Advent: A New Year

ADVENT MARKS THE BEGINNING of the Christian year, for many. We await the return of Jesus and prepare for it by revisiting the story of his first coming. In Isaiah 64, the prophet longs for God to tear the heavens and come down, a description more apt for the latter return of Jesus than his first appearance. The longing for Jesus to return and fix the world’s mess escalated for many last year about this time and was expressed by a widely read online Advent devotional under the hashtag F**kThisS**t. (The original title was unapologetically uncensored. The originators argued that “to convey a visceral gospel, we must sometimes use visceral language.”)

There is a theology that says one day God will clean house and fix everything. In the meantime, we have to live here. Advent is about waiting and preparation. What shall we do while waiting for the return of Christ? What can we do about the state of the world? The gospel for the second Sunday in Advent calls for spiritual work, confessing and repenting sins (Mark 1:4-5). The following week the gospel suggests that there is work to which we can put our hands: “Make straight the way of the Holy One” (John 1:23).

Preparing for this Christmas season and the eventual return of Christ, we can have no better guide than Isaiah 61, the text Jesus chose for what is regarded as his first public sermon: “Bring good news to the oppressed, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty and God’s favor, and comfort all who mourn” (verses 1-3, modified).

[ December 3]

Stay Woke

Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37

"STAY WOKE" IS A MANTRA of the Black Lives Matter movement. (The grammar is AAVE, or African American Vernacular English.) It is an exhortation to pay attention to the injustices around us. In the New Testament, the expression “keep awake” urges believers to watch and wait for Jesus to return (see Matthew 24:42; 25:13; Mark 13:35, 37; 1 Thessalonians 5:6).

“Stay woke” and “keep awake” may seem distinct: one a focus on human failings and the other a focus on Jesus who redeems, restores, and reconciles. The two postures hold much in common. In neither is one only watching and waiting. Those who assert the value of black life, in the face of actions and policies that deny its value, stay “woke” to resist and counter the squandering of black life and those who defend death-dealing policies. Likewise, the call to “keep awake” is a call to actively prepare for the return of Jesus.

That preparation is indicated by the illustration in Mark 13:32-37 in which the slaveholder expects his slaves to do their assigned work while he is away. The text is concerned with whether the slaveholder will find his slaves sleeping. Staying woke while reading this text—and indeed all the scriptures—means resisting the normalization of slavery in the text, including in the teaching of Jesus.

Unfortunately, unhappily, the slaveholder appears to be analogous to Jesus in the parable. Staying woke to the ugliness of that convergence and its impact on the history of the world means never minimizing slavery in any context.

[ December 10 ]

A God of Mercy

Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8

It’s your own fault. One broad tradition in Israelite theology can be summed up in the notion that bad things happen to people who do bad things—or, in some cases, because their parents or ancestors did bad things (see Deuteronomy 28:20; Ezra 9:13; Jeremiah 11:17). But there came a point when this theology had to be revisited. The horrors the Israelites endured during the siege and fall of Babylon and during the exile were more than they could have ever deserved, even with the most vengeful retributive theology.

God spoke to the poet-prophet, who here continues the Isaian tradition, to rebuke this theology. God tells the prophet to comfort her people (Isaiah 40:1) and assure them that whatever penalty they might have earned has been more than paid—double, in fact (40:2). The Isaian tradition may have been continued in Second and Third Isaiah by disciples that First Isaiah took into the desert (8:6). In Daughters of Miriam, I argue that some of those writing in this tradition were women.

To comfort the people, the prophet offers a well-rounded theology to reintroduce them to their God. God overturns the status quo, even if it’s carved in stone (Isaiah 40:4); God holds all accountable (verse 10); God tenderly cares for her sheep and lambs (verse 11). Here the most comforting attribute of God is God’s presence. This is the “good news”—basar in Hebrew is euaggelizo in Greek, later “gospel.” Here is your God (verse 9)!
Whatever will come, God will be with them—in victory, defeat, exile, and restoration.

