There is a powerful moment in the performance of The Messiah when the soloist steps forth and sings Comfort My People. It is like the skies open up and the hand of God comes down on the stage and lifts up the whole of the orchestra, the chorus, the soloist and the audience. It is exactly what Handel was trying to craft in that glorious oratorio; the sense that God is coming again among his creation to give us immeasurable hope in the middle of chaos. Certainly the chaos is caused by ourselves, there is no doubt about that, but God puts that aside and comes to us with great comfort.
There is a space between the end of the 39th and the beginning of the 40th chapter the book of Isaiah in most bibles, a space that signifies the end of one thing and the beginning of another. The scholars call that the break between first and second Isaiah, the first two parts of that great book. What is at an end is exile, sorrow and grief, and what is beginning is comfort and compassion. Here in the expectant season of Advent, what better message could we hear?
We have a wreckage of a political campaign in front of us. The Occupy movements are being evicted from their campgrounds, and there seems to be no progress at all on issues that trouble this country; the deficit is still towering, unemployment is a horrible problem, and the average salary of an NBA player is estimated at around eight million dollars. There only seems to be economic insanity out there. Bridges and roads remain to be fixed, the public transportation system is in chaos, and US Air is raising the price of a ticket to Philadelphia from Pittsburgh by five hundred percent!
There was a story on the news this week about a family living in a truck. They have little money, no place to live and the kids still go to school. There is not much help for them, they live hand to mouth, but they are very good people, trying as best they can to live their lives with some kind of meaning. There was another story talked about families racing to the grocery store at midnight on the first of the month, because that is when their food stamp money is deposited. Both of the parents have jobs at about eight dollars an hour, but they just can’t make ends meet. The father said that he would go and get a second job, but that would mean that they would lose their eligibility for food stamps. We don’t live in very hopeful times.
When I was a kid in the great depression, my parents were feeding people who came to our back door. We didn’t have very much money either, but we were better off than those who were poor and homeless in that terrible time. It seems to me that we are in a similar time now. The strange thing is that we had a better “black Friday” this year because people flocked to the stores after Thanksgiving to pick up bargains. There were fights over some of the items, one woman used pepper spray on another shopper, another sign of the greed that seems to be rampant in our community, instead of compassion, which it seems to me is an outgrowth and a reasonable expectation of community.
Comfort, O Comfort my people, says the Lord. The time of strife is over, the time for healing has begun. Here in Advent, we are again reminded that the only place that we can with certainty look for hope is the God who created us, who loves us with an immeasurable affection, an affection so strong that he came to this earth in human vesture as our Lord Jesus, and walked among us to know the reality of humanity; to feel the sorrow and pain that we feel and the ultimate joy of relationships.
One of the most poignant moments in the story of Jesus for me is that moment at Lazarus’ tomb, when John’s Gospel says simply: Jesus wept, when the tears rolled down his face and stained the ground in sorrow over the death of his dear friend. He then raised Lazarus so that we could all know that death is only a moment in time and is certainly not permanent. There is the embodiment of hope eternal, the final answer of Jesus to all of the desperation that dogs humankind. It is that hope that we carry with us in expectation this Advent as we wait for the coming of our Lord in flesh, that the worries that we all carry rest in the heart of our God, who will redeem us utterly from all of the turmoil of this world, and bring us finally into our true home.
No comments:
Post a Comment