Homily for Advent 2, December 7th 2008
The Very Revd Michael J. Pitts
Christ Church Cathedral
The Very Revd Michael J. Pitts
Christ Church Cathedral
Isaiah 40:1-1
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8
Perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of our present world financial crisis is that we have discovered how much of our economy and therefore of our way of life, is based on consumer spending. From the 1950's onwards advertising has used the insights of Sigmund Freud to invent ways of persuading us not only to want more and more, but to want things we have no real use for, and probably didn't know existed before we saw the advertisement. All of the great Christian festivals have been co-opted by commerce to promote consumer sales. We know about Christmas, of course, but even in this beautiful season of Advent we have been persuaded to provide our kids with a count down to the great feast of consumption in the Advent Calendar. And on the way we have taught them to consume a piece of chocolate each day!
When I was young and growing up in the Christian faith, the customary theme for Advent was the four last things - Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. I am not suggesting that this stick and carrot approach to Christian education was especially healthy and its use to control and manipulate people is as unacceptable, in my understanding, as any post-Freudian advertising method. Yet this sort of theology continues to be propagated today in many churches, where it serves not only to control the people, but also to maintain the leaders, usually men, in their positions of power.
But as I started my studies of theology in earnest, I found reasons other than these to move to a different understanding of Advent. For I found that the Bible, when studied in the historical-critical tradition, is not so much a manual for a personal spiritual life centred on going to heaven and avoiding hell. It is rather a story about a God who is made known in history. We know that the Bible contains many texts from different authors of different periods, with very different themes and theologies. But, in the way in which the texts have been put together and come down to us through the Jewish-Christian tradition, there is an overall theme, or rather two themes nestled one in the other. The outer theme is the history of the universe, from creation to re-creation, from Genesis to Apocalypse. The inner story is that of salvation history, the calling of God's people, the history of Israel, the coming of the Messiah, the crucifixion and resurrection and the life of the church in the Spirit. This view of the Bible, which has evolved through critical scholarship over the past two hundred years, is now accepted by the vast majority of scholars in the mainline churches. Advent as the focus of thinking about salvation history is clearly delineated in the Bible readings for the season in the Revised Common Lectionary, which is likewise used, with small variations, in all the mainline churches. [1] Today's readings are an example of this.
Before I go off in a slightly different direction, I should like to point out that this understanding of God, made known in history and specifically in salvation history, points us to community centred, socially oriented interpretation of the meaning of our faith rather than an individualistic view. Our faith comes to us out of a community, and our hope for the future is a hope for the whole human race and for the whole of creation. It is also clear, as we read the scriptures in this light, that God's justice is not so much a question of reward and punishment in relation to individual sins. It is more a matter of social and international justice, with a special concern for justice and compassion towards the poor, the oppressed, the marginalised and the enslaved. There are even passages in the Biblical writers which, thousands of years before our current concerns with environment and ecology, point to justice being a cosmic demand requiring proper respect for the world God created. Salvation, too, is less of an individual spiritual experience: it is more an outward political movement, which flows from God, through us, to the world.
These, then, have been among the themes which I have preached during Advent and indeed across the Christian year throughout my ministries. But these themes, so full of possibilities for reflection and for praxis (that wonderful 70's word), also raise problems. Let me try to discuss two of them.
The Biblical view of history is set in a frame work which (if we include the two millennia since the time of Jesus to the present) is about six thousand years wide, from creation to 2008. But after the work of Einstein, Slipher, Friedmann, Hubble and others who have followed them, we now have to think of the history of the universe spreading over fourteen billion years. But it is not only the work of mathematicians and astrophysicist that challenges the Biblical view of history. Geophysicists and evolutionary biologists from Darwin onwards have also provided a very different framework in which we understand history. (By the way, in 2009 we shall celebrate the 200th birthday of Darwin.) In particular, the evolutionary understanding of life and biosphere profoundly challenges not only the Biblical book of Genesis, but the whole Biblical view of humanity and our relationship to the cosmos. For some the dichotomy between Biblical and modern scientific views of cosmic history has led to atheism. Others have resolved the problem for themselves by holding religion and science in separate watertight spheres. Still others have rejected science for a simple old time religion. I find myself among those who continue to struggle to find a single search for truth in all areas of experience.
The problems of which I have just spoken relate to what, a moment ago I referred to as the outer theme of the overall Biblical narrative from creation to re-creaction. But the inner theme, that of salvation history, also creates many problems. Among them I should like to highlight two. The concept of a chosen people, whether we think of it as the people of Israel, the Christian Church or the idea of a Jewish-Christian people, is essentially an excluding idea. Whether we think that God's choice is for the privilege of salvation of for the duty of service, some are inside, some are outside. This insider/outsider mentality has played itself out in history in horrendous ways, slavery, anti-Semitism, the Shoa, not to mention the current persecution and dehumanisation of homosexual persons. In our global village, It also stands in the way of crossing barriers and building bridges between ourselves and people of the other faiths, Islam, Hinduism Buddhism and the oriental religions among them. It is interesting to note that, by and large, the globalized world of finance, business and consumerism, with which we began, has bypassed these barriers. But they are less easily bypassed in the search for peace, justice, new humanity and freedom.
The second problem I want to highlight is, on the one hand, an internal discrepancy within the scriptural narrative but, on the other hand, possibly a pointer to way of resolving the first problem. The narrative framework of all the writers of Christian Scripture includes the idea of a people chosen for suffering, service and ultimately for salvation. That idea of God's choice entails the idea of the rejection and exclusion of the others. But in Paul's thinking there is also the idea that the cross breaks down all barriers. In the Gospels there are also many passages where Jesus is shown to be inviting people into an open boundary-less community. This theme figured largely in the work of the modern Jesus of History scholars such as Borg and Crossan, who saw this view of Jesus being based in the historical person. But whatever the long term validity of the conclusions of these scholars (and it is much debated), they have certainly alerted me to seeing this inclusive theme an important, if minority, component of both Gospel narrative and Pauline theology.
As we struggle with the present financial crisis brought about by unbridled consumerism and capitalism, with ecological crisis which has similar roots, but is also rooted in past interpretations of Scripture, and with the warfare and violence of our time which arises from the divisions of religion and culture, maybe it would be important to take this other theme of our scripture seriously, even if this might result in a total revolution in the church and in Christian faith.
[1] For more information about the Revised Common Lectionary, go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Common_Lectionary
