A scene for you to imagine.
All across the land, in malls and stores, children are lining up with their parents for a visit with Santa Claus. There is an obligatory picture of the child sitting on Santa’s lap. Then, there is Santa asking the child: So, what do you want for Christmas?
Santa gets ready for a list of items that he has heard hundreds of times before. But this time imagine Santa’s surprise when the child pulls out a wish list and begins to read: Well, let’s see. I want the desert to rejoice and blossom. I want weak hands to be made strong and feeble knees to be made firm. Oh, and I want the eyes of the blind to be opened and the lame man to leap like the deer. I want water to break forth in the wilderness and I want the burning sand to become a pool. I want everlasting joy to be upon our heads and I want sorrow and sighing to flee away.
You can imagine the look on Santa’s face, and your own. But once you get over the initial shock perhaps you are almost breathless as you say to yourself, “Now that is a wish list. That is an expression of deep, passionate, unbridled yearning and desire.” You could say that it’s not really a Christmas list. It is really an Advent list. It is list of some of the things that during the season of Advent, God invites us to consider, to yearn for, and to find ways to give expression to in our world.
Of course, the images on the child’s wish list come from the words of the prophet Isaiah that we considered in our previous post. There are many different responses one could make to this Advent wish list. Even though the words come from the Bible, it is tempting to see them, and dismiss them, as idealistic, perhaps to the point of being naïve.
Well, of course, it would be nice if everything turned out fine and just the way we wanted but the real world doesn’t work that way. Maybe in the next world when God sets everything right at the end of the age…but today, no, I don’t think so.
I invite us to notice that this Holy Way of Advent described in Isaiah does not lead us out of the wilderness but even deeper into it.
The prophet does not say that God will whisk us out of the desert to a fair and heavenly place. No, it is precisely that ravaged landscape that will blossom and bloom. It is precisely this dry dirt that will become springs and pools of water. None of us will escape the wilderness. It is part of our living. But it is this very wilderness, this very life, that will blossom and come alive.
I am reminded again of how joy and sadness are often found together. In her essay “Joy”, Zadie Smith writes that “Joy is such a human madness.” She makes a distinction between joy and pleasure. She says that pleasure is a part of daily life. We experience pleasures, great and small, that give us satisfaction.
But joy is something completely different. Joy may not give pleasure at all. It is a “strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight.”
She uses the example of being on the way to visit Auschwitz while her husband was holding her feet. “We were heading toward that which makes life intolerable, feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile. That was joy.” How can that be? How can the intolerable make life worthwhile? How is it that joy is found by going deeper into the wilderness and not avoiding it?
Perhaps we can accept the invitation that this Advent wish list can offer us. Perhaps our yearning and desire becomes limited and small because our sense of and experience of God is limited and small as well. During this season of Advent, we find ourselves claiming to wait for God to show up. But we can also wonder, are we ready, really ready for and receptive to whatever actually appears. One of the biggest challenges of Advent is letting go of who we want God to be and how we want God to be in our lives, so that we can embrace fully who God is and how God wants us to be in his life.
I am reminded of how Paul does not encourage us simply to rejoice. He invites us to rejoice in the Lord. And it is this “in the Lord” perspective that makes all the difference. Paul uses a variation of this image over 200 times in his letters. What does it mean to rejoice, to live “in the Lord”? It is more than following the example of Christ. The motivation of Paul’s life, according to theologian James Dunn “was not the inspiration of a heroic tale of what Jesus taught or did two decades earlier. He was not involved in a Society to Celebrate the Memory of Jesus of Nazareth. Rather his conception of Christ was of an open channel between God and humanity.” For Paul, Jesus was a kind of atmosphere in which we, as disciples, live and breathe.
It is this Christ whose birth we prepare for during Advent. It is this Christ who brings God’s presence into the world in a way that is unimagined…and transforming. May we find ways to bring that same presence into the living of our days.