Almost Advent

(WARNING: Some readers may think what follows is a rant, and is ridiculously naive and blatantly political. I don't deny their claims.)


Tomorrow in the liturgical Christian Churches, we begin the season of Advent. It is not a way of getting started celebrating Christmas a little early. It is something else entirely. It ties together the comings of God into our lives: the startling and astonishing coming of God into human existence in profound vulnerability as the Child adored by the shepherds, to be sure. But also the coming that we sometimes call the Second Coming, the coming that represents the equally startling and counter-intuitive truth that, in the end, the God of justice, mercy, grace and love wins!

It is this Second Coming that is where our Advent observances begin. In that sense, Advent ties the beginning of each liturgical year to the end of the year before.
We read this year from the Gospel of Matthew, and so we get a "Joseph perspective" on the story of Jesus' birth. We also read during this season, as always, from the Hebrew Bible. And all our readings are from the prophet Isaiah. In each, Isaiah casts a vision of an alternate reality from what his hearers were experiencing. And in each of those visions followers of Jesus have seen his coming expressed as well.

So, in order to get a handle on how I will preach about the Comings of God this Advent, I pulled a wonderful book off my shelf. I’d started it about three years ago, but now is the time for me to read it in its entirety. It’s The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001). He writes:

It is the task of prophetic ministry to bring the claims of the tradition and the situation of enculturation into an effective interface (2).

…The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us (3).

Brueggemann writes in this book both about the prophets in the Hebrew Bible and the prophetic elements in Jesus’ life and ministry. He says that the New Thing that God did under Moses’ leadership when liberating the Israelites from Pharaoh is paradigmatically prophetic. God’s radical and absolute freedom always challenges the institutions that kings and emperors put in place in futile attempts to domesticate and control God. In Israel, under King Solomon, God’s vision of justice was co-opted, and in its place there arose Solomon’s vision of a continuing dynasty. To that end, he developed a harem; tax districts; bureaucracy; a standing army; a close court-cult relationship with the Temple--Brueggemann describes them as a religion "in which God and his temple have become part of the royal landscape in which the sovereignty of God is fully subordinated to the purpose of the king" (p.28); and conscripted labor.

The prophet is the one who, in that context, speaks the poetry and sings the songs that allow people to envision an alternate reality. But we can’t even hear until the spell of the dominant culture is broken by the laments of the marginalized folk who know that something is terribly wrong with the way things are now. Out of lament and despair and tears comes, then, God's surprising hope.

About hope, Brueggemann writes:

Hope...is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk.

So, I got to thinking: what is it that I hope for, long for with intensity, but I'm embarrassed to admit I hope for so much, because it seems impossibly unrealistic? What is it, that when I talk about it to "reasonable and sensible" people, I sense that they think that I've got my head in the clouds and need to quit being such an idealist or such a bleeding-heart liberal?

To be very specific, I hope for a way for my 21 year old daughter, who has Type I diabetes (the kind where your pancreas doesn't make any insulin, and you die if you don't receive insulin via injection or pump), to receive the health care here in the United States, that she needs to stay alive and healthy. She could be on our insurance policy next year if we were going to have insurance ourselves (which we may possibly not have), and if she was in college or otherwise our dependent (she's living on her own and working a minimum wage job without insurance on offer). She has some other disabilities that, despite her high IQ, make her almost unemployable. She's not held a job for more than 3 or 4 months in her life, and she flunked out of college because she refused to avail herself of the assistance she was eligible for under the Americans with Disabilities Act. She's not merely being obstinate: her brain is just wired very differently from the rest of us, and her diabetes, when her blood sugar is too high or too low, also sometimes makes her so exhausted and miserable that she misses more work than a healthy person might. Her insulin, blood glucose testing equipment, and pump supplies would cost us about $500 per month retail. She's been told that, even if she was eligible for medicaid, there would be no coverage for the insulin pump that has made her very brittle diabetes more controllable and has kept her from life-threatening and irreversible organ damage. The provisions of the wimpy, terribly-compromised Health Care Bill that might help (no denial when applying for insurance for pre-existing conditions, coverage on parents' plan for children under age 26) don't come into effect in 2013.

In the dominant culture of Solomon's day, there were quite a few people with significant affluence. But their affluence, their full banquet tables, meant that others went hungry. In our day, the inequality between the richest Americans and the rest of us is greater than at any period since the Gilded Age. It is greater in the USA than in Nicaragua or Honduras, places we sometimes hear disparaged as "Banana Republics." My question then becomes: Who benefits from a system that allows my daughter to fall between the cracks? So many people out there would say (behind my back, if not to my face):

"Well, too bad! She has a pre-existing condition."
"No insurance company should be compelled to lose their competitive edge or fail in their fiduciary responsibilities by being forced to take clients with serious chronic disease."
"It's not MY fault, and MY taxes or access to health care shouldn't be affected by HER problem, or problems of other people like her."
"Don't bring Jesus or justice into this conversation. It's strictly a business decision."
"We don't need to have a nurse-maid society that takes care of people. That is their own responsibility."

