Notes for Reflection

November 30             NOTES FOR REFLECTION             First Sunday of Advent

Texts:  Isaiah 64:1-9; 1 Corinthians 1: 3-9; Mark 13:24-37

Theme:  There are some old chestnuts to mark the start of another liturgical year.  "Tell Me the Old, Old Story", is one that comes to mind; another is "Here We Go Again"; but both seem to me to have rather negative overtones.  Something more positive might be "A New Beginning" or "A Fresh Start".  [In some ways it's a pity that we can't have a bit of a 'closed season' between The Feast of Christ the King and Advent Sunday, to emphasise that we really are starting a new season.]  If we want something a little more specific to this particular Sunday, something like "Watching and Being Watched" might start us off in the right direction.  Or, for fellow Isaiah devotees, what about "Are You Still There"?

Introduction.  A rather disconnected collection of readings this week.  We start this new liturgical year with one of the most poignant lines of Scripture as Isaiah cries out to the Lord, "O that you would tear open the heavens and come down".  He wants God to break his silence, to come out of hiding and to reveal himself.  St Paul seconds the motion, albeit less loudly, with words of encouragement to the new believers at Corinth as they await "the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ", to be understood in the context as referring to the Return (a.k.a. the Second Coming) of Christ at the end of the Age.  St Mark rounds things off with an extract from "The Mini-Apocalypse" in chapter 13, dampening down expectations of Christ's imminent return, while acknowledging that no one (not even Jesus himself) knows when that will be.

Background.  How might we sum up the last year?  What has stuck in your mind out of all the headlines and big issues in our media over the last twelve months?  For me, the answer has got to be Governments and their lackeys behaving badly and getting exposed by whistleblowers and hackers.  And all that has taught me one thing: while everyone likes to be heard, no one wants to be overheard.   And that simple statement now has to be interpreted to include all forms of communication.  Many desire to communicate the most intimate and trivial details of their own lives and the lives of their cats, dogs and other significant others, but are outraged if those communications are "accessed" by unauthorised persons, particularly if they show them up in a bad light.  Perhaps the award for the gall of the year should go to Cameron Slater who lodged a complaint against someone who "stole" material from his computer and used it to reveal exactly what Cameron Slater had been doing to damage anyone to whom he took exception, including accessing their electronic communications.

At the lower end of the scale there was a report of schools being warned that teachers had no right to look at the content on a student's phone, even when that student had been using the phone in the classroom, and was suspected of being involved in cyber-bullying.  In the case in point, the students had been expressly told that they were not to have their phones in use during the class time.  The teacher became aware that two students were posting text messages to each other, and challenged them.  Both insisted that no such nefarious activity had taken place.  The teacher did not believe them, and insisted on seeing for herself.  Now think about that for a moment.  Suppose these students were Neanderthals like me and did what I and my fellow students were doing when we were their age – we passed scribbled notes to each other, didn't we?  And if we were caught and the teacher demanded to see the notes, what then?  Was it ever suggested that such a demand was an outrageous breach of our right to privacy?  Would it be today?

Somehow the focus has shifted from the wrongdoing, to criticism of the exposure of the wrongdoing.  [Think Private Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and, of course, Nicky Hagar.]  Our right to privacy seems to have morphed into a right to do anything we wish to do so long as we do it in private.  And woe betide any sneak who invades our privacy and exposes our wrongdoing.

One of the more interesting courses I took as part of my law studies was one on criminology.  The lecturer began the course with a statement along these lines.  "In this course we will be looking at the reasons why people commit crimes, the incidence of criminal offending, and the penal response to criminal offending.  When we have done all that to comply with the prescribed course, we will address the far more interesting question: why do most of us go through life without ever committing any serious offence, even when it might clearly be in our own best interests to do so?"  He was proved to be quite right: the discussions we had on that question were far more interesting than anything covered in the prescribed course.

Broadly we found ourselves in two camps.  Camp one, the idealists, believed that most of us led broadly crime-free lives because we chose to do so, we were moral people, guided by our well-formed and well-informed consciences.  [Yes, even in the Swinging Sixties there were law students who believed in the essential goodness, if not of human beings in general, at least of themselves.]  Camp Two, the realists, knew that the real answer was that we avoided criminal offending out of a healthy fear of being caught; and I for one felt vindicated when, during a power black-out one ordinary shopping day, a large store was just about emptied by its erstwhile customers before the lights came back on 40 minutes later!

