This talk was written for and delivered to a group of young adults.
My brother and sister in law got a new puppy this past
summer. In case you were wandering, it is some sort of mix between a boxer and
a lab, and his name is Barley. If you weren’t wandering about those things, and
the names of breeds don’t give you any kind of idea, I would call this dog
medium sized, light brown, very dog looking. Anyway, one of the first things
that my brother decided to do with this dog is sign him up for dog school. This
was a new idea to me, but this is the kind of place where a dog learns to sit,
roll over, not bite people, wait to eat on command, and the ever popular: not
pee on the carpet. Well, whenever I go over to my brother’s house now, the
doggy diploma is displayed prominently on the refrigerator, and my brother
likes to show me how well trained Barley is. And I have been very impressed, my
brother says sit, the dog sits, my brother says roll over, it rolls over, he
tells Barley to wait to eat his food, and maybe one out of every three times he
actually waits, he yells come here boy and O my goodness is that a squirrel, I
love squirrels, I want it! Shoot it went up a tree. I will wait here for it,
and then surely I will get it. Meanwhile I will dig up this mushroom. It will
make me sick it always does, but it is so tasty. What is that noise I hear, it
sounds kind of like that guy that feeds me, but who needs him when I have this
squirrel and this mushroom. In all fairness to Barley, he is a puppy, and this
is what puppies do, perspective is not an easily learned skill for a dog. Because,
you see, Barley doesn’t see how good he has it. He gets all of his meals, plus
treats and hot dogs. He gets two walks a day and a big backyard to play in, and
trust me he gets plenty of attention and belly rubs.
For us, squirrels and mushrooms do not hold the same kind of
sway over our attention, but there are things that can grab our attention. In
fact there are so many possibilities of things that we could focus on, that we
could choose to dedicate our time, energy, and wallet to; that companies spend
billions of dollars to try to get us to prefer to spend our time, energy, and
money on their product rather than others that may be very similar. And we do,
many times for good reason. For example, we have to eat, so we have to buy some
sort of food. Beer can be a good thing, and If we are going to drink it we have
to choose one to drink, and so we decide among the options that are presented
to us. However, companies do not present products merely as an option. Can you
imagine a billboard that said: Coors Lite, if you are looking for beer, this is
one of your choices. No it sets up a picture of a world that the product is
part of. Do you want the Rocky mountain freshness? Do you like the idea of
mountain climbers risking their lives to dig your beer out of an icy cliff?
Don’t you think a beer would be more cold if it was brewed cold? If you like
cold, if you are a cold loving kind of person, then Coors light is for you. And
then you become part of a community of Coors drinkers. “O, you’re a Coors guy, my
friend Joey is a Coors guy, ‘hey Joey, James is a Coors guy.” I wish I could
tell you that that has never been said to me. But this process is replicated
over and over: favorite sports team, favorite burrito place (Chipotle),
favorite soda brand, favorite kind of movie, favorite music group, etc. Then it
just makes sense to build our culture, our view of the world as a whole, based
on our own preferences, rather than any account of what is good, meaningful, of
value, or real. Our lives can become centered on many different kinds of
visions of reality much more substantial than beer preference. We can think ‘Everything
would be right in my world if’ . . . if I could get the job I want . . . if I
could live in the neighborhood I want to live in . . . if I could just make
that relationship work . . . if I could
finally meet my mother’s, boss’s, father’s husband’s, insert person here’s
expectations for me . . . if I could meet my own expectations for myself. These
goals can quickly consume us and become our main outlook on life.This is a problem that the people of Israel faced throughout
its history, as well. Though our Lord and God had made a promise to the people
of Israel time and again that he would take care of them, they were always
looking for new gods who could do for them what they thought the Lord could not
do as well. After they had seen the Lord part the Red sea in two and lead them
through it safe onto dry land. After the Lord had made bread fall to the ground
to feed them, and after he had made delicious ‘flightless birds’ appear in the
middle of the desert, they grumbled against God and thought up a better God,
forming this God out of their own hands, and worshipping the golden calf in the
desert. God the Father, after some swaying from Moses, responded in love and
Mercy to his people, taking them back, and continuing to pour out his good
gifts on them. And this is the story of Israel repeated time and again. Just as the unfaithfulness of Israel grew and
grew, so did the intervening love and Mercy of our God. And at the heart of
God’s continued faithfulness, the prophets began to hear of the love of God
coming to them in a way all together unexpected. God had sent prophets, judges,
kings, and priests to help guide his people, but they came to know that one
would come who was greater, the one that would save the people definitively
from the oppression that repeatedly came from their turning away from God. For the faithful people of Israel, the promise of God toward
Israel was not the promise of one god among many gods, in their faith they saw
that all they had and all that was came from the Lord their God. In their faith
they knew that what the prophets foretold of a new messiah would come true,
they knew that a pattern of sin thousands of years old would be definitively
taken away in the coming of this new Messiah. And in the history of Israel there
was one person who had the kind of Faith that knew this history of Israel in
her heart in the fullness of its meaning. She knew the turning away and in an
even greater way she knew the extent to which God had poured out his love on
his people. Mary grew up under the care of Joachim and Anne, and though we do
not know from scripture anything about her early life, we can imagine that she
would have heard the stories of Israel, and that as she would with her son, she
pondered these things in her heart. The heart of Mary held the whole story of
Israel and the whole of their expectation in the work of God that was still to
be done in her midst. We can imagine that this faith would have become the
whole of her vision of the world in which she lived. Israel was everything,
God’s promise was everything, the whole of who she was, the whole of the world
around her. With the eyes of faith she saw the need of Israel and with ears of
faith she was ever ready, unbeknownst to her, to hear the Angel Gabriel’s
greeting, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you” “Do not be afraid, Mary,
for you have found favor with God. And now you will conceive in your womb and
bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.” Mary, the one who had given her faith
so totally over to the belief that the whole of her life and the whole of her
history and her people’s history, everything was subject to the God who
continued to give his people his love, was chosen to help in bringing this very
vision to life, to flesh. This is Mary’s faith, and this is the faith that Advent calls
us to. As we await the remembrance of the birth of our Savior, and as we look to
the coming of our Jesus Christ again, we are called to see all things in the
light of faith. Our world cannot be neatly separated into convenient visions of
reality. Our world is not constituted by the sum total of our preferences or
our distractions, or even our own goals as much as sometimes we want it to be.
There is something more fundamental going on, something more radically true
than all of those things we can let define us.So what if you moved into your dream house, what if you your
mother finally approves of your choices. What if you are able to momentarily
live up to your own expectations. What if Barley finally lives up to the
promise of his obedience diploma. What if I do find solace in being a Coors
man. What if the Virgin conceived and bore a son, what if the Word became flesh
and dwelt among us. What if he will come again to judge the living and the
dead. Faith knows. Mary’s faith, our advent faith can examine these
possibilities, and will help point us toward which ones to count on.
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