The Advent liturgy is full of shouting - and nees to be, as the Word of God competes with the eternal noise of Musak jingles or blasts of pre-Christmas bargain advertising, as well as the internal noise of our own worries about what has to be planned in family, at work, for holidays, in these weeks before Christmas. "O that thou would tear open the heavens and come down!" shout the returning Babylonian exiles of the sixth century B.C.E. They were a community in crisis, a ragged group of exiles who had returned from Babylon (in present day Iraq) to the devastation of their Jerusalem Temple and the ir land. They are facing opposition from the "locals" those who had not been exiled and did not welcome the return of people who might upset their settled life. Bold and audacious in their hope, familiar and abrasive in their speech, the remnant people still recognize God as their go'el, "redeemer" or nearest kin, charged in the Jewish tradition with the protection of the weak and needy. The returned exiles implore God to make their present sorrow and disillusionment the birth pangs of something new. Isaiah's wonderful imagry can speak to us, no matter what our present climatctic season, for we recognize that we often walk in the winter of personal sinfulness; that we can be withered people blown about aimlessly like a heap of dead leaves; that although exiled by sin we can beg our redeeming God to help us return home and live. We may look back on the past year and realize that there have been times when our lack of integrity and our lethargy have piled up like dirty laundry on those frenetic days when we had neither the time nor energy to do any washing. The days of Advent call us to some vigorous "laundering" to the repentance that enables us to continue our journey of faith clothed in the fresh grace of our baptism. The responsorial Psalm 80 is insistent about the need for the Advent repentance that we pray: "Lord make us turn to you, let us see your face and we shall be saved," even though it is a gentler repentance then that of Lent.
Sr. Verna A. Holyhead Welcoming The Word In Year B
I have tried to make it a practice to read as much commentary from people other than white male commentators because without that you don't get anything like a full meaning of things. That's a true outside of Scripture as when reading Scripture commentary. With the differences of different lives comes differences in understanding and what you notice requires emphasis. Sometimes the differences in emphasis is subtle, sometimes it's as loud as what Verna Holyhead said the liturgy for Advent has to be.
I'm probably going to be leaning most heavily on her commentary because it has that subtly different emphasis that not only shines a different light on the readings, it also makes the newly engaging, for me at least.
Through the words of Isaiah, God assures the people that he is always their go'el, their redeemer and nearest kin., has never been absent from them, is always ready and willing to be found, even by those ho have given up seeking their God. "Here I am, here I am." God also calls to us this Advent. Meister Eckardt, a fourteenth-century mystic, described spirituality as "waking up" to the presence of God in our live, especially in our sisters and brothers -those elbowing, jostling, lonely, unloved, and (we might consider) unlovable people around us or distant from us to whom we are called to reach out in practical compassion, justice, and prayer.
Which makes me think of nothing so much as something Marilynne Robinson once said, that even those of us who are really rotten people are unaccountably loved by God, even ourselves when we don't deserve love, when we fall far short, she said that we should consider that God could be expected to know ourselves better than we could, I don't think she added that we should consider that God knows those who are unloveable better than we could know them. I put that together with Emily Dickinson's hope that in heaven "Somehow it will be even, A new equation given" before she relapsed into the fashionable Transcendentalist era's habit of giving up before making a choice. I think the choice to believe is ours to make but I don't think you'll get anywhere without having the courage or audacity to make the choice. I think Robinson has more of both than poor Emily mustered in that poem, at least.
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