How many millions of other people are there out there, who are either being bankrupted or being denied health care because the people of the United States can't see a way to do what the Europeans have done, and make health care available to everyone?

My hope, my deep yearning, is for a day when everybody here in the USA can get the care they need to be as healthy as they can be. When people won't have to decide between making a house or rental payment or paying for their medicine. (And just because my hope is specific to the USA in 2010 doesn't mean that I don't long for all the hungry, the sick, the poor, the imprisoned.. to be made whole and free.)

So what does this have to do with Advent? The coming of God, the fact that God entered our world as a fully-embodied human being, means that we may have hope for a time when justice will prevail. Bodies matter to God. Hungry bellies and sick people and the blind and the lame and the deaf all don't need to have their suffering ignored. Jesus proclaimed that healing was a hallmark of the coming Kingdom of God. The coming of God at the Eschaton, the culmination of all things, doesn't let us off the hook for doing what we can to live justly, to work for justice now. Rather, it allows us to do justice fearlessly, because there are no threats, not even the threat of death, that can shut us up.

Advent is about hope. Ridiculous, enormous hopes, however counter-cultural they are.

Dear Mom and Dad,

It's a cloudy "soft" day here in Orlando, and some rain fell earlier. This is a novel and wonderful thing after 42 sunny days without a drop of rain. It smells different now, more like it did when I first came down to visit Wayne on New Year's Eve last year. It's quite a subtle change, not nearly as dramatic as the coming of autumn in the North. But there it is! Even the Starbucks where I'm sitting has switched to its "holiday theme" cups with red trim and stylized snowflakes.

This is the week of All Saints and All Souls in the liturgical churches, including the Episcopal Church that has been my spiritual home for the last 30 years. This isn't your tradition. But it is the place where I have landed. You gave me a precious gift when you prayed with me, taught me to pray, told me Bible stories, showed me lives that were founded and centered on God. You raised me to trust that God is good, that God loved me more even than you did, that God created this beautiful world for us to explore and learn about, to live in in ways that were loving and generous. What a foundation! I have taken this foundation and carried it into my "new" spiritual home, the Episcopal Church. But it was in the Covenant Church of my girlhood, from Pastor John Wiens that I first was pointed to the Communion of Saints, surrounding us as a "great cloud of witnesses." So I am writing you a letter. It's a little act of pleasure. I loved writing letters to you when we lived far away from each other. It was a way of drawing near to you when I missed you. It was a way of sharing what was going on in my heart.

The last substantive, hand-written letter I received was from our cousin Joy. It was more than a year and a half ago. I have it in front of me, and I owe her a response. So much has happened in our lives in the last couple of years that every time I thought I would write, something big was in flux or changing, and I delayed until there might be some sort of resolution. It was also such an anticipated pleasure to respond to her letter with a hand-written letter of my own, written at leisure, that I waited (in vain!) for a good time to respond. Maybe this weekend???

I began this letter to you, as I usually did, with a description of the weather and the place I am sitting. It situates me concretely in one place, and invites you to imagine yourselves here with me. It invites or evokes communion, one might say. Dad, I remember all the letters you used to write on Sunday afternoons to your brothers and sister. There was lots of talk about weather in the letters from Norquay that you received, and in those you sent. I suppose that's because farmers are so affected by weather and attuned to its subtleties. You can take the man off the farm, but you can't take the farmer out of the man. (I remember a birthday card that said you were a man "out standing in your field"!) You used carbon paper before the days of easy photocopying. Over the years you would occasionally write me, too, more often with a word processor. Your writing got a little bit shaky at the end. Mom, your little letters on smaller pieces of stationery were also precious. Even though we could talk on the phone regularly and easily, there was something about a letter, arriving in an envelope, that lent gravitas and importance to the communication. I miss your letters, perhaps even more than the phone calls. I have a bunch of them in files.

You are now in a place beyond where letters can reach. I am counting, however, on time operating somewhat differently from the perspective of the heavenly realm than it does from my more limited perspective here and now. My prayers to God of love for you continue, and perhaps your prayers to God for me continue,too. After all, the scriptures say that the prayers of the saints rise like incense, and they do not specify whether those saints are in heaven or on earth. There were many days when the children were younger and my life was supremely challenging that your prayers, which I knew you prayed each morning at breakfast for all your children and grandchildren, sustained me.

Now, in my mid-fifties, my life seems--what? Becalmed, perhaps. I am not in the work force. Actually, I loved being the parent at home when the kids were younger. There was much to do and I loved having more time to devote to making meals, keeping the house more organized, being available for the children, etc. It seemed that I was adding value to the family by my contributions. Now, not working a regular "for pay" job, I feel guilty and unproductive. Yet I enjoy the rhythms of my present life: having time for regular exercise, prayer, and meditation; being able to read more widely and deeply, having time to travel to see the grandchildren, being able to make meals and entertain friends more frequently.

So, if you still pray, will you pray for me not to succumb during this time to laziness, passivity, or disorganization? to frittering away this less-structured time that is, in some senses, a gift? Will you pray that I not waste this precious time worrying, but will trust that the right work will come along for me AND that I will devote an appropriate amount of time to looking for that work?