In the Real World, Advent 2 (C) – 1997

---

The lessons and Gospel for today all reflect the totally unique character of our faith among human religions in the way in which it is constantly tied to specific times and places and people in history. Here as we begin the church year, we not only have Baruch’s prophecy of a very concrete return to Jerusalem, but we also have St. Paul’s opening of his letter to the Christians at Philippi, with its prayer that their love may overflow with knowledge and insight, and, finally, we have St. Luke’s carefully dated and structured notice of the beginning of the ministry of St. John the Baptist. In all of these the Bible and its authors are making very clear the fact that God works in and through history and that creation and history are good.

Granted Buddhism is related to the life of the Gautama, but his is a message of escape from the world into a “higher,” “spiritual” realm in which all individuality is to be destroyed. And granted that Hinduism is tied to the appearance of Vishnu in his various forms, but again the true reality is seen as “spiritual” and all concrete history is ultimately meaningless. Finally, Islam is clearly tied to the life and teaching of Mohammed, but his is post- Christian and fundamentally based in the Old Testament Biblical tradition.

It is only the two Biblical faiths, Judaism and Christianity, which see creation as basically good and see God constantly acting in and through history. Indeed the whole of the Bible is the record of the way in which the faithful have seen God acting in history. Whether it is the author of Genesis starting out “In the beginning God created,” or Abraham called to leave his home in Harran, or Moses called to lead the people out of Egypt, or Saul anointed to be king of Israel, or Isaiah in the temple seeing “the Lord high and lifted up,” or God incarnate in the person of His Son, Jesus, or John the Baptist, “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the High priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas,” our Biblical tradition is one of God acting in history in relation to specific people and times and places. In the Bible we always deal with a God who cares radically about the world and what goes on in it and who is constantly recorded as getting involved in what goes on in the world.

Neither the Christian faith nor the Bible is about “pie in the sky, bye and bye.” Both of them insist on our being involved with God in the everyday activities of life. We are called to be Christ-like and that likeness is in terms not of what we believe, but in terms of how we act. When the disciples of John the Baptist, at a later time, went to Jesus to ask him, “are you the one for whom we wait?” Jesus answered them by describing what he was doing – “the lame walk, the blind receive their sight, and the poor have the good news preached to them.” And when Jesus was asked what people were supposed to do if they became his followers, the answer was in terms of selling what they had and giving it to the poor, or in terms of “loving your neighbor as you love yourself.” These are all calls to concrete action in the real world in which we live, they are not calls to having an appropriately orthodox theology. An orthodox theology has its place and its value, but only if it serves as the source of the knowledge and insight to do the work of God in the world.

When St. Paul prays for the congregation which he had founded at Philippi what he asks is that their “love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help (them) determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ (they) may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.” What he praying for is that not only should they have knowledge, but that they should also have the insight, the vision, to use their knowledge properly. It isn’t enough to know the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and whatever else you were taught in Confirmation Class or Inquirer’s Class. To be a Christian is to produce what St. Paul here calls “the harvest of righteousness.” And that “harvest” is the rightness of the way in which we live and deal with one another. The first Christians were called “the followers of the Way” for the simple reason that their faith changed the way they lived so much that they obviously were following another way. The call to us is exactly the same as St. Paul’s call to his old congregation at Philippi. We too are to produce in our lives the same “harvest of righteousness.” Now, obviously, we do not live in first century Philippi, and, equally obviously, we have never heard St. Paul preach, but all of us have had our understanding of the faith in some part shaped by him and his writings. And all of us have to live out our faith in the world of our time as they did in theirs.

Every Advent we hear the story of the beginning of the ministry of St. John the Baptist and it is always a ministry in the real world of his time. A ministry in which he called all people to a recognition of their sinfulness and to the Baptism of God’s forgiveness. And that call went out to the rulers, the clergy, the teachers, and everyone else, that they should examine themselves and their lives and acknowledge their sins, their failures, their self-righteousness to God and be baptized to receive His forgiveness. Now, note, this is not John’s forgiveness. It is God’s forgiveness meditated through John and the act of being baptized, the action of cleansing.

And every Advent we are called to the same recognition of our sinfulness, our failures, our self- righteousness; not in the abstract, or in some “spiritual” never-never land, but in the concrete daily acts of our lives. Only when we know the reality of our need for forgiveness, for the action and the grace of God in our own lives, can we be in any way prepared to understand the reality of Jesus coming into the real world, into flesh exactly like ours.

If we’re looking for some “spiritual” way that by- passes or devalues the importance of our day by day acts, then we have no business looking forward to the feast of the “incarnation,” the feast of the “enfleshing” of God in a person, at a place, in a time. Here again in the Christmas we are moving toward we find a God who is invariably and unalterably concerned with the real world of everyday.

We live in the world of everyday and we know a God who cares about everyday, not only because He created it, but also because he knows that this is the only place we have to know Him, to serve Him, and, as St. Paul says elsewhere, “to work out our salvation in fear and trembling.” The whole of the Biblical record, the Biblical revelation, is the description of the acts of God in various times and places by which he has shown himself to us and by which he has shown us what he expects us to do in response. God never waited us for us to be wise enough, or to know enough, or to be good enough. At all times and in all places He has come to us as we are, where we are, and being who we are. He came to Abraham and promised an old man that he would be the father of nations. He came to Moses and called him to lead the people out of Egypt. He came to Isaiah in the Temple and called him to be his prophet. He came to Zechariah and promised him a son. He sent that son, John the Baptist out into the wilderness to call the people to repentance and preparation for the one who was to come. He sent His own Son into the world in the person of Jesus whom we call Christ,and he sends us into the same world to be His witnesses, not in word alone, but in actions and deeds of love.

As God has always dealt with us, his children, in the world he created for us to live in, so he calls us to produce a harvest of righteousness. Willy, nilly, we produce a harvest simply by living from day to day, by meeting people, by dealing with people on the subway, or in the store, or in the office. The question for us is, what kind of a harvest do we produce? Is it one we show to God as a sign of our love for Him and our neighbors, his children? Or is it a harvest that we would not want Him to see or know about? Is it a harvest which is shaped and informed by “knowledge and full insight,” or is it a harvest shaped and informed by our personal needs or by the world and not by God? All we have to do, to see any one of these kinds of harvest is to read the Bible with open eyes and hearts. All of humanity, good, bad and indifferent is to be found in the Bible, because God deals with all of humanity, even those who don’t believe in Him or know anything about Him. He is the creator of all and He loves us all and He comes to us as He has always come, not in some spiritually perfect or abstract relationship, but in the day by day business of our lives. As St. Benedict says, every time we greet a stranger or a guest we are greeting Christ. Every time we act whether out of love or of fear, out of concern or out of self-protection, out of our responsibility for each other or out of self-interest, we are showing the harvest of our lives. What kind of a harvest we reap is determined by how we act in relation to others. As Christ himself said, “Inasmuch as ye have done unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

Our harvest and our faith are in the real world of everyday, just as God’s revelation of Himself was and is in the real world of everyday. It is only the names of the people in power which have changed. The realities of God’s love to us and his constant coming to us remain the same. As we approach the Feast of the Incarnation, we always need to remember that He came to our world, took on our flesh, and calls us to walk His way of service to one another in His name. Where we live day by day is where our harvest is. What kind of a harvest is it?