wonderment: thoughts on advent

"Only wonder understands. Concepts create idols." Gregory of Nyssa

When i was an intern pastor my supervisor said, “Advent’s coming. What should we do?” I said, “It seems like people are so accustomed to Christmas that its strangeness doesn’t impact them anymore.” “Right,” he said, “Let’s do something about that.”

So, we had a woman in the church paint an ordinary clay flower pot gold, decorate it with lots of baubles, and put it on a set of steps in the chancel. Each week we moved the pot with great ceremony down the steps. The drama culminated in the Christmas Eve destruction of the pot, crushed in a bag on the communion table. It was strong, that’s for sure.

The beauty of it was in the unexplained parts of it. I’m sure the sermons worked another, more intellectual angle, but the sight of that pot moving inexorably to its demise, its beauty obscured by a bag and then beaten to pieces with a hammer was a wonder-filled thing.

Gregory of Nyssa caught a truth that the Church (or, a large part of it) has lost sight of. In fact, many arms of the Church ran straight into the idolatry he was warning against. Once, when i was teaching an adult Sunday School class, a man said, “We know that the Bible is a book of principles . . .” I was flabbergasted, flummoxed, even. I honestly thought that only straw men set up by liberals and post-evangelicals said such things. I’m sure i didn’t answer very well, which is unfortunate, because he was beyond wrong. He was treading the ground of idolatry.

For some people i meet, to even hint that wonder is the best way to understanding is a heresy. Maybe it is. It transgresses against the religion of reason, it questions the worth of logic and linear thinking, it suggests that maybe we cannot know perfectly, but only through a dirty window at best. Wonderstanding (so, it’s a word now) is not the opposite of intellectual understanding. It’s not emotionalism. God knows American pop piety is full to overflowing with meaningless sentimentalism. Wonder is a different way, one that might move us past some of the roadblocks thrown up by knowing or feeling.

Advent, the liturgical season preceding Christmas, is an invitation. It’s an invitation to understand the Incarnation through wonder, not concepts, ideas, theologies, or theories. Without building elaborate schemes to explain away or defend the Story, we get to wonder at the hard stuff (like a God who loves all people enough to live and die for them) and the impossible stuff (like a virgin birth). Advent says, “Please, let’s not force this through the micro-filter of a modernist mindset. Please, let’s not approach these texts with preconceived religious ideas. Don’t try to understand through twenty-first century or first century eyes, through science oriented eyes or the eyes of faith.” In the spiritual exercise of Advent, we don’t seek to examine the stories with a microscope or to have an audience with a set of principles. Rather, we want to swim in the texts. Allow the fullness of the Story, which is no mere tale, to flow over you and fill you with wonder.

what about the rest of it?
When you read the Apostles’ Creed, you might not notice that the life of Jesus is summarized by the phrase, “He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He rose again from the dead.” You might think, if you did notice it, “What about the rest of it?” If you didn’t know any different, you might think that Jesus popped out, fully formed, and died.

We Western Christians, heirs of the mediaeval Roman Church, focus on the crucifixion, almost exclusively, and we apply that death almost exclusively to our own salvation (Granted, we are also people of the Resurrection, which is very, VERY important. But our obsession with our personal salvation might be keeping us from some bigger implications of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Implications like the redemption of the entire cosmos.). Among other problems, such a focus allows us to leave behind some of Jesus’ harder words and teachings. In the rush to save Jesus from being added to The List of History’s Great Teachers, we relegate him to the Myths of Dying and Rising Gods pile.

Our sisters and brothers in the Eastern Orthodox cluster of churches see things a little differently. They have a great appreciation for the incarnation of Jesus. They have a word that’s connected to it, kenosis, which is the taking on of flesh, his self-emptying, his humility. When the first cell divided in Mary, something (or, better, Something – Someone!) shifted in the universe. God in the material world – nothing could ever be the same again. Even if Jesus failed in his mission (a very real possibility, one we seldom really contemplate), everything changes.

(((Do you ever contemplate the possibility of Jesus failing in his mission? It appears, from reading the stories, that God gambled everything on this chance to save the cosmos from extinction. His prayer to the Father gives us a little insight into what was at stake there. I’ll confess, i’m more than a little afraid of that Love, a Love so deep. You should be, too.)))

at least three (maybe more)
The changes we usually focus on are in the area of sin. We say that by dying, Jesus defeated sin. Sometimes i hear a great slogan, this from my more conservative evangelical friends: by living a sinless life and dying a sinless death, Jesus frees us from sin. I want to say more. With some caution i want to say that in the death of Jesus sin died. I realize the audacity of that, given the obvious odor of sin in my life and the world, but there is no future for sin. It no longer holds the human race like it once did.

