Monday, December 8, 2008

GOD WITH US: Meeting God in the Wilderness - December 7, 2008

Have you ever been out to a desert? I don’t mean Las Vegas. Now, that does not count. Why would anyone go out to the wilderness to see a prophet? John the Baptist is hardly a hippie “taking a walk on the wild side”. Would such a prophet attract people to the wilderness? Yes, apparently so. John followed the example of previous Hebrew prophets, living austerely, challenging sinful rulers, calling for repentance, and promising God's justice. He had a large following before Jesus came on the scene. The Gospel writers all pointed John the Baptist to be the forerunner who prepared the way for the Messiah. He is the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah. He continues the prophetic tradition to be on the outside, calling people to step out of the ordinary to examine themselves.

According to Isaiah 40, there’s a prophetic voice in the wilderness crying, calling for the preparation of the way of the Lord… as in the arrival of a king. Historically, highways connect people and cultures, as wealth and power flowed through the ancient highways and trade routes. But Isaiah imagines a highway that will connect people to God. How does one meet God there?

John the Baptist was also a desert hermit. Later in the 3rd Century, there was a different form of asceticism in the desert fathers. They took on a monastic tradition similar to other religions elsewhere in the world – to escape from the chaos and persecution of a troubled world, seeking refuge in solitude. These are monks who want to seek self-discipline and holiness away from the world. They found God in the wilderness. Jesus often goes into the wilderness for a retreat. The place apart can also be a meeting place for us to encounter God.

Why the wilderness? It is a barren place, seemingly lifeless. But it is filled with life, with its signs very much hidden. Yet, it is a lonely place. Long while ago, I read an article about a couple who went to Africa to study lions and prevented elephant poaching. They ended up in a place the size of Ireland, all desert land, all by their lonesome. They were the only two human beings with all kinds of wild life surrounding them. Now, that is a very different experience! However, they found it incredibly lonely.

As people go through a transition in life, they often end up in a state similar to that of a wilderness. They too feel very lonely. However, what seems to be a total waste of time on the surface may be more productive than we know. It is a special time for us to do some important inner business.

William Bridges in his book, Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes talks about this process. In every kind of change, transition, or to use a bigger word, transformation, it always involves at least 3 stages: an ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning. The story of the Exodus follows the same three stages: the exit from Egypt led by Moses; the wandering in the wilderness for 40 years; and the eventual entrance into the Promised Land. The natural world also provides for us similar examples: the butterfly that goes through the caterpillar stage, the cocoon stage, before a beautiful butterfly emerges anew.

Therefore, being in the wilderness stage or the transitional stage, we do the work of letting go of what we had before, in order to make room for something or someone new. It is a time for us to disengage from the old, before incorporating the new. In general, it is making room for new life, or as in the image we have in today’s Isaiah passage, clearing a pathway through the wilderness. That’s why wilderness is also the place wherein transformation takes place.

In life, we often need some form of retreat or stepping outside of daily life to be alone, to take stock of life and on what has gone on before. Jesus often goes away from the crowd to pray, to be with God, and to re-charge his battery. Sometimes, we need to look back at where we have been, before we can find out where we are heading toward. We are such a busy people, we often go from day to day, from week to week, without really knowing where we have been and where we are going. It is especially true for us now, when we are stressed out in the month of December.

When we go through transition and losses, we become disoriented. The wilderness experience allows us to be re-oriented, to re-examine and re-shape our identity. It is just like the caterpillar hiding in a cocoon, before the new life of a butterfly can be born anew in metamorphosis.

I can remember one such stage in my life when I was in an absolute wilderness state. At the time, my favourite song was “Dust in the Wind” by the group Kansas. “I closed my eyes, only for a moment and the moment’s gone… All we are is dust in the wind.” It was one of the most pessimistic and depressing song ever written. I was in a stage where I was lost, not knowing where to go next. I missed my friends and family in Hong Kong. I found the academic study no longer challenging and exciting. I found my Christian friends talking about things that really did not concern me. It was a dry spell in my spiritual development. I was not satisfied with all the pat answers given. At the time, I did not realize that I was grieving over my father’s death. Even though I was never close to him, his death was still a significant loss. It was only years later that I came to realize how major an impact his death had on me through those desert years.

