A Reflection for I Advent All Saints’ Episcopal Church,
Southern Shores, November 30, 2014 Thomas E.
Wilson, Rector
Being a See-er for Advent
This is the first week of Advent and we lit the candle representing Hope. The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Rome about hope (8:24-25): “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”
Part of being human is that we find it hard to see
hope. We get so involved in doing all the things that our ego demands to be in
control that we do not stop and see things with God’s eyes. The lessons for
this the first week of Advent have to do with seeing hope with God’s eyes.
Prophets like Isaiah are called Seers – one who sees with God’s vision. They
have visions and dreams, and as they try to understand what they have seen,
they translate it for the people. After prayer and meditation, Paul writes
letters to churches, as in today’s selection from one of the letters to the
church in Corinth, in order to tell them what he sees as God’s vision about the
problems in their church. He sees hope for them as he says the church in
Corinth has been given every spiritual gift they need to do God’s work. The
author of the Gospel of Mark is writing what he sees in God’s vision after the
Temple has been destroyed in 69 AD, and he remembers Jesus saying that bad
things will happen, but God’s vision of hope is shown in the Resurrection as
God shows us that nothing, even death itself, is greater than God’s love and
redemption.
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| Chagall's Calling of Isaiah |
Let me start off with a quick overview of Biblical prophecy.
In the Hebrew Testament lesson from the Book of Isaiah, things are just not working
out after the exiles come back from Babylon. This section was probably written by
students in the School of Isaiah between 530-510 BC. The school was founded by
the Prophet Isaiah who prophesied in Jerusalem of the Kingdom of Judah from 742
to 701 BC. He listened to God and, in
the name of God, he denounced the exploitation of the poor by the rich and the
powerful. He was part of a series of Prophets in the 8th Century BC -
Amos and Hosea in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and Micah in the Southern
Kingdom of Judah - all of whom railed against economic injustice. They warned
that the destruction of the community of care for all the citizens would be the
destruction of the very political reality of the Kingdoms. In essence, the
message was that the undermining of the soul of the nation, the spiritual
center based on justice and love of neighbor, would be a precursor of the
destruction of the nation.
In 721, their warnings came tragically true when the
Assyrian empire conquered the Northern Kingdom and scattered the people there to
other provinces of the Empire. Psalm 80 which we read today was written as a
song for the Northern Kingdom (the tribes of Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh) as
a Prayer for God’s help in facing the Assyrians. The people did not listen to
what the Psalmist saw and relied on their own power. The Assyrians then tried
to conquer the Southern Kingdom in Jerusalem, but a plague broke out in the
besieging Assyrian army about the time of a palace coup in the Assyrian Capital
of Nineveh, modern day Mosul in Iraq. The Empire fell apart, collapsing under
its own weight and greed, and Isaiah saw this as God giving the Southern
Kingdom a new chance to create a more just society. They sang Psalm 80 when
they were in trouble, but their leaders did not seize the opportunity to change
and the students of Isaiah had to continue to warn the rich and corrupt. These
students keeping the tradition of Isaiah of listening to God will be joined by
prophets like Nahum, Zephaniah, Jeremiah, Habakkuk and Ezekiel, all seeing the
same vision of God.
Finally in 587 BC, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which had
replaced the ruins of the Assyrian Empire, conquered Jerusalem and scattered its
leaders into the different parts of the Babylonian Empire. Jeremiah was
kidnapped and taken into Egypt where he would die, and Ezekiel would go into
exile with his people. The students of Isaiah continued and wrote songs of
encouragement to the exiles. The Babylonian Empire, as all empires do,
collapsed under its own weight and greed and was replaced by the Medes and the
Persians in 539 BC. As a result of learning about the collapse of the Assyrian,
Babylonian, and later the Egyptian empires, the Persians decided to de-centralize
their empire and allowed the exiles to return. Second Isaiah continues to record
visions of encouragement to the exiles in their return. However, the reality of
difficulty in coming together as a semi-autonomous province under Persian Rule
would prove frustrating, and the old habits of greed and injustice did not die
out. This is where the ministry of group of anonymous writers, which we lump
together as 3rd Isaiah, come to the fore and will be joined by
Haggai, Zechariah, Obadiah and Malachi, all calling for the people to remember
that a relationship with God means a just relationship with all of God’s
people.
In today’s lesson, the writer of this section of 3rd
Isaiah leads a confession for the people, a confession of how they, as the old
Prayer Book used to say, “had done those things they ought not to have done and
not done those things they ought to have done.” He asks for God’s help in
shaping a new life as they realize that they can only be who they were created
to be if they allow God to be the potter of the clay of their being.
The image of us being creatures of clay comes from
the second Creation myth in the Book of Genesis where God takes the humus of
the earth and molds it together creating a human, named Adam, from the word Adamah meaning ground, soil.
The message from the seers is that they see hope in the fact that God is
not finished working on us yet. As God pronounced that what God created is
good, so also God is helping us to work with God in making this world a good
part of God’s creation. Hope is here if we can just forget about trying to have
it our own way.
Some of you may ask what has happened to all the
prophets, the seers who see what God is saying and sharing what they see in
their soul in their conversations with God. They are still around, they are the
people who listen, who stop to look at God and let their egos take a break. I
go to poets a lot when I want to hear prophets who are seeing the world with
God’s vision. This time I will not share a poem that I wrote but a poem by a
prophet from the 19th century named Emily Dickinson who wrote this
poem about Hope:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
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| Emily Dickinson |
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
In this the first week of Advent, please stop and
listen to the way God sees this world with hope and maybe write a poem about
what your soul sees when you listen to God. My prayer for you today is that you
will be a “seer” - one who sees with God’s vision.
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