[ December 17 ]

Mary’s Poetry

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Luke 1:46b-55;1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28

Mother Mary and son Jesus are both powerful preachers (and cousin John isn’t bad either). Isaiah 61 (“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me ...”) is memorable because Jesus used it for his “inaugural sermon” in Luke 4:16-22. It is a simple and straightforward declaration of the good news. The poet-prophet responsible for this portion of Isaiah speaks in the first person on behalf of an unidentified person. In Luke 4:21, Jesus claims this text as his mission statement.

Isaiah 61 on its own is a powerful proclamation of the gospel, making plain that the work of God through her servant is the care and redress of the downtrodden and disposed, including a complete reversal of their fortunes. People at the bottom of every power curve are God’s primary concern: the oppressed, the broken-hearted, those experiencing captivity—political and social, such as occupation, and those imprisoned—with no mention of guilt or innocence, and those who mourn (Isaiah 61:1-2). The well-being of these is at the heart of the gospel in both testaments.

In Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman asked rhetorically if there was “something unique ... in the womb of the people out of whose loins [Jesus] came.” The affirmative response applies to the woman out of whose womb Jesus came as well. Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46b-55) is rooted in Hannah’s hymn (1 Samuel 1:1-10) and in Psalm 113:5-9. It is a hymn of trust and praise—and makes a very fine sermon. I’d like to think Jesus knew his mother’s poetry and preaching and that it is reflected in his own.

[ December 24 ]

House Hunting

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38

God dwells with us. Second Samuel 7 and Luke 1:26-38 each detail a potential divine home. In 2 Samuel, David comes up with the honorable idea of providing God a permanent home reflecting the glory of David’s own home. In an interesting episode, Nathan tells David to go for it, but when he gets home, God is waiting for him like a wife who has just found out her husband made plans for her without checking. She is not pleased. She tells him to march himself back to David and tell him no. David can’t build God a house because David’s hands are stained with blood from his years of pillage and murder, killing women, men, and likely children as well (1 Samuel 27:11).

The home the Blessed Virgin offers God in Luke 1:26-38 stands in marked distinction from the bloodstained building David would have built. She offers flesh, blood, and a pure heart. Reading this text on Christmas Eve doesn’t allow the reader to live with and contemplate this miraculous pregnancy. It really belongs nine months in advance. Since the date of Christmas has been set as Dec. 25, the Feast of the Annunciation is observed on March 25. The Annunciation has been understood as such a pivotal day—detailing God’s intent to dwell in human flesh in and through the body of Miryam (Mary) of Nazareth—that some medieval Christians marked it as the first day of the new year.

[ December 31 ]

A Jewish Messiah

Isaiah 61:10 - 62:3; Psalm 148; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:22-40

It’s still Christmas in churches like mine where Christmas is a season and lasts 12 days. Today’s lessons remind us that at the heart of our Christian story is a faithfully Jewish, Torah-observant family. In Luke 2:21, Yeshua (Jesus) is circumcised, according to Leviticus 12:3. In the assigned text Miryam goes to the temple to be purified after childbirth, according to Leviticus 12:1-8. The text presents the purification with the redemption of the firstborn, though there would have been a 10-day period between them. The redemption ritual was based on Exodus 13:2 and Numbers 18:15-16, in which all firstborn are offered to God. Miryam’s sacrifice is the offering permitted for women who are too poor to offer the standard lamb (Leviticus 12:6, 8).

The author of Luke takes pains to establish the Jewish identity and fidelity of the holy family. He uses the plural throughout to make Yosef (Joseph) a participant, though the purification was for Miryam alone. The gospel builds a case that Yeshua is the Jewish messiah, confirmed by a venerable elder Shimon (Simeon) in Luke 2:25-32 and by a prophet Hannah (Anna) in Luke 2:36-38.

A messiah or “anointed one” is a priest in the Torah and a monarch in the rest of the Hebrew Bible (see Leviticus 4:3; 2 Samuel 23:1; Isaiah 45:1). Unlike monarchs and priests who are concerned with (only) their people and their borders, this messiah offers light and redemption to all nations.