On one hand, it seems like such a wasteful time for me, drifting along aimlessly. Yet, it was not a total loss. It became fertile ground only after I kept treading it over and over again; until the time was right for me to move on, and ended the wandering.

The wilderness is never a comfortable place to be in. There is a real temptation to rush through it and get out of there. However, it is important to note that we cannot rush through it as quickly as we wish. To everything there is a right time, and the right amount of time for change and for healing. We cannot rush through grief and try to bypass the pain and the sorrow involved. Any such attempt will backfire, and the pain and grief will come back to haunt us in more harmful ways later. The main function or activity of the neutral zone of transition is to surrender!

The person must give in to the emptiness and stop struggling to escape it. We should try to find meanings in the wilderness experience. Don’t fight it! Instead, try to befriend this loneliness. It is there for a purpose. It allows us to discover new life and new meaning. It is there in the mysterious place of the wilderness that we find powerful agents of change and transformation. It is there we meet God, as Moses found out to his amazement! It is there in Sinai where he received God’s commandments. It is in the wilderness where the people of Israel found their distinct identity among other nations and peoples. It is there in the journey through the desert they became the people of God.

The wilderness provides access to an angle of vision on life that one cannot get anywhere else. It is a very unique angle. That is why the prophet called people out into the wilderness to look at life from a completely different perspective. Very often, we get stuck on looking at life from one particular angle; especially one particular way of looking at the present, when things are not going well. Letting go of that specific interpretation of the present may make it easier to conceive of a new future. Paradoxically, how we get out of the wilderness will depend on how well we find our way in, and how well we make use of the resources the wilderness has provided for us.

Do you have your own wilderness experience? How do you meet God there? Is your experience true of the description given?

Advent is also about a wilderness. It is an in-between time, a time of waiting, where the fulfillment of God’s promises is still on the horizon. Nonetheless, God is there, and God is here with us in the wilderness.

The call of Advent is to prepare the way! Therefor, go to your wilderness, find your bearing there, and build a highway for God. By doing so, we may end up finding a way to take us closer to the heart of God.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Fr Victor+
www.stjd.ca

Monday, December 1, 2008

GOD WITH US: Meeting God at the End - November 30, 2008

We say, “Happy New Year” today, a whole month ahead other people. Instead of celebrating Christmas for 6 to 8 weeks, right after Halloween, we have another season called Advent, which no one else in the world cares about. We still insist that December 25 is Christmas, not the whole month before it. For those who feel the need to be counter-cultural, feel free to be a Christian! Let’s start not from the beginning, but from the very end!

One of the favourite saying of storytellers is, “but I am getting ahead of myself!” “Are we getting ahead of ourselves?” In many areas of life, yes, we are! Our consumer culture does not allow us to delay gratification – it has to be instant, right away: "buy now, pay later!" "Travel and vacation first, no payment for 6 months…" We spend what we have not yet earned! There is a nice word called credit that allows us to do that. We are always getting ahead of ourselves! The Commercial Christmas season is all about shopping, spending and saving. We will diet first before getting fat again, then another round of new diets we will adopt as New Year Resolution. How can we wait? No, we cannot!

With the new church year, we begin with Year B of our 3 year-lectionary, which uses primarily the Gospel of Mark as the designated Gospel. As you know, Mark does not have a birth narrative at the beginning of his story. It poses a bit of a problem for the Advent readings… Instead, the chosen reading for today is a discourse about the end of time from Mark 13. At first sight, it may not seem appropriate to begin at the end. However, Advent has to do with the coming of the Lord, the birth being but one form of the appearance of Christ. After all, we are living in between the first and the second advent of Christ. At the core of Christian faith, we understand that the end time has to do with the coming of the Lord. God is "the One who comes" to strengthen and to heal, to reveal, and to redeem. Therefore, the posture of the people of God is always one of expectation and hope in waiting.