All of which ramblings and muses get me to Isaiah, who continues to surprise.  I like to think that I know my way around Isaiah pretty well – Jeremiah not so much, and Ezekiel hardly at all.  I took it for granted that the case for the prophets could be summed up like this:  God was gracious and kind to his people; they had nevertheless rebelled  against him; God was understandably miffed and turned away from them; and the prophet's role was to call the people back to God and ask God to give them another chance.  But this week's passage (at least as it appears in my NSRV edition) doesn't quite say this.  Both verses 5 and 7 seem to change the sequence of events in a quite significant way.  But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed...  There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.

It seems to be an example of the "teacher-out-of-the classroom" syndrome.  What is the point of doing right if God has left us to it?  And conversely, if God has chosen not to pay us any attention, why shouldn't we do what we like?  So I'm wondering if this is what is going on in our increasingly secular society.  Having "got rid of God" (the all-seeing Judge), people are outraged to find that they are now under the scrutiny of the "all-seeing" hacker, whose "judgment" may be more terrible than anything they had previously feared from God.  Could that be why the greatest offence these days is to be "judgmental"?

Already, according to a report in the ODT recently, there is a swing back to the good old, relatively secure, typewriter.  So much easier than living a life that could withstand public scrutiny.  Or acknowledging our faults and accepting the forgiveness of God freely offered through Jesus Christ.

Isaiah 64:1-9.  Isaiah sounds to me like a man of about my age.  His patience is running out, and he's given to bouts of nostalgia.  He remembers the good old days when God did awesome unexpected deeds that left no room for doubt and needed no interpretation.  In those days when God appeared everyone knew where they were, and more importantly, who God was.  But that was all a long time ago; and we all know what the people got up to when Moses left them to it for a few days.  God has been absent, or at least invisible and silent, for a far longer time, with the inevitable result, both among the people of Israel and among her enemies.  It is time for God to re-appear and establish his authority once again.

Taking It Personally.

·        Advent is a good time to review your own spiritual journey.  Can you recall a time when God was more obviously present to you than he is now, perhaps when you first became a Christian?

·        Does Isaiah's opening cry strike a chord with you?  Would you like God to make himself more apparent to you?

·        Do you have any sense that you are being watched or listened to by God?  Is that comforting or alarming for you?  How does the image of God as the Divine Hacker who has access to all your thoughts, words and actions strike you?

·        Looking ahead to another year of hearing and reflecting on the Scriptures, how do you feel at that prospect?  Is it exciting, boring, or somewhere in-between?  Is there some particular part of the story that you would like to go into more deeply this year?

·        What would you like learn, experience, hear, see, realise or understand more clearly this liturgical year?

·        Spend some time in prayer as you bring your thoughts before God and ask for his continued grace, blessing and guidance through this coming year.

1 Corinthians 1:4-9.  This passage is a sort of overture of courtesy before St Paul gets to the first movement, dominated by the percussion section!  (Read verses 10-17 to see what I mean.)  Perhaps the idea is to remind the Corinthians of all the gifts they have received (the grace of God in effect among them and within them), so that they will understand how unworthy their behaviour is.  They have not, of course, gone beyond the tipping-point: God will strengthen them so that they may become blameless.  God is faithful (subtext, in contrast to yourselves).  And St Paul reminds them that they have been called into a spiritual fellowship (subtext, in contrast to a club).

 

Taking It Personally.

 

·        Reflect on God's goodness to you.  In what way have you been enriched in Jesus Christ? 

·        Is your local faith community manifesting all the spiritual gifts?

·        Are you (and are they) waiting "for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ"?

·        Is your local faith community manifestly a spiritual fellowship, or more of a cosy group of pleasant people?

 

Mark 13:24-37.  A strange and difficult passage to end this first week with.  It sounds like one dramatic event, and yet verse 29 suggests a process of some length.  Perhaps the better approach is to take it that it will become more and more apparent as time goes on, and that the sooner we become aware of it and respond to it the better.  There is no escaping the difficulty posed by verse 31 if it is supposed to be understood at all literally.  If Jesus (or perhaps the author of this gospel) really did predict the Return of Christ within the lifetime of those living at that time, then they got it wrong by (so far) close to 2,000 years.  On the other hand, verse 32 seems to rule out anyone knowing when it was going to happen.  For me, it has been happening ever since the resurrection, so that already the signs are all around us, and we should be continually on the lookout to see Christ returning among us more and more until the end of the age.  Keep awake, do not sleep your life away.  I think that's the message we should take from all this.

 

Taking It Personally.

 

·        When do you expect to see Christ: (a) at any moment; (b) when you die; (c) at the end of time; (d) none of the above?

·        Do you truly believe that "he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end"?

·        Is the idea of some sort of Judgment Day important to you?  How else might the manifest injustices of life on earth be set right?