Welcome to the new school year!

                                                                                    Adv 1B

                                                                                    St. Stephen’s

                                                                                    November 30, 2008

My old liturgics mentor at Catholic University, David Power, was a brilliant Irish leprechaun of a priest who used to tell a story he swore actually happened.  He was in England, touring one of the great cathedrals among all the other awe-struck visitors, gazing at the vast space filled with color and light, magnificent appointments, and centuries of prayers of the faithful.  Behind him he heard one old Irish lady whisper to another, “All the same, you can feel the Real Absence.”

            In today’s passage from Isaiah, the Jews are feeling the Divine Absence.  They don’t know where God’s gone:  “You have hidden your face from us!”  “If only you would tear open the heavens and come down!”   It is the 6^th century BCE, and the Jews have been overwhelmed by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar and carried off to Babylon, where they spend their time lamenting.  A few decades later, King Cyrus of Persia conquers Babylon and sets the Jews free to return home.  What they find when they get back has them lamenting even more—the Temple has been destroyed, the country is laid waste.  They take a look around and immediately wonder where God can be in all of this misery and destruction.

The author of the psalm, too—who was not David—repeats the same theme at the same time as a result of the same experience:  “Show the light of your countenance, O God!”  Where are you, God?  Why did you leave your chosen people?  Everything’s fallen apart.  Where is God?  Is he really absent?

We can hardly blame the Jews—whether 2600 years ago or much more recently—for suspecting God’s absence.  There is probably no other people whose history should make it harder to keep faith in their god.

But even without the history of oppression and misery God has doled out to the Jews, Christians, too, may well feel a sense of God’s absence.  The world is a mess.  The economy is a mess.  Hardworking people, not to mention those who cannot work, are thrown out of their homes.  In other countries, they are being blasted out of their homes, often by our weaponry. 

People have become terrified of each other.  Danger lurks everywhere.  When I was a toddler, my mom plunked us into a playpen out in the front yard while she did stuff in the house, quite literally confident that we were perfectly safe and that God would watch over us.  No one does that anymore.  Kids don’t get sent to the neighborhood playground by themselves anymore.  Pre-teen girls don’t do much babysitting anymore.  God doesn’t seem to be watching lately.

Is God gone?  Is he absent?  It is no longer enough to say, with cheery confidence, “I’ve found Jesus!”  Like he’d been hiding behind the couch all the time.  Where is God in this mess we live in? 

            How do we find God if looking behind the sofa is not enough?  In the play Inherit the Wind, based on the Scopes “monkey” trial about evolutionary theory, the Clarence Darrow character, having demolished the fundamentalist arguments of the very religious William Jennings Bryan character, says in retrospect,  “The man got lost - lost because he was looking for God too high up and too far away.”

I suspect that all too often, when we despair of God’s presence in our lives, it is because we are looking too high up and too far away—imagining a physical, distant place…some kind of heaven far, far away, where an enormous God lives in splendor while we suffer here below.  Someplace, perhaps, where Christ the King is getting ready to label folks either “sheep” or “goats.”  Is that where God is hiding?  Is God really absent?   Or does it just seem that way because we are looking for the wrong God?

            Elie Wiesel, who, as many of you know, survived Auschwitz, has one answer to the question, Where is God?  This comes from his book, Night:

The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him. …

The victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. "Long live Liberty!" cried the two adults. But the child was silent.

"Where is God? Where is He?" someone behind me asked.

At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over. …

Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive...

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. Behind me I heard the same man asking: "Where is God now?"

And I hear a voice within me answer him: "Where is he? Here He is - He is hanging here on this gallows. . . "

The Christian, of course, sees—or certainly should see—the face of Jesus in that boy.  If we are looking for the God of the Skies who will come with great power and might to liberate us and smite our enemies, then, yes, that God is absent. If we are looking for a distant being who watches and judges our every movement, that God is probably absent.  If we are looking for a pal who will leave his footprints in the sand, that God is probably absent.  But if we are looking for the God of the victims, the God that Jesus tells us about, the God that Jesus showed us in his own life, then that God has been with us all the time.

            The Christian answer to the question, Where is God? begins with Jesus on the cross and continues with all who suffer, whether from poverty or disease or neglect or injustice.  That is where God is.  With those who suffer.  With those dying of AIDS.  With those who hunger and thirst.  With those who are hopeless.  With those who are impoverished.   With refugees.  With the homeless.  With the depressed.  With the bankrupt. 

And with those who work alongside God to alleviate suffering.  It is not about you and your personal, private spiritual relationship with the great high sky God.  It is about you and your relationships with those whom God has identified as his own, with those whom God loves unconditionally, with those whom God calls us to love and cure and feed and visit.

For the Christian, finding God is easy.  Fortunately, our sacramental life does not depend on the survival of one temple, as it did for the Jews, and around the world Christians find God in the body and blood of the Christ every time the Mass is celebrated, hundreds of times at any one moment in the turning of the earth.   The teachings of Jesus and his presence in the sacraments of the church open us to awareness of his presence and to the secret at the heart of his Kingdom—when we do good for the least of our brethren, we do it also to and with a very present God.  As long as there is suffering in this world, God will be there, the God of the sufferers, the God of the helpless.  If we want to find God, we must go and join him there. 

Advent signals the inbreaking of the Kingdom, the beginning of God’s reign on earth.  Jesus comes:  First the human child, then the biblical sage, then the revolutionary preacher, then the One who suffers with us, and—in some vision of ultimate perfection—finally the one who presides over a millennium of peace and joy, where suffering shall be no more.  That final age can only come if those who cause suffering and those who can alleviate join together to eliminate it.