Hi Friends,
First off, I am preaching at Imago Dei Church in Portland, Oregon this Sunday if any of you are in the area and want to check it out.
Next up in our Monday Night sessions, we will work our way through the Advent sermons in Rowan Williams’ collection Open to Judgment. If you don’t know him, Rowan Williams, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, is one of the most significant theologians in the church today. His expertise is in Eastern Orthodox theology and he is also a poet with eyebrows that belong in Hogwarts.
Here is a recent interview with him in the New York Times.
And here is the text of the first sermon we will discuss on Monday at 7:00 EST:
Advent
A university sermon
Advent pulls the imagination in two directions. We turn our minds to the universal longing for God that is given voice in the Jewish scriptures, the yearning towards the ‘desire of all nations’; in the cycle of the great Advent antiphons that begin with O Sapientia on 16 December, the phrase comes twice, in the sixth and seventh texts: O Rex gentium, ‘O King of nations and their desire’, O Emmanuel, ‘desire of all nations and their salvation’. Christmas is the moment of recognition, the moment when what we have always secretly known is set out in plain and fleshly terms. And at the same time,’Woe unto you who desire the day of the Lord’ and ‘Who may abide the day of his coming? For he is like a refiner’s fire.’ This morning’s Old Testament lesson reinforces this:’the loftiness of man shall be bowed down...and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day... And they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth.’Christ-mas is a beauty that is the beginning of terror: the Burning Babe, who has come to cast fire upon the earth. Before his presence, the idols fall and shatter.
In other words, Advent is about the essential ambiguity of our religiousness. We live, as human beings, in an enormous hunger to be spoken to, to be touched, to be judged and loved and absolved.We live-at some level-in the awareness that there are things we cannot do for ourselves. No human being alone can teach himself or herself language; nchuman being alone can know himself or herself loved. And the whole human race alone cannot assure itself of its worth or interest, its dignity and lovableness, its responsibility.When no reality over against us pronounces a word of judge-ment or a word of affirmation, how do we know we are worth judging? The twentieth century has been in full flight from certain conceptions of personal morality, but what age has ever suffered from so acute an awareness of collective responsibility? Who shall absolve us from the guilt of the Holocaust? Colonialism? The Enlightenment? The failure of the Enlightenment? Who could absolve us from the guilt of a nuclear catastrophe? The appalling moral anxious-ness of our age is an oblique recognition that the human being as such waits to hear something; and when we have collectively denied the possibility of hearing something from beyond our corporate culture, we expose ourselves to deep worries about our humanness. ‘Man did not lose his self in the modern age but rather became incommunicado,being able neither to speak for himself nor to be spoken to...he becomes invisible. That is why people in the modern age took photographs by the million: to prove despite their deepest suspicions to the contrary that they were not invisible.’1
It is the same writer who wryly observes that we are obsessed with the idea of being contacted by extra-terrestrial beings, and that we have a deep and yearning credulity about this beneath all our scepticism. We long to know that we are addressed. And this is where the ambiguity comes in: we fantasise about what such an address might be; we project on to the empty space before us the voices we need to hear.Close Encounters of the Third Kind remains a haunting fiction-a story of extra-terrestrial visitation in which the ‘aliens’ turn out to have the ghostly shapes and faces of a lost childhood. The menacing stranger is, after all, only our own forgotten innocence. It is a striking secular parody of the Christian story, and one that points up the questionable-ness of our desire. What if our longing to hear a word spoken to us from beyond simply generates a loud echo of our need to be told we are all right, we have never funda-mentally gone astray, we have never really left an undifferen-tiated Paradise? But our longing to hear from outside our frontiers is likely to be mixed with apprehension about what is completely different. The voice from beyond may assure us that we are not invisible; can it assure us that we are heard,taken seriously, valued and understood? Best to be on the safe side and prescribe what we shall hear. Even the language of the grand impersonal beauty of the cosmic void -so dear to a certain kind of semi-popular scientist and the metaphysics of Mr Don Cupitt-is just as much a projection,a fiction, a noble and unmoved classical countenance out-facing the misery of human affairs, somehow consoling by being indestructible.
Our longings remind us of the essential human fact that we are talked and touched into life, and that a human race struggling to do all its talking and touching for itself faces a paralysing unhappiness and anxiety. And these longings are also fraught with the danger of illusion, the making of idols to meet our needs. The Israelites pour their treasures into a mould and ouIt comes the Golden Calf; as if surprised,they cry, ‘Here is God’, as if they had not themselves deter-mined the shape of the outcome.
