1^st Sunday of Advent (B); November 29, 2020

Is 63:16b-17,19b; 64:2b-7 Ps 80 1 Cor 1:3-9.  Mk 13:33-37

Deacon Jim McFadden

         Carly Simon in the 1970s sang, “Anticipation, anticipation is makin’ me late, is keepin’ me waitin.”  As we enter the new liturgical year and the season of Advent, this song reminds us that we wait in anticipation for the coming of Christ within our hearts and community at a deeper level.  Fort that to happen we need to be vigilant and expectant.

            The first reading is taken from the 63^rd and 64^th chapters of the prophet Isaiah, which has to do with the passionate expectation of the nation of Israel during the time of Babylonian Exile.  To understand the latter, think of 9-11 and Covid-19 a thousand-fold.  The exile in Babylon was the ultimate calamity for biblical Jews because everything had fallen apart.  The nation was destroyed, the temple was burned down, and the people were carried away to a distant land.  They lost everything.

            This was obviously hard to take.  They were God’s Chosen People.  The temple was the epicenter of their worship.  Jerusalem was God’s great city.  How could this happen?  So, for 50 years, while they waited in exile, Israel anguished and they wondered whether they were still God’s people.  Listen to this line from the first reading:  “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, with the mountains quaking before you” (Is 63:19cd).

            This is not the language of praise, but one of anger, deep disappointment, and lamentation.  “ Why don’t you come down?  Why don’t you make the mountains quake before you.”  Why don’t you act?! Israel is waiting.

            Like the ancient Israelites we, too, in one way or the other, feel captive, put upon, exiled from where we want to be.  Therefore, we feel the anguish of exiled Israel.  As we strive to live in shelter-in-place, work at home, manage our household, monitoring our children’s Distance Learning, we may feel  in a very spiritually dry space and time.  It’s like wandering in a desert, where there is so much bleakness.  We cry out, “When is this ever going to end?  How long Lord will you allow us to experience this darkness?  Where are you in this chaos?”  It appears as though God has hidden himself and so, we cry out in anguish, “How long O Lord?”

            Listen more to the prophet Isaiah in chapter 64: “For you have hidden your face from us and have delivered us up to our guilt” (cf. 64:6b).  There are times in our life when it seems that God is simply “missing in action.”

            So, how do we make sense of all of it?  Now, comes a master image for the time of Advent: “Yet, O Lord, you are our father; we are the clay and you are the potter: we are all the work of your hands” (v. 7).

            Let’s unpack this image.  As revealed in the Old Testament, God is intimately involved in Salvation History and the work of creation and redemption.  At the Burning Bush (cf. Exodus 3:7-10) God reveals himself to Moses as ‘Yahweh’: I AM.  Therefore, God is always in act:  God is always present to us here and now—not in the past, not in the future, but in this moment: in the eternal now.  The great Church father St. Irenaeus (202 a.d.) said that “God is unmade ; he is the Creator.  But, we, his creatures are continually being made” (Against Heresies). We are being shaped by an artist trying to fashion us into something pleasing to him.

            How does God fashion us?  As the contemporary spiritual writer Paula d’Arcy once said, “God comes to us disguised as our life.”  God shapes us according to everything that happens to us: success and failure; gain and loss; sickness and health; financial setbacks.  Think of all of this, everything as ingredients of God shaping you.  I’m not saying that God causes stuff to happen  in our lives, such as the pandemic, but he can use everything for his purposes.  In other words, whatever happens can be used for God’s shaping desire.

            And, so, like ancient Israel in exile, we wait because all of us to some degree are wandering in the land of exile.  We wait, we watch, we cry out to the Lord.  But, while we do, we keep the master image of the potter in mind.  We’re the clay, we’re passive in God’s hands.  Moreover, this potter is not distant or aloof.  Rather, he is immediately and intimately present here as our sacred story unfolds.  He is carefully molding  us into the people he wants us to be. 

            Carry that tension: wait for that; watch for that—that’s a good attitude to bring to Advent. Amen.