So in light of all that, we go to the readings. And what all three of the readings focus on, in quite different ways, is the matter of relationships. From the Christian point of view, or the Jewish point of view, the prime emptiness is found in the area of relationships. So you get this extraordinary vision from one of the Messianic texts out of Isaiah about wolves living with lambs and leopards lying down with young calves and lions being together. The so called peaceable kingdom. What is going on is clearly a reference to how I am related to those people who are my enemies and those who are excluded in some way. This Isaian vision is what God is going to do through the Messiah whose task is to remove those boundaries and help us to focus on the question of boundaries and relationships. We are supposed think about is what is absent; who is absent. That is the whole project of Jesus. We get it in Paul talking in the letter to the Romans. He says that Christ became the servant of the circumcised in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarch. I ask your indulgence for a couple of minutes for some fairly technical exegesis of this text. What does this mean that Christ had become the servant of the circumcised etc., etc. We want to say that Christ (which is simply the word for Messiah in Greek) occupied the position of trying to talk to his fellow Jews about the boundaries that they had built among themselves to distinguish themselves from all the other people who were not Jews. Judaism historically has done what every human group seems to do; in order to preserve some sense of what they are, they had to radically differentiate themselves from everybody in a way in which they are superior and others are inferior. So Jesus becomes a servant of the circumcised, this means the Jews, on behalf of the truth of God, which was what? That He might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs. What were those promises? The promises made to Abraham were that through Abraham’s offspring all of humanity will be brought together and be brought to God. You have the same thing exactly reflected in the passage from Mathew where you have John the Baptist saying to the Pharisees and Sadducees, these super Jews, that God can make children of Abraham out of stones. In other words, that all these things that you think that you have that make you God’s people in some special way are irrelevant because God is able to make children of Abraham, that is to bring people together out of the most unpromising situation.

So, this raises all kinds of promises. Let me name just a few. How does one coordinate, for example, one’s desire to be open to one’s immediate circle of people, one’s family, one’s students, one’s colleagues, without, by dint of lack of energy or lack of insight, simply excluding the rest of the world. How do you do that? I don’t know. Because I know all kinds of people who exert enormous amounts of energy in fixing up their relationship with their immediate environment and let the rest of the world can go hang. And on the other hand, I know all kinds of people who are extraordinarily concerned about the starving North Vietnamese and Sudanese and who are utter monsters in their domestic situation. We don’t seem to be able to bring this off very well.

And yet what we get out of these texts, is that somehow what God does, make us permeable to everybody everyplace. How does that happen? What does it feel like? I don’t know. I know that the sense of that absence is itself the beginnings of hearing the Kingdom of God, of listening to Jesus. The fact that that is a problem for me is itself a first step. I am on the way at least to cultivate that sense of multiple absences. It’s not just me and my kids, but me and all those other people.

And then you make the other issue, which I find personally extraordinarily problematic. I would love to be able to just turn some switch in myself or in the world so all this stuff would happen. I would love to control the situation in such a way that I could manage to destroy all those barriers. I would love to do that. The problem is, of course, that I cannot do that without violating the freedom of the other people, in which case the whole thing collapses on itself. Remember the temptation scene at the beginning of the Gospels of Mathew and Luke. Where Jesus is out in the desert, hungry, and has this thought – if only I could turn these rocks into bread, people would go nuts. So that when I go and say, "repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand", they would fall over themselves to follow me. But at what expense? By removing their freedom and that is called blackmail. And the wonderful thing about Jesus is that he did not buy into that. He did not buy into some kind of coercive role in order to bring about the Kingdom of God. And that is the other problem. The world is full of managers. Pinochet, a manager, very anxious to build some tidy organization. At what cost?

So, we call on Advent as a time to simply reflect on absence. What should I experience in my life that is missing? Where is the emptiness in me? My God, there is plenty of emptiness, of all kinds in our world. All kinds of absences. We are here to try to pray together to clarify our absences for us. Help us to feel those absences rather than these absences. Help us to be empty in this way rather than that way.