Happy New Year! In
the Christian tradition, we mark time according to the liturgical year rather
than the calendar year. Today is not
only December 1, it is the First Sunday of Advent – a new liturgical year. As James Alison reminds us,
At Advent, it begins again: the cycle
by which God breaks through the clutter of our lives to announce to us that the
Presence is very near, irrupting into our midst, hauling us out of our myths ,
our half-truths and the ways we have settled for what is “religious” rather
than what is holy, and alive, and real.[1]
It is so easy for us to sleep walk through life, oblivious
to the Presence, the Mystery, the Something so much bigger than we are that is
at the same time so intimately familiar as to be taken for granted. Advent invites us to wake-up and to renew
our practice of the Presence of God. It is this sense of God-with-us that is the
ground of our hope.
Jesus
invites us to be present to the Presence.
Underneath the mythological language in his somewhat enigmatic teaching
recorded in Matthew’s Gospel, lies a simple invitation to wake-up. What does a woke humanity look like?
Jesus’
answer may seem a little bit odd to us.
“For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.”[2] Let’s unpack “the coming of the Son of Man”
for a minute. First “Son of Man” can be
a title, used to designate someone anointed by God for a special task. Jesus speaks self-referentially using this phrase,
but it also simply means “a human being.”
“The
coming” is a gerund derived from a Greek verb, παρουσία, which means “to be
present” as opposed to being absent. A
more literal translation would be “the becoming present of the human being.” So Jesus is talking about what it is like
when a human being becomes present to her experience, with the connotation of
becoming available to be useful for God.
The woke human is present to reality in such a way as to be an agent of
God’s will.
Jesus
is the model of the woke human being, and he is a model meant to be
imitated. St. Paul gets this when he
writes to the churches in Rome to wake-up and “put on the Lord Jesus Christ,
and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”[3] We are to become like Jesus in being awake
and transparent to God’s desire. Again,
we are invited to become present to the Presence.
OK,
so what is this woke humanity like?
Well, it is like in the days of Noah.
Huh? This is where we have to
engage in some demythologization. In
mythology, floods are a symbol of disorder and destruction, often the expression
of cataclysmic violence. In the Genesis
account of Noah and the ark, we are already half-way to a demythologized
reading of the story for we are told, “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s
sight, and the earth was filled with violence.”[4]
In
Noah’s time, people went about their daily lives, oblivious to the impending
disaster all around them, right up until the day Noah entered the ark; “and
they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.”[5] They were not awake, and so were swept away
by the flood of violence. Noah and his
family were awake and able to respond appropriately to reality. They survived the flood and preserved a
sustainable community of life. Woke
humanity builds the ark.
Jesus
said it would be the same in his day.
Two guys would be working in the field.
One would get taken away, the other would remain. Two women would be grinding meal. One would get taken away , the other would
remain.[6] Here, Jesus is referring to the wave of
violence sweeping through Israel in response to Roman occupation. Some would be swept up into the violence
cataclysm; others would remain awake and aware of God’s Presence. Jesus’ words would prove prophetic when a
Jewish revolt against Rome led to the destruction of Jerusalem.
Now,
no one knew precisely when crap was going to hit the fan. But anyone who was a awake could read the
signs of the times. The point was to be
present to the Presence so that you would know how to respond when it did; not
to be swept up into the violent reaction but to remain steadfast, grounded in
God’s mercy and available for the work of repair. The woke human has a compassionate compass
that always points toward the Presence of God even in the midst of the
flood.
This
teaching of Jesus is not about the Rapture – about being rescued from reality
when it gets hard to acknowledge. It
isn’t about escapism, much less denial.
It is a teaching about the Ruptures in our experience, the moments when
our humanity needs to be awake to the Presence of God so that we can remain rooted
in reality and capable of responding in alignment with God’s mercy.
