What did you come here to see?
Advent calls us to prepare for the coming of Christ. But what are we really looking for in Christ’s coming? What are our motivations, expectations and goals? What choices are we making to commit to our deepest goals?
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Transcript
Come, Holy Spirit,
Fill the hearts of your faithful
And kindle in them the fire of your love;
Send forth your Spirit
And they shall be created
And you shall renew the face of the earth. Amen.
Here is a legendary story of Rabia al-Basri, an eighth -century Sufi Muslim woman, mystic and poet that will help us reflect on today’s Gospel. The story is that the local people saw Rabia walking one day, in an ecstatic state, with a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When they asked her what she was doing, she replied, “I am going to burn heaven down and extinguish the fires of hell.” Of course the people were confused and concerned, but Rabia’s poetic image was meant to challenge their preconceived notions of why they were practicing their faith in the first place.
Were they only practicing their faith because they wanted to achieve or earn some reward in heaven? That is the energy of the grasping ego and must be resisted. Burn heaven down, Rabia said. Or were they practicing their faith because they wanted to avoid the fires of hell? That is a fear-based posture and must be resisted as well. Put out the fires of hell, Rabia says. Her image challenged the people to ask themselves what is your motivation in practicing your faith? Of course, her hope was to inspire reflection, so that we all could ask ourselves just what it would be like to worship God for the sake of worshipping God. No pursuit of a reward; no fear-based avoidance. Can we even imagine such a practice?
I hear this question of motivation in today’s Gospel reading when John sends questions to Jesus from prison. Are you the one we have been waiting for? John asks. Jesus sends back a message that is full of testimonials: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. In other words, I am not sure about the motivations of any questions, but I can tell you about the actual, lived experience. I can tell you about the lives that have been healed.
Then Jesus takes the opportunity to challenge those gathered there, asking them in return, What did you go out to see? What did you come out into the desert to see?
Why did you come here? What was your motivation? This is a question of deep spiritual maturity.
I couldn’t help but think of how this question connects with our lives now, on many levels. This time of year, it is so easy to get pulled into the consumerist mindset, thinking that, somehow, properly observing the birth of Christ means stressing ourselves and spending enormous sums of money on presents. I can hear the wisdom in the question: What is your motivation?
Maybe we could take advantage of Advent being an intentional time of preparation for the coming of Christ, and ask ourselves What is our motivation in doing what we do?.
Not just with Christmas season and our cultural assumptions, but with our deeper practice of faith in the church, Jesus’s words convict us: What did you come here to see?
With the uncertainty we have, our anxiety and fear often lead us to grasp onto the first seemingly certain thing we feel–or to swear fealty to profiteers who throw promises around like candy at a parade. While some things may seem to make us feel better for the moment, do we want to feel better or do we want to be made well, to be healed? Those are different things and our discernment is essential. Jesus calls us beyond the spectacle and the saccharine-sweet to a deeper substance.
What did you come here to see?
But, of course, in our culture, such deeper spiritual work does not sell well–fear is much easier to sell–because we are habituated to seek out instant gratifications and entertainment rather than practices of deeper spiritual maturity. We fall into patterns and habits and the energy needed to shift out of these can feel enormous.
It may not sell well, but this deeper work is the thing that can truly nurture healing in us.
These are hard questions to ask ourselves in these days, and this is difficult work to do. But we must ask ourselves these questions and we must do this work. And we must face the fact that one of the main reasons we find ourselves in our current mess is that we have not asked these difficult questions nor done this deep soul work. The wider world wants us distracted and reactive. It makes it much easier to manipulate and leverage if we just blindly consume.
When it comes to “church,” we too often consider church to be a place where we go to feel good about ourselves rather than be a space that can nurture a deep practice of faith that transforms our hearts and our lives. Comfort is needed, AND we are meant to grow into the fullness of Christ, as our Baptismal Covenant reminds us.
Until we see Christian community–church–as a sort of spiritual gym, a school of prayer, a community of practice, honesty, consciousness, and transformation, rather than an entertainment venue or some religious-service provider, we simply will not foster the transformation that is needed for true healing.
What did you come to see? What is your motivation? But, as I said, this doesn’t sell well.
Prophets like John the Baptist are notorious for having shorter life spans than the oppressive, imperial systems and rulers they challenge. A corrupt empire may seek to silence the prophets who challenge it, but the truth of the Gospel cannot be killed. Light shines in the darkness, and God’s dream will eventually be born anew.
Jesus says today, Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me. Tell John that the healing transformation is already taking root.
So, how do we take advantage of this invitation for greater reflection and practice? There are different ways to practice our faith. One way is what I have taken to calling the pin-ball orientation, where we crash from crisis to crisis, falling back like gravity into complacent patterns so long as we can afford it, until the paddles of life hit us again and toss us back up to ping off the next crisis. That is a way that many practice their faith. There is very little intentionality and consciousness in it, and it ends up looking very much like what Rabia was protesting against: going to church, so to speak, in a reactive way in order to get into heaven or avoid hell.
Jesus didn’t have much patience for this approach.
There is another way to practice our faith, and if I can be so bold, I see it in so much of our life here in this community. This approach is marked by stretching our spiritual muscles, recognizing that our life is our practice. It is a practice marked by intentional and proactive reflection, and, like Brandon mentioned so well last week, repentance, metanoia, seeking to actually change the direction of our lives.
Such an intentional practice of faith calls us to make choices that will put us at odds with the values and assumptions of the broader culture–and this is why it is so hard and doesn’t sell well, as we say. Who wants to be the first in their peer group to stand up and call the question on the insane patterns of life we feel trapped in?
Perhaps we see the challenge in a family who feels torn because, on one hand, there is the pressure to participate in sports, but they also know they are completely exhausted and can rarely ever come and worship, to say nothing about the pace of their life and their well-being. How do we name the struggle? What did you come to see? What is your motivation?
Perhaps we see it in ourselves when we feel pulled into longstanding family narratives, drama and customs that feel painful, and we struggle to know how our practice of prayer can actually transform the way we live. Do we realize we actually have choices to participate–or not–in events? How do we speak truth and change our lives? What did you come to see? What is your motivation?
In our consumer culture, when it comes to Christian community, and our conscience feels pinched in times like these, we so often fall back on asking “what can the church do differently to reach out and bring people in?” I wonder if Advent, and this image of Jesus and John the Baptist, is challenging us to flip that. What if we dared to be honest and ask if the church as an intentional Christian community can be a place that asks–challenges–us all to name what we can do in our lives to make our practice of faith a greater priority. How can we actually change our behaviors? How can the church be a space that encourages us–and holds us accountable–in asking what we actually need to change in our lives in order to nurture healing?
If we don’t engage on this level, the church becomes a much more shallow club that avoids the deep soul work the prophets and Jesus call us to do. Advent, as we are reminded again today, focuses our attention on strengthening our spiritual maturity.
Because now we make a shift in this season of preparation. In these final ten days of Advent, we are called to ask ourselves the powerful question: how do we need to prepare our hearts so that we can receive Christ in our own lives and give birth to Him in the world today? That is the deep question. That is our work. What did you come here to see? Such a deep practice may not sell well, in terms of the broader culture, but rest assured that it is the practice that can truly transform our lives and nurture the healing that we yearn for.