December 8, 2024 – Second Sunday of Advent
Kahu Gary Percesepe
Confession: I’ve always wanted to design an Advent Calander where you open one of those cute little windows and out pops John the Baptist glaring at you, saying, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come, you brood of vipers!”
John would not have made a good dinner party guest. He was a truthteller and a fearless prophet. His preaching combined politics and religion. As the kids say, he went there!
There’s an old saying, “The truth will make you free, but first it will make you miserable. “Whoever said that must have had John in mind.
John preaches a message of repentance. The word of God happened to John in the wilderness (v. 2). His voice is the incorruptible truth of God’s word coming through this strange looking prophet.
John told people to get ready for the One who was to come. The prophet Malachi speaks of the One who comes “like a refiners fire” to purify and redeem us. This world, which continues to break our hearts, is not the world that God intended when God began to create.
Deep down we know we are not what are supposed to be. We feel false, frustrated, dishonest. We may try to hide ourselves and pretend to be what we are not. The result is that we feel inauthentic and wear social masks to keep others from noticing this. We’re so afraid that someone will notice we’re not what we pretend to be. We judge others according to our own image of perfection; naturally they fall short of our expectations. Theologians call this the false self. The consequence of living in a world of false selves is called fallenness.
God comes to help us become the True Self, to redeem the world. To redeem means to buy back. There can be no redemption until there is an honest recognition that we need redemption. We’re powerless to make things right by ourselves. We all have an innate human propensity to mess things up. You can’t be saved until you know you are lost. If you don’t think you need saving, then you remain lost. You remain out in the wilderness thinking everything is swell. Someone must love us enough to tell us we are lost, that we are not our True Self but a False Self. Enter John.
Let me illustrate: There’s an essay titled “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,” written by philosopher Alain de Botton.[1] His message is simple: we all think we’re easy to live with. Until we get married. We have a bewildering array of problems that emerge only when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on a first date would be: “So tell me, how are you crazy?”
Before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever our flaws are revealed, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. Who wants to be told they are a moron? One of the privileges of living alone is the sincere comfort of nourishing the illusion that we are quite easy to live with.[2]
Our partners are no more self-aware than we are. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.[3]
But you know who will tell us the truth about how difficult we are? An ex-lover.
Think of John as the ex-lover sent from heaven who comes to us speaking of how we can get out of the hell we’ve made of our lives.
The New Testament word for repentance is beautiful: metanoia. Metanoia is a summons to change our outlook, to welcome the God who is knocking at our door by means of the events in our life and in our world. What metanoia can we discern in this week’s latest tragedies? The CEO of United Health Care was gunned down in midtown Manhattan. The words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” were found emblazoned on the ammunition, words used by insurance industry critics. Some act gleeful about this, the comeuppance of those greedy insurance companies who merrily deny our claims almost one third of the time. What sense can we make of people who are made happy by an act of murder in broad daylight in an American city? What sense can we make of companies that flourish by denying insurance claims to those whose health is endangered? What sense can we make of the ongoing genocide of mothers and children in Gaza, hospitals bombed, Israeli hostages tortured and killed?
The world is fallen. Evil acts give rise to more evil, unless there is spiritual attentiveness and an intentional effort to break the cycle of hatred and violence. Prayer helps us to distinguish between the thirst for justice and the desire for revenge, following the steps of Christ who, “when he was threatened, did not threaten in return.”
The world in 2024 is a fearful and divided place. Looking back, historians may view 2024 as a series of enormously wasted opportunities for which we may pay the price for years to come. And yet, as Brother John of Taize points out, regret is one of the least fruitful of emotions. Brother John writes, “The road to wisdom consists rather in learning from our mistakes. It is time to live the values we believe in—solidarity, compassion, openness, hospitality—beginning in the simplest events of our daily lives, trusting that the future is not prepared by the “movers and shakers” who occupy the foreground of our TV screens, but rather by the hidden multitudes who work humbly and tirelessly for what they believe in.
“The Christian Bible ends with a tale of two cities: Babylon and the New Jerusalem. Unlike their counterparts in the Hebrew Scriptures, these are not geographical locations separated by physical space. Like it or not, we are all residents of Babylon. But at the heart of Sin City there are many whose true home is God’s City. Our task then is to live as citizens of that other city, even if that means being mocked as idealists, rejected as troublemakers, or persecuted as disturbers of the peace. For despite appearances, we trust that Babylon’s victories are short-lived, that what will in fact prevail is that other “well-founded city, designed and built by God.” Short-term prospects may seem dim, but that is not a call to lose heart. A missed opportunity can act as a stimulus to search more deeply, to grow in realism without losing ideals, and so to be ready when another historical moment arises that calls for a creative and life-giving response.”[4] Amene.
[1] Alain de Botton, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,” The New York Times, May 28, 2016 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-will-marry-the-wrong-person.html
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] The story of how I came to know Brother John of Taize, and the essay I asked that he write for Mississippi Review, may be found here: https://keawalai.org/2024/11/07/pastoral-letter-november-6-2024/