and gloom with no brightness in it?

Justice ain’t pretty, folks.

There are terribly few Americans alive today who are not riding on the backs of the poor in some ways. Almost everyone I know from the poorest people at my agency to the wealthiest people in San Francisco and New York are all – even the most liberal – participating in a global economy that hoards wealth, that robs the environment and disturbs the social and spiritual well-being of persons around the globe.

Justice ain’t pretty.

When we pat ourselves on the backs for the enlightened attitude of we’ve displayed in finally electing a Son of a Black Man to leadership, we forget that for 450 years we enslaved his people, that they helped build our country and, in most of our cities and towns, still labour at the bottom of several ladders holding the rest of us out of the mire. When we accept the accolades of much of the rest of the world, we simply help them to obscure the fact that persons with darker skins have never been elected in those countries either.

Justice ain’t pretty for them, either.

And, sadly, in this country: we’ve all learned to dump on people down the line from us. Although 450 years of slavery are a lot more than a squabble over legal status, I think it’s interesting to note that Californian Blacks and Hispanics saw fit to deny rights to gays at the same time as electing a person of colour as president. No one is free while others are oppressed. But it was the ancestors of many of those upper and middle class gay men – mostly white, but not all – who owned the ancestors of those blacks, who stole 1/3 of the country from those Hispanics, who eat the food harvested by those poor hands, who wear the clothes sewn by those children.

Justice ain’t pretty.

Amos calls us to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream…” But we are not righteous yet. Justice will be painful. For those of us who look for President-Elect Obama to set things aright – and assuming he does – it’s going to be a long, bumpy, and painful four years.

Salon Magazine opines this will be the beginning of the Fourth American Republic. And the parallels they draw are with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and FDR. None of those are pretty – all of them represent a time of great pain, trials by fire, death and destruction. The other common thread is that the leader rose above it all to be a Jovian figure in our history. Will Barak Obama be this? Or perhaps we need to look at how many of the Boomer Generation are, effectively, scared: they’ve seen three dynamic, youthful, revolutionary leaders slain in their lifetimes. Some have a sort of PTSD-based fear about another dynamic, youthful and revolutionary leader.

The passage from the Gospel is hard to read into this cry for Justice. In fact, it seems to speak about the “wise virgins” as refusing to share. I don’t know what to make of it. But St John Chrysostom takes us down an interesting road – saying that the sense of the story is that oil represents charity to the poor. And so even with the grace of their virginity, these ten women, having showed no mercy to the poor, were unable to move into the kingdom. Although he doesn’t touch on it, the words of Chrysostom take me to a different but parallel place. The Greek word for “mercy” is related to the Greek word for olive oil. In running out of oil, these women were running out of mercy.

Chrysostom says,

Do you see what great profit arises to us from the poor? Without them we loose the greatest hope for our salvation. Wherefore here [in this life] must we get together the oil, that it may be useful to us there [on the Day of the Lord], when the time calls us. For that day is not the right time of to plan on collecting it [the Oil of Mercy]. The time is now. Do not spend your resources on luxury and vainglory. You will need much oil there.

Elsewhere, the same saint reminds us,

The rich usually imagine that, if they do not physically rob the poor, they are committing no sin. But the sin of the rich consists in not sharing their wealth with the poor. In fact, the rich person who keeps all his wealth for himself is committing a form of robbery. The reason is that in truth all wealth comes from God, and so belongs to everyone equally. The proof of this is all around us. Look at the succulent fruits which the trees and bushes produce. Look at the fertile soil which yields each year such an abundant harvest. Look at the sweet grapes on the vines, which give us wine to drink. The rich may claim that they own many fields in which fruits and grain grow; but it is God who causes seeds to sprout and mature. The duty of the rich is to share the harvest of their fields with all who work in them and with all in need.

And if that sounds like “redistribution of wealth” it is. In fact, the fathers go further – telling us that clothes we have in our closet that we don’t wear are stolen from the poor. Food that we have in our cupboards that goes bad is food stolen from the poor. Some go so far as to imply that saving money “for a rainy day” is stealing money from the poor. Remember: no one in the “old days” would ever have thought of “retiring” – a luxury we’ve created for ourselves and for our children to bear. If you don’t work – you don’t eat. And many of the saints of the church, having reached an age beyond work, gave everything to the poor and entered Monasteries or became, themselves, voluntary beggars.

Justice ain’t pretty.

But we’re assured, at least, by the annual celebration of Advent – no matter how long it is – that it’s also “not yet”.

Church as the kingdom of God lives in an “already not yet” dichotomy. She is the kingdom of God already, but things are not yet perfect. We forget ourselves, mostly – running off into injustice and oppression – when we confuse a politician or other secular leader with the possibility of NOW. It’s called immanentising the eschaton and it is, rightly, seen as diabolism. The Roman church teaches, The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism.

I note that they say “intrinsically perverse” the same way they say “intrinsically disordered” about gay people… but, still they are right here. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

A lot of people in our culture think that a new president is going to set things aright. He might make a start, I have to allow: and I allow myself a smirk of hope. This Advent season might seem a bit more hopeful that a good few in my life time. But this President – no President, or secular or religious authority – is not going to make the kingdom of God more real on this planet. That’s the process we’re all engaged in, but it won’t happen until it comes from the hand of God.

Prior to the election and on into this week I’ve made (and heard) many jokes about the Messianism of many of the President-Elect’s followers and disciples. I’ve commented about the Great Obamantiphons and the ancient hymn O Come O Come Obamanuel. But the man – and his team – are going to need our prayers if he’s to be a leader (good, bad or indifferent) and he can’t be blamed for the madness of his followers. He might bring us some more justice and righteousness.

But it won’t be pretty.

I pointed out to a coworker that if, as an anchor, you have only the presidency of the United States, Tuesday must have been terrifying: either in a good way or a bad way. Change is always scary. But change is something that happens to “them”, done by “us” or vice versa.

If you have something else, something higher on which to anchor your hopes, change is not bad at all. That’s the meaning of the claim that “Jesus is Lord”: it doesn’t matter who is hiding on Caesar’s throne – or behind it; Jesus is Lord. Good gov’t or bad Gov’t, Jesus is Lord. Support the Gov’t or reject the gov’t,Jesus is Lord. Elect the leader or follow a Divine-right Monarch or live in a fascist state, Jesus is Lord.

That’s the good news, this Advent and always!

I think a lot of faithful people imagine Obama will make living out the Gospel easier for them. I think a lot of faithful people imagine Obama will make living out the Gospel harder for them.

I think the only thing that matters is that Jesus is Lord.