Part of the preparation of Advent has to do with waiting for God to appear in our lives in various places and situations. We arrive at the season of Christmas with the wonderful mystery of the incarnation of “God with us”! We start off examining the promise of God with us at the end of time.

A lot of doomsday prophets proclaim the end is very near, and some actually claim they know exactly when! There have been too many doomsday cults throughout history; they have devoted their energy solely in unfruitful predictions and speculations. They choose to prepare for the end time by stopping to live in the mean time. Some end with very tragic outcomes. Remember 30 years ago in Jonestown, Guyana, where more than 900 members of Peoples’ Temple took poison at the order of their leader Jim Jones? But it is clear in today’s text that even Jesus does not know when the end will come. We should not waste time either!

We have seen a sign board that said, “Prepare to meet Thy God!” We usually think of meeting God only at the end of our lives. Most people don’t think of encountering God in their daily life. Yet, Christians claim that we can have a relationship with God by faith through the person of Jesus Christ. By faith, we can relate to God and encounter God even in our everyday life. God is not a stranger to us, when we can pray to this God, ask for forgiveness, praise and worship God, and give thanks for God’s many blessings.

Given such relationship, should we be afraid of the end? Should we fear the Final Judgment?

It is like have regular performance reviews in your job, with on-going evaluations with your managers or supervisors. There should be no unpleasant surprise at the end of each evaluation period. The best evaluation process should produce no surprises. Whereas, if performance evaluation or judgment only takes place once in a life time; then it will be a very different matter. These days, management cannot fire anyone without giving prior warnings along the way, unless the employee had done something seriously wrong.

Moreover, if a faith relationship already exists; at the end of our life time, when we have to meet God as the Final Judge, will we find a friend or a stranger? Given in last week’s Gospel of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, there is surprised reaction to those people being judged, there may still be surprises for us, too. Would our confidence turn us into self-righteous fools with spiritual arrogance? Would we follow blindly our religious rules and fail to see the needs of those around us? Or, would our preoccupation with good works turn us into unthinking machines dispensing mercy and charity?

Again, our perception of God certainly influences and colours our relationship with God. It may determine whether that relationship is one of fear, or one of loving trust. Would we find God an angry and vengeful God ready to punish us, as in the Isaiah (ch 64) passage? Or, do we relate to God as Abba Father, more of an intimate daddy? Or, do we submit to a God where the relationship is more one-sided, as in “we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.”

On the other hand, apocalyptic endings are really good news for the believers! It is about Hope! Even if the details sound horrifying and horrific! It provides comfort and hope for deliverance, especially to those who were facing persecution and suffering in the early church.

St Paul assures the church in Corinth that the grace of God that strengthen them in the first place will continue to do so as they wait for the revealing of Jesus Christ. He said, “He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”(1 Corinthians 1-3-9)

Since we do not know the timing of the end, unlike those who claim that they know, we are reminded that Jesus’ words to the disciples are “Beware! Keep Alert! Keep awake!” These words of action are all in the present tense. A commentator, James Edwards (The Gospel According to Mark p. 406) argues: “All the signs that have been given add up to one conclusion: the End cannot be prepared for. That is because the End is ultimately not a ‘then’ but a mysteriously present – ‘now. The sole preparation for the End is watchfulness and faithfulness in the present.” What we do now matters. Rather than anticipating what is to come in the future, we should concentrate on living with watchfulness and being alert in the here and now.

Yes, our existence takes place in between the first and the second advent of Christ. As Christians, we live with the end in sight, but we are not distracted by it. Some would advise us to live every day as if it were the last day of our life. That way, we can treasure each moment and live it to the fullest. As we wait actively, keeping awake for God, we do so with a joyful expectation. We don’t wait idly, full of anxiety and worries. St Paul said in Romans 13:11, “For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first became believers.” The end is something we can look forward to, rather than something we dread. Our outlook is based on God’s promises to us, and that God has always been faithful to us as we have experienced.

Therefore, when we talk about the end, are we getting ahead of ourselves? No, not when we have the end in sight and live according to the hope that God has set before us! Thanks be to God. Amen.

Fr Victor+
www.stjd.ca