1st Sunday of Advent

The completion of our own humanity

1st Sunday of Advent

Obviously the readings are all geared to getting us into a state of preparedness for and anticipation of Christmas. I thought it might be useful, in the four Sundays of Advent, to look at various aspects of the central meaning of being prepared: namely, existing in a state of hopefulness. I will look at 'hope' during the next few weeks.

Immediately we run into a problem: how do you distinguish a hope that is really religious from hope that is not religious? What I mean by non-religious hope is, for instance, the several hundred ads that we see every day. Basically those are promissory notes. They are a stimuli to hope. You know, buy this and then... They are all future oriented, and this is the very essence of an ad. If we do this now, then tomorrow will somehow be better than now. Of course, we also live in the fading remnants of that great Enlightenment idea that human history is essentially progressive. Progress is our most important product. We are all familiar with that kind of stuff. It's in our bones now matter how much it may be under assault by other phenomenan.

So, we need to be very clear right from the outset about what we are doing when we are talking about hope that is specifically Christian. I've been trying to organize this in a kind of aphoristic, portable fashion so that I, and I hope you, can think about it during the week. The best that I can come up with is this: hope is essentially sin-shaped. I put it that way because I think that any other way of looking at hope doesn't have anything to do with religion. It is reducible to sheer optimism, or self-confidence or whatever. But the only way that we can get hold of a hope that is specifically Christian is to see that this is hope, as Paul will say, against hope. Namely, against our own sinfulness. Unless we hope that ultimately God will transform us then we don't have religious hope, a Christian hope. There is no other way to look at it so far as I can see. The thing that put me on that line is, of course, this glorious passage from Isaiah.

There are a couple of little odd things here, because the Jews could not imagine anything going on in the world without God being the agent of it happening. So you get these really strange lines like: God, you harden our hearts! You hide yourself. So, seemingly by implication, it's your fault... But that's not what they meant. We can read it that way easily enough and it has been read that way. But it's the Jews' intellectual quandary as to how can we say that everything that happens is because God is agent, and yet we are somehow agents as well. So they will seem to attribute our sinfulness, in effect, to the activity of God. But this has to be countered, of course, with that other great, central Jewish notion, that we human beings are essentially free. In fact, there is not a religion on the face of the earth that exalts human freedom in any way like the way that the Jews do. Human freedom is at the very essence of a connection to God. And, of course, human freedom is at the very essence of the nature of sin.

So, for what do we hope? We hope for the completion of our own humanity: that God shaped humanity; that we see in these texts and in the lives of the saints. That's what we hope for. And of course, freedom is of the essence of being human. So, we can choose that kind of human life, choose that way of being human, or act against it. This is what we call sin. And this is where problems immediately begin to set in. At least it is for me, because my notion of sin, whether I am talking about when I was growing up or undergoing four years of moral theology in the seminary, was seen as a set of prohibitions. Don't do this. Don't do that. If you do that you'll be sinning. There was this terribly, terribly under do undernourished understanding that, underlying these prohibitions is some positive understanding of what it means to be a human being. It's in the light of understanding what it means to be a human being that these prohibitions take on their meaning. And yet, that's not the way that was presented to me and maybe to you too. A sin was the breaking some law that somebody had laid on me. The truly impoverishing aspect of all this is that the great positive view of humanity and of human freedom we get from the career of Jesus or in the scriptural tradition, is terribly underplayed. Did we have a catechisi of freedom in the church? Do we today? I don't know. But if we don't, then, of course, we can't even begin to talk about sin in any meaningful and authentic way. But we can reduce it - and de-nature - it to some kind of calculable measurable quantum. Are you doing it Trojcak or are you not doing it? We love to have these things to be quantifiable because then we can reassure ourselves that we're okay. But it doesn't really work that way. To determine the degree of rule breaking is handy because we are so insecure that we need all these markers.

In other words, the problem I think in the Church, is that we have not been guided in how to examine the quality of our own human existence under our own steam. All kinds of other people are quite ready to rush in to say "Oh, you need to do this..." or "What you need to do is this...". But all of that is somehow alienated. It didn't give me my life. Yet if we want to talk about sin, we're talking about how I am mutilating my own life. How am I deforming my own life. That's the great biblical notion of sin. Sin is always dehumanization. All the biblical metaphors for sin are reducible to that. But because we don’t start from this understanding even the perception of sin very difficult.

Just a couple of instances of that vision of humanity that we get from the prophets. How indifferent am I to the rest of the world? How have I trivialized the quality of my human relationships because I am not able to look very closely, very carefully, at that. And how aware am I of the great, crucial issues of our day? Of ecological problems? We are destroying the planet, folks. We are destroying the planet; species after species disappearing weekly from this planet, in large part by dint of our greed. Is that part of my humanity? I think so. Racism. Sexism. Homophobia. Have I been brought by the church, let us say, to see that these attitudes effect my humanity? It is an extraordinarily important question.

Hope is essentially the desire to move beyond where I am to this other person that God calls me to be. The obstruction to that is sin... real sin. Not sin that someone else accuses me as having committed. So we have again to review this great problem in the church: of seeing sin as violation of some exterior injunction, one that somebody else dumps upon my head.

Of course, we have another, secular difficulty too, wherein sin is reduced to some form of neurosis. God knows it is very difficult to distinguish between neurosis and sin because we are all at least slightly neurotic. So how much freedom is there in the carrying on of our lives? But that we should ask those questions is the very essence of hope. Because if we don't ask those questions, hope is going to be reduced to some "Pollyannish" optimism. "Well, things will work out in some kind of magical way over my head." No! God calls us to freedom which means that God calls us to take responsibility for our own lives.

Advent is a penitential season. Meaning what? Just exactly what I said at the beginning. If we learn to hope we have to find out that hope is fundamentally sin-shaped. To hope is to see the possibility of realizing that vision of our full, Christ-shaped humanity, beyond our conscious, repeated and free betrayal of it

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