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.