Advent 3, Year A, Psalm 146

Father Alfred Delp, a Jesuit priest who was imprisoned by the Nazi's in World War II, wrote from his prison cell shortly before he was hanged:

I see Advent this year with greater intensity and anticipation than ever before. Walking up and down in my cell, three paces this way and three paces that way, with my hands in irons and ahead of me an uncertain fate, I have a new and different understanding of God's promise and release. This reminds me of the angel that was given to me two years ago for Advent by a kind person. The angel bore the inscription, “Rejoice, for the Lord is near.: The angel was destroyed by a bomb. A bomb killed the man who gave it to me, and I often feel he is doing me the service of an angel.

- from Watch for the Light, Readings for Advent and Christmas, reflection for December 5, Plough Publishing House.

The apostle Paul was also no stranger to jail and beatings, but as a Roman citizen he could hold a chancy hope in his privileged Roman citizenship (Acts 22:25) - to believe that, push come to shove, the power of Caesar might spare him. Meanwhile, his sufferings notwithstanding, he could write to the believers in the imperial capital:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God . . For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.

Romans 13:1,3a (NRSV)

Perhaps only a person who believes God is going to wrap things up in this world within his own lifetime or soon thereafter, and whose mindset singles out Rome's Mediterranean empire as “world”, could believe such stuff. After twenty centuries of evil authorities aplenty to attest to the contrary, Father Delp wrote in his last days that the people of Germany could see in advance the fault lines running beneath the official lies of national progress and unity, but chose to turn away: “Many of the things that are happening today would never have happened if we had been living in that moment and disquiet of heart which results when we are faced with God, the Lord, and we look clearly at things as they really are.”

When Anthony the Great left domesticated life in the second century to live in the Egyptian desert, he was probably reacting to the newly minted imperial church proclaimed by Constantine the Great. He and those who subsequently followed him into the waste were not keen on the emerging faith of convenience to which the church suddenly seemed to be playing host. They went to the desert to see things as they really are – demons and all. Their removal to the wild embodies a stark alternative to the accommodations of “failed princes”. The church of any age, for all its liturgy, sometimes forgets who is sovereign, and nihilism has a way of worming into the places where the sovereignty of God takes anything other than first place. Civil religious partnerships become betrayals. One day the citizens of Aleppo wake up to see the politic human devises that claim to serve the general welfare are a shambles.

The psalm would have it that there is nothing in the flesh and blood of this world that can save us. This anonymous psalmist of the 146th is refreshingly non-Davidic. There is no royal house with its promises or apologetics. It reads like an unsanctioned celebration that there are, when all is said and done, no mortals and certainly no governmental authorities (“princes”) that merit our trust. No one would choose such a scenario, and we hope for better, but there is a freedom in this disabusing when the old safety nets are shot to doll rags. All hope is diverted to the Creator, totally and exclusively. God does not disappoint us.

In Advent our churches are invited to become cloisters of a kind where we take upon ourselves the isolation of a cell, joining, in the Spirit, with those others, present and past, who have been confined for whatever reason. It is not a place we would want to dally forever, but there is a time. We are invited to join the wild man in the desert who is a renegade like Elijah and Elisha, never to be reconciled to a failed state; with martyrs and victims past and present; with contemplatives who are gifted to embrace emptiness - just as the deep dark enables us to see the stars. Our isolation, for whatever cause, is a place for the Holy One to do for us what no mortal can: prepare a new beginning. This is the vision of our anonymous psalmist.

We partner with God in our prayer to undergird those who will never hear our voice or see our face. Or in some cases, anyone's. They know.

© 2016 Andy Gay