The
brilliant Zen Buddhist teacher, angel Kyodo williams, expresses this need to be
rooted in reality – to be awake – as the ground of our hope. She says,
I
think that if we can move our work, whatever work we’re up to, whatever kind of
desire that we have for our own development in life, to be willing to face
discomfort and receive it as opportunity for growth and expansion and a
commentary about what is now more available to us, rather than what it is that
is limiting us and taking something away from us, that we will — in no time at
all, we will be a society that enhances the lives of all our species. We will
be in a society that thrives and knows that the planet must thrive with us. We
will be in a society that knows that no one that is suffering serves the
greater community, and [is] an indicator of the ways in which the society
itself is suffering.[7]
This
hope emerges out of the experience of rupture, the sense of distance between
the way things are and the way they could be.
This rupture is the death of denial and the resurrection of hope. It is as we move through the rupture, present
to the Presence, that we become open to the flow of God’s mercy that is the
source of the world’s healing.
“But for us to
transform as a society,” Williams says,
we
have to allow ourselves to be transformed as individuals. And for us to be
transformed as individuals, we have to allow for the incompleteness of any of
our truths and a real forgiveness for the complexity of human beings and what
we’re trapped inside of, so that we’re both able to respond to the oppression,
the aggression that we’re confronted with, but we’re able to do that with a
deep and abiding sense [that] ‘there are people, human beings, that are at the
other end of that baton, that stick, that policy, that are also trapped in
something. They’re also trapped in a suffering.’ And for sure, we can witness
that there are ways in which they’re benefiting from it. But there’s also ways,
if one trusts the human heart, that they must be suffering. And holding that at
the core of who you are when responding to things, I think, is the way — the
only way we really have forward — to not just replicate systems of oppression
for the sake of our own cause.[8]
Woke
humanity is only possible when we are willing to do our inner work. This work requires us to take time to pause,
to sort out what is God’s will, God’s desire verses the dis-ease we have
internalized. Again, Williams is helpful
here:
There is so
much momentum to every aspect of what drives us, what moves us, what has us
hurtling through space, including all of our thoughts and even our own sense of
our emotions; how we interpret any given feeling, any experience of discomfort;
where that discomfort sits in our bodies. It’s not just that we have a feeling
of pain or awkwardness. It’s that we then interpret that.
And those
interpretations — much to our chagrin, we come to understand through a process
of observing them — are not clean or not free of all of the things that are
impacting us outside. And so even our sense of what pains us and what makes us
feel shame, feel guilt, feel awkwardness, feel put-upon by people, feel
disempowered, has to do with the external information and cues that we have
received. And they’re moving at an incredible rate of speed. And for the most
part, we almost never get the opportunity to observe them and sort through them
— kind of like that drawer that collects everything in your house.[9]
So, we need to
engage in a kind of regular inner house-cleaning. This is the work of contemplative prayer,
meditative study of scripture, journaling and self-reflection. All these and more are forms of the practice
of the Presence, in which we come to know ourselves in the image of God.
“To do our work,”
says Williams,
to
come into deep knowing of who we are — that’s the stuff that bringing down
systems of oppression is made of. And so capitalism in its current form couldn’t
survive. Patriarchy couldn’t survive. White supremacy couldn’t survive if
enough of us set about the work of reclaiming the human spirit, which includes
reclaiming the sense of humanity of the people that are the current vehicles
for those very forms of oppression.[10]
To
be “woke” it isn’t enough to want to change the world. We have to be willing to change ourselves,
our perception of reality, and our way of relating to ourselves and others –
even to our enemies. Waking-up and
remaining awake, even as others are being swept up by the flood, this is the
work of Advent. It isn’t about
“religion” as yet another means of escaping reality. It means being plunged into reality, the deep
baptismal waters, where we encounter what is truly holy, and alive, and
real. Be present to the Presence. We have work, good work to do, and God is
with us every step of the way. Amen.
[1]
James Alison, “a puncturing fulfillment” at http://jamesalison.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/eng51-1.pdf.
[2]
Matthew 24:37.
[3]
Romans 13:14.
[4]
Genesis 6:11.
[5]
Matthew 24:39.
[6]
Matthew 24:40-42.
[7]
Krista Tippett interview with angel Kyodo williams at https://onbeing.org/programs/angel-kyodo-williams-the-world-is-our-field-of-practice/#transcript.
[8]
Ibid.
[9]
Ibid.
[10]
Ibid.
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