‘In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver, and his idols of gold, which they made each one for himself to worship, to the moles and to the bats.’ For the people of God in Jewish scripture, loyalty to the covenant meant above all the forsaking of idols: the task is not to make sense of the world,beginning from unaided human resource,but to let ourselves be given sense purely by the summons of God.This was Israel’s own story: being led out of slavery and given shape and solidity by the unexpected presence and pressure of God. Israel’s hostility to idols is a measure of the recog-nition that what I make to meet my needs cannot set me free,cannot give me a new and assured reality. The eyes of the idol are my own, looking back at me; I am still incommunicado.
And in Advent, in that day, we all become-as it has beensaid-Jews once more. We relearn the lessons of the first covenant: that we cannot make God, however we long for him; that we must be surprised, ambushed and carried off by God if we are to be kept from idols. The loyalty of the Jewish people to God is the fierce preservation of such a story: there is no sense to be made by thinking or imagining,only the violent upheaval by which Israel became a single community of obedience and praise. That loyalty remains in the Jewish people: in the refusal to ‘make sense’ of, to explain and domesticate, the nightmare upheaval of this century,the Holocaust; refusing comfort,refusing reconcili-ation with the memory, this can be the most potent of witnesses to the faith of the Mosaic covenant. No idols, no images to mirror back to us what we long to hear.
The Christian in Advent needs to listen to that, listen to such a degree that this season becomes both a season of joyful expectancy and a season of ‘poverty’-of the knowledge that we cannot talk and touch ourselves into life; of that deep poverty of the imagination which can only stand helplessly before the outrages and miseries of our world, utterly at a loss for a word of meaning or hope to speak. We are here at all, celebrating Advent (as the Jew celebrates the Passover)because there has been a word spoken, a word of unexpected interruption, a word that establishes for good the difference between the God we expect and the God who comes,a word that shows us once and for all what an idol looks like in face of the truth. We are here because those acts we call liberation and absolution have turned our history into new and strange courses-the history of Israel (up to the present time), the history of a Church struggling to keep open its doors to all people. Yet we cannot imagine how tomorrow and the day after, that form of liberation and absolution will renew itself, how the word will go on making itself heard to renew the world. We are perpetually looking to and giving thanks for an uncovenanted event, a transforming newness,the history of Israel and Jesus; we are perpetually ‘on the eve’ of God’s coming,knowing and not knowing what it will be. Advent insists that we stay for a while in this tension of being ‘on the eve’, if only in order that the new thing wecelebrate at Christmas may have a chance of being truly new for us, not a stale and pious cliché.
There is a risk for any religion that looks to accomplished events as its foundation. The word once unexpectedly spoken becomes ours, is absorbed more and more into our needs and fancies and preferences. Once it was strange, now it is familiar and idolatrous. The Advent tension is a way of learning again that God is God: that between even our deepest and holiest longing and the reality of God is a gap which only grace can cross; otherwise we are alone again,incommunicado, our signals and symbols bounced back to us off the glassy walls of the universe.
‘The idea of God remains uncompletable for humanity’, wrote Hans Urs von Balthasar. We begin building a bridge from two ends-philosophical questing for unity and mean-ing, and mythological interest in a divine life that is personal and engagé; but ‘the idea cannot complete the bridge spar’.?Historical action alone closes the gap, the discovery all at once of a unity existing not as a theory but as a community of love and worship held together in response to the unex-pected moment when history turns and there is disclosed ‘a total and presuppositionless love’.3 If we keep Advent faith-fully,we shall know a little of how the word of this love can be freely heard only when we recognise the power of our urge to idolatry. Advent, we have said, sets out before us the richness of religious eros; it is a season of beautiful,elegiac hymns,voicing our longing to be spoken to, judged and absolved.But in its deeper aspect, its pushing of us back into the experience of Israel and Israel’s unconsoled rejection of idols,it shows us also the danger of religious eros, its capacity to become another vehicle for human self-reflection. The Christian, in the Advent season above all, must learn some-thing of God’s own simultaneous ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to all religious aspiration and expectation. God, say the mystics,is innominabile and omninominabile, the one for whom no name is adequate, the one of whom all true words speak.
Only the newness of a new turn of history, the specific newness of new words, acts and relations, can show the God who wvill not allow himself to be caught in the circle of ideas alone, and so can show the God who exceeds both the fiercest longing and the profoundest speculation of crea-tures. Because Advent tells us to look for mystery, absolute grace and freedom, in a fleshly human face, within the mobile form of our shared history, it brings our idolatry-philosophical and mythological alike - to judgement. Our hunger is met, we are talked and touched into new and everlasting life, our desire is answered; but only insofar as we have lived in an Advent of the religious imagination,struggling to let God be God; casting our idols of silver and gold to the moles and bats, ‘for fear of the Lord and for the glory of his majesty’, longing simply for our God to show himself as God in the ‘total and presuppositionless love’ of his incarnate speech to us.
