Destination Bethlehem. J. Barrie Shepherd
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have been warned.
In the meantime, where did we put away
those golden Christmas bells that looked
so perfect over the front door last year?
Gifts of Advent I
Promise
Now when these things begin to take place, look up and raise your head, because your redemption is drawing near.
—Luke 21:28
In the midst of a presidential election season a young schoolboy called Brad, in Reading, Pennsylvania, composed the following essay:
If I were Presdent . . . If I were Presdent I would wish for a better world. And no guns or wars. NO litter. And everybody would be friends. And nobody would lie. No body would eat brussel sprouts or zewckeine.
What a platform! What a vision! Peace, no litter, no crooks, and NO vegetables either. Way to go, young man!
There is more involved here, however, than smiles at a youngster’s unsophisticated view of the world. What Brad is doing here is presenting a promise, a vision, his personal vision of the future. And more than anything else, in these shadowed, yet expectant days, we need such visions. Is this not, in fact, a major part of the perennial magic of these days and weeks before Christmas? They give us something to look forward to: they give us that essential gift, the gift of promise.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish,” warns the book of Proverbs 29:18 (KJV). And in a host of situations nowadays this would appear to be the case. Ask the nurses and attendants in our nursing homes and hospitals and they will tell you that the elderly and frail, even the terminally ill, will hold out, hang on to life for holidays, birthdays, weddings, those major family occasions; but afterwards, when there is nothing left to look forward to, they slip away.
Some years ago now Mhairi, my wife, and I—ourselves first-generation immigrants—visited Ellis Island and its splendidly renovated Immigration Museum. And there, shining through all those sepia-toned photographs, still lingering among the displays of family belongings and relics, resonant in the scratchy, recorded voices from long ago, we could not help but sense the presence of a vast promise, the living, breathing, almost reach-out-and-touchable vision that this nation represented to the millions who came here. It was Nietzsche, that great challenger of visions, who wrote: He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.2 It seems that we human beings are built for, designed and engineered to run on, hope. It is as vital, as essential to the soul, as oxygen is to the blood. We require, we absolutely need to have, a promise.
As soon as one says this, however, one has to concede that there are promises, and then there are promises. One of the most damning critiques of religion over the centuries has been that it has catered to this universal need by holding out false promises, by cultivating empty hopes. “Pie in the sky religion” these critics have dubbed it, when churches seek to pacify poor and oppressed peoples, to make needy folk content with their lot, by holding out the promised consolation of an eternal reward awaiting them in heaven. Yet it seems to me that the false promises we are faced with, the delusory visions we need to worry about in our day and age, have more to do with this present life than with any future realm. As travel writer Rick Steves, quoted recently in Christian Century magazine, points out,
While aristocracy-controlled religion was the opiate of the masses back then, corporate-controlled media is the opiate of the masses today.3
Perhaps nowadays we ought to be denouncing, not “Pies in the Sky When we Die,” but “Pies in the Media,” “Pies in the Lottery and Stock Market,” “Pies in all the cheap escapes and empty satisfactions thrust before us every day.”
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and sage James Reston wrote of our time as one in which people confuse the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure. Reston saw our unnamed but universally agreed upon philosophy as one that encourages folk to seek what we used to call salvation in the endless accumulation of material wealth, one which leads people to build their hopes, their vision of future bliss, around a winning lottery ticket, a lucky number at Las Vegas. Surely it could be argued that, just like those religious “Pies in the Sky Bye and Bye,” this here-and-now secular promise—of instant and unimaginable wealth, success, satisfaction, sex appeal—can also have the effect of pacifying the needy and oppressed, of distracting all kinds of people from the captivities they face in daily life.
We need a promise; we human beings must have something to hope for. Yet so much of what we do actually pin our hopes upon is inadequate at best, sheer foolishness at worst. What then? Perhaps, at last, we are ready for the genuine promise, the authentic vision of Advent. This is a different kind of promise: more elusive, but also more enduring. It is a promise of something that will always be beyond us, yet somehow can, at the same time, be within us; something that is within our reach—we can stretch out and touch it—yet is far beyond our grasp—we can never possess it or control it. This is not something we will ever achieve by our own individual efforts. Rather it is something which we can only receive in simple openness, faithfulness, and trust.
I cherish all those Old Testament prophecies of the coming of Messiah that we read at this time of year. They are so varied, so mysterious, so rich with enigma, possibility, and promise. Isaiah sings of one who is gentle and meek, “a bruised reed he will not break, a dimly burning wick he will not quench . . .” yet one who will establish universal justice, feed the hungry, free the captives, do away with poverty forever (42:3–4). Malachi has The Promised One coming in a fury of judgment, a purifying fire (3:2–3). Hosea sings of a lovely garden, “I will be as the dew to Israel; he shall blossom as the lily, he shall strike root as the poplar . . . his beauty shall be like the olive, and his fragrance like Lebanon” (14:5–6). Crazy old Balaam foresees a star coming forth out of Jacob, a scepter arising out of Israel (Num 24:17). And Jacob on his deathbed blesses his sons with the mysterious promise of Shiloh who is to come (Gen 49:10). Marvelous words they are, musical words, words that conjure hope and expectation, a vision of the future that is beyond precise and specific definition, yet is all the more powerful because of that reality.
They sing to us, these ancient seers, of trust in God, the God who holds all history in his hands. And the fascinating thing is that, as they present these hopes, as they paint these varied, multifaceted visions of the future, they do not spell out what we must do in order to get there. There are no detailed guidelines or programs, few, if any, itineraries for the journey toward the heavenly city. What they do tell us, one and all, is to be ready, to watch and pray, to make straight in the desert of our own lives and times a highway for our God.
Isn’t that what we’re ultimately put here for, after all—right at the heart of these amazingly creative, yet murderously violent times—to seek out, and then hold up a different vision, to show forth, make clear, an alternative to the gloss, the evanescent fluff this constantly consuming society of ours pours forth in such calculated abundance?
Not much of a contest really, or so it would seem, all the flash and power of the internet, the glossy magazines, the bulk mailings and the media, over against our individual lives, our modest little Sunday morning clusters. And yet the message of this season centers around just such a contest: a flickering candle in the looming, almost overwhelming dark, a fragile reed that bends before the gale but never breaks, a tender child, as full of promise today as he was two thousand years ago, an infant whose tiny, apparently powerless hands embraced the hopes and fears of all the world, still hold them tight today.
Advent is the season for promise. There are the promises of God that are fulfilled, and then renewed, in that humble manger birth. But there are also promises evoked in response, promises on our part that are called for in this season. Therefore, by the welcome we extend to all we meet, of whatever race, economic level, sexual orientation, by the generosity we extend to those in cruel want these wintered days, by the witness we bear to those in power against injustice and inequality, we must renew our own commitment