Second Sunday in Advent 2018
This week’s lection calls us to turning, and it isn’t so much a turning toward checking our shopping lists and the ingredients on our favorite cookies, though we might indeed be doing both those things as part of tending our relationships with the Holy, this planet, and one another. Thankfully, the ability to turn means we don’t have to be perfect with all we do and all we are. Instead, we cultivate faithful promises and learn to live them more skillfully over time and in differing circumstances.
Turning - repentance - is an act of trust and generosity, which we need for any relationship to thrive. There’s no space to turn, to try again, to rewind, to do-over, to change directions, to learn, or to play if we don’t have both trust and generosity. Without trust or generosity toward each other, we might be playing with a water pistol and end up shot. Without generosity or trust, we might say something hurtful and then neither be able to learn from that mistake nor carry on in relationship. We need to trust that we’re not deliberately up to malice, have generosity when we make mistakes or misunderstand or participate in the less than ideal or best self. Ideals draw us up. Life is practice drawing us on. And we will fail.
We will frequently fail, in small, medium, and major ways. When we fail in our relationships, what do we do? Do we deny the failure? Tell the other person they don’t know what happened and here’s the real and alternative facts? Suggest that the other person is responsible and not ourselves? Or do we take responsibility, apologize, seek to make amends, and tend to repairing, nurturing, healing, and maybe even strengthening the relationship?
When our lives are heading in frightening directions, full of suspicion, hatred, and not-enoughness, we are being called to turn in a different direction, to repent. So Baruch reminds the people suffering oppression of where their heart’s home is. And John brings the people struggling under oppression out into the wilderness where they can sit under the cedars and touch the waters of the Jordan.
The Roman occupation was causing massive environmental damage to the land, with erosion rates increasing as trees were felled, silting the harbors the Romans relied on. In today’s changing climate world with our plundered carbon reserves destroying the planet as we know it, we face similar displacement from our heart’s home, and increased oppression and hatred with the increased numbers of displaced peoples. Every lie displacing truth, every act of hatred, every enshrinement of the idols of oppression in law and practice, is another threat to and break in relationship -- our needful relationships with one another, with this earth, and with the sacred. We cannot truly love the Holy and not love one another and this planet, wilderness and city, seas and dry lands, one breath of life after another.
The fragrant trees Baruch speaks of need us now, just as we need them (Baruch 5:8). The peoples displaced by our changing world need us now, just as we need them. This is a time of possible turning. How will we? How will we turn to nurture our relationships with one another, this planet, and the Holy? As we check our lists, how are we nurturing those relationships? How are we cultivating the trust, generosity, and tenderness these relationships need? How do we commit to begin again each day? To carry on each night? We won’t be perfect, and we don’t need to be, if we keep turning again and again to our heart’s true home. We can live into these faithful promises, touching the earth, tasting the waters, holding one another gently, dismantling oppression piece by piece, protecting the trees and one another like the shade we need in summer, breathing in the sky and into every moment with abundant and abiding love.