I wrote something like, “Sin died with Jesus,” in my ordination paper. That did not sit well with the review committee. As i looked for metaphors to explain myself, the image of a snake whose back has been broken slid into my mind. When a snake (and a lot of other creatures) is mortally crippled it flails around. Its frenetic activity isn’t the sign of health, but of impending death. Is sin like that?

Jesus’ life was also an affront to the reign of death over all people. Isaiah called it a shroud that covers the nations. Living is always a movement toward death. And that can be frightening. Somewhere (I think it was in Greece) the Church picked up an idea like a venereal disease: the idea that we humans have an immortal soul. If we do, someone forgot to tell the writers of the Scriptures about it. Does that surprise you, or even sound grating in your ears? We have bought a package of wishful thinking that there’s something in us destined for eternity, by its very nature. We, brothers and sisters, are mortal. That means we’re not immortal in our natural selves. We imagine that some little part of ourselves will survive the sloughing off of this skin like a snake. When we die, we die (The one consistent objection i get from people when I spring that phrase on them that is, “Well, what about hell?” To bring hell into this discussion is a little like trying to soak up the ocean with a cup of sawdust, it’s that insignificant. To worry that someone might not burn in the lake of fire for eternity because they might not live that long seems to have little to do with the good news of Jesus, who came to liberate us from hellishness, including wishing everlasting damnation on others).
Everything Jesus did, from the moment of his conception, was a challenge to death. He was Life itself, walking around in a world of death.

Almost as importantly, that Life is given to us. You, the holistic reality that is You, will live eternally, not because you were created with an immortal soul, but because the death denying life of Jesus is given to you. Again, the Orthodox give us language to carry these deep realities. They have another great word, deification, which hints at our union with God, the Life of God being lived in us, and we living the Life of God.

Finally, Jesus came to undo what St. Paul in Ephesians calls “the principalities and powers.” Some of us mistakenly think that term means only personal demons, tempters like alcoholism, lust, pride. Others of us believe it to mean only the structures of injustice that oppress human beings like capitalism, communism, and corporations. The Apostle seems to have meant both and probably more. Whatever else it means, Jesus came to undo those powers and to establish an alternative kingdom.

the alternative
The kingdom of God is not heaven. It’s not pie-in-the-sky; it’s pie-on-earth. At least, it’s a slice of the pie. The kingdom of God is about restored relationships. First, as the carol says, “God and sinner [are] reconciled”. Second, there is in the kingdom reconciliation among people and peoples, which has enormous implications for ecological stewardship and war and economic justice and racism and domestic violence (and a slew of other issues that sometimes make people uncomfortable because they sound political).

Our Orthodox friends remind us that by his very incarnation, Jesus sanctified all things. He became matter, sanctifying matter. The very substance of the universe is now united with God is a way it wasn’t before. The Preacher in Ecclesiastes was wrong: here indeed is a new thing under the sun, but it’s not the same sun that rose yesterday. It, too, has been changed by divinity sliding into the world in a new way. The human experience is sanctified because Jesus passed this way before: as a zygote, as an infant, as a youth, as an adult. Everything is different.

a people en route/a saviour en route
So, her we are, approaching Advent, a season the Church marks out for her children. The word advent means something like what we mean by en route. During the season of en route we read the Scriptures of the ancient Hebrews because, somewhere between the Jordan River and Babylon, they began to think about and get a glimpse of and imagine in their deepest longing a Deliverer who would come and rescue them from their enemies. Their prophets point to a kingdom in which justice is truly done, where everyone has enough, where there is no want. We read the nativity narratives of the New Testament because those writers were beginning to realize that Jesus came as that Deliverer, but to save us from our real enemies: sin, death, and the principalities and powers of personal demons and power structures.

But the season of Advent has another meaning. St. Patrick’s Breastplate, a sixth century poem/prayer calls on the strength of Christ’s “return for the judgment of doom.” That’s why so many of the texts for this season focus on prophecies of the fullness of the kingdom, not only what it can, should, and sometimes does look like now, but the fullness of “God’s dwelling among mortals”.

But don’t be fooled by the theology or theologies you’ve heard about the return of Jesus. There is much flotsam and jetsam today that looks like solid ground when it comes to the return of Jesus, but turns out to be only rotted wood, illusions, and dangerous ones at that, because they claim to be the sole truth and probably are nothing like it. Many trees have been felled to promote silly unbiblical theories and speculations and plot lines of the so-called end times. They’re not only unbiblical in their competing diagrams, but in their encouragement of sloppy living now. Here, i think, the Apostles’ Creed does indeed summarize clearly what scripture has to say: “he will come to judge the living and the dead.” Dwell on that, and in that, for this time, not on weak speculation and textual gymnastics that try to answer questions the Scriptures never pose.

I hope you’ll dive into Advent. Puzzle it. Wrestle with it. Let it throw your intellect, your emotions and your spirit to the floor and tell you its mysteries. Let the wonderment it teach you understanding.