Richard Bollman, S.J.

2nd SUNDAY of ADVENT: B

Isaiah 40:1-11; 2Peter 3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8

It was in 537 BC that many thousands of Jewish refugees in Babylon

found their lives suddenly changed after 50 years in an alien culture.

In their captivity they had maintained their community life

serving as workers in a pagan society, earning their keep.

But in 537, Babylon was liberated from its tyrant dynasty

by a neighboring warlord, Cyrus of Persia,

who wanted to clear the country of its refugees.

Under Cyrus, the Jews were released to go home

and they rebuilt their temple and their way of life in Jerusalem.

This was an extraordinary event that Isaiah thought

was surely caused by God, using Cyrus as a human agent of the divine plan.

Isaiah’s interpretation of this new era was taken down for posterity.

Yahweh is doing a new thing for us, full of compassion and nurture;

but this is the same God that Moses knew.

He is coming in our lives again, though we have done nothing to merit this.

Don’t dwell on the past, but look to this new era.

What we don’t have is this prophet’s actual name:

whoever wrote chapters 40 to 55 of the book known as Isaiah

was a later visionary genius. The style of writing is different,

but collected with the original Isaiah

to lend authority to what he had to say

at a time when the tradition needed to be authenticated,

but also imagined anew.

The New Testament, this morning, in Peter’s letter and in Mark’s Gospel,

concerns more familiarly the coming of Jesus Christ;

his first appearance at the Jordan river in the Gospel,

and his hoped for appearance at the end of time.

Let us listen to our Advent scriptures.

Our Advent situation feels different to me this year,

more confusing and harder to see in the dark of it.

I’ve been following the news about job losses; you can’t miss it,

on NPR, evening news, daily papers.

So there’s November, the worst month in decades for jobs disappearing;

and the ranks of the unemployed growing.

And we don’t count people who have part-time jobs; or who have stopped looking.

There’s something about this that feels intimidating, frightening even.

Like a hidden terror attack you can’t track down or stop . . . ..

people losing work, income, homes.

Or a virus in our whole social system.

It’s one thing to reach out to someone who is sick or dying

or even displaced by floods or disasters,

or to listen to the painful stories of lost faith,

but this story is hard to grapple with.

This would still be somewhat abstract, manageable maybe,

except that a close friend locally has been let go

from a job he held for over 20 years, and he’s just shy of the age

when retirement would be possible, sustainable.

If I’m bewildered, he is stunned to the heart,

and naturally vacillates between anger and fear.

He calls me up for support, just a voice on the phone, asking not even for prayer,

but more for awareness, and maybe a reference to job opportunities,

something I have little awareness of for starters.

And I think to myself: how sheltered I am in my own life

from this kind of crisis, job loss, unlikely in religious community,

but you have your stories of it.

It casts a different light on the story of glad tidings. the raising of hopes

that is a common theme of Advent. Expectations.

And that’s what I have to say to you:

This situation so close to home in our lives and neighborhoods,

the new face of the homeless, the fearful voice of it

cries out to heaven. It should be solvable: we are still a rich nation;

but we are a broken nation, and the cry goes up.

All the more poignant then is the story of another wilderness

where people trudge across the wastes of Darfur

or the dangerous killing fields of the Congo,

these things we now have to look at from our shared helplessness

wondering how to build our own world again

toward security, solidarity, a sustainable future.

We’re all living it together.

A cry goes up, and our hearts have to reach out, to feel beyond where we are.

So I come along here tonight without a story of hope

except for the fact that you are here, that is a story of hope in itself;

and except for the fact that a cry does go up here this night.

The cry of our own singing. This is of profound importance.

How does the meaning of our faith become flesh

except when the words are sung, breathed, lifted up, cried out.

I think this is something of what sounded in the desert around Jerusalem,

the voice of one crying out; not a scripture reading, but a powerful song it was!

"Come, O Radiant Dawn, come O Gate of hope,

Come O Mighty Lord, master of the stars, Strength of Pilgrims."

The voice in the wilderness preparing the way.

This is important to sing: it is more than sentiment.

It is the Bible taking shape among us.

"Christ circle round us."

And as we find our voices,

it’s not then just our own voices.

The Word who is flesh in us also cries out.

I read this recently from a woman theologian, Elizabeth Johnson,

writing about the crisis of meaning in the holocaust,

how we have not lived past that moment except to find within it

the cry of God himself.

"God," she says, "God is the cry of life in the midst of suffering.

For a God who would not suffer is really a demon."

This stops me, this is a teaching that measures up a little more

to the dark night of our time.

The cry of life in the midst of suffering is God’s cry.

So am I becoming more and more intimate with God

when I listen to my friend’s voice on the phone:

"I’ve been let go, after 20 years, let go."

Or another call randomly placed to the parish line:

"I need a miracle: I’ve lost my job, and my home,

my children will not have Christmas."

This is a moment of holiness and of sacred pathos, God suffering in us.

And as we listen, as we hear the cry,

we become compassionate resisters to all that would violate human beings.

Those too are words of Elizabeth Johnson. The suffering we witness

calls us to be compassionate resisters to all that would violate human beings.

Out of this cry then comes something new,

which is our desire to work for a new and different world,

even as we wonder how to face the differences it will require of us.

"What sort of persons we ought to be in holiness and godliness

to hasten the day of God." That’s the question in Peter’s letter tonight.

This desire for the Kingdom, for God’s day,

it is a real desire, waking up, don’t you see?

And that desire is the baptism of the Holy Spirit that John foresees

in the coming of Jesus in our land.

"One mightier than I," mightier than our weakness,

even as he approaches to dwell within our weakness,

to dwell within our human limitations as infant child of a poor woman.

We know that child, and we give voice to his presence.

"Longing for peace, our world is troubled,

longing for hope many despair.

Your word alone has power to save us

Make us your living voice."

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The quotations were given me from the book A Quest for the Living God, by

Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J.