“Absurdity: Our Only Hope”
Luke 1:68-79
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
12/6/15
Zechariah has
been a priest for a lifetime. He knows and teaches the newness-from-emptiness wonders
of Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah. He knows and teaches the redeeming prophecies of
Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Hosea. In spite of that well-storied faith, when
Gabriel tells Zechariah that his wife will have a child, the old priest says, Prove it.
You preachers, says Gabriel. When you declare it, you expect everyone to
believe it. But when it is declared to you, suddenly you’re all scientists and
critics. But I’ll play your game. For the next nine months, you will have no
voice. That mouth of yours will be a dry well. Be ready, though. After nine
months, you’re going to speak differently. You will use words more gratefully
and generously. You will regard your new voice and your new son the same way –
as holy gifts, gifts that reflect and reveal God, gifts to be shared on behalf
of the world.
May you never forget this lesson,
Zechariah: Wherever you see emptiness, God sees potential.
The first
words Luke attributes to Zechariah after the birth of John are words of praise,
thanksgiving, and promise.
“Blessed be
the Lord God of Israel,” says Zechariah, “for he has looked favorably on his
people and redeemed them…By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high
[is breaking] upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and the
shadow of death, to guide our feet in the way of peace.”
With his new
voice, Zechariah speaks of promises made, but promises still unfolding. And he
does not sugar-coat reality. God’s creation still sits “in darkness and in the
shadow of death” longing for peace – for the holy Shalom of God.
While first
century Rome is a place of remarkable achievements and great wonders, it is
also a place of darkness and death, violence and turmoil. The Pax Romana, the great “Roman Peace,” is,
like every other political “peace,” wrought and sustained by brutal violence
and relentless fear. Jesus is hardly the first or last person to be executed on
a cross. And Rome means for every crucifixion to serve as an example of her murderous
resolve to control the masses and protect her power.
Into such all-consuming
starvations prophets are born - or, as Walter Brueggemann might say, the
“prophetic imagination” is born. While prophets “are characteristically
immersed in public crises, they are not,” says Brueggemann, “political agents
in any direct sense and rarely urge specific policy. Nor are they [merely] social
activists. They are most characteristically ‘utterers’…[who] speak most often
with all of the elusiveness and imaginative power of poetry…they speak in
images and metaphors that aim to disrupt, destabilize, and invite [us into]
alternative perceptions of reality.”1
If
Brueggeman’s long-studied observations hold credence, they emancipate the word
“prophet” from contemporary caricatures of gypsy fortunetellers, fear-mongering
street preachers, and what I consider to be the sadly misguided comments of a certain
Christian university president.2
I know that
fear is an undeniable reality in our day and age. I have never felt it more or been
more affected by it myself. And I am not saying that terrorism does not warrant
a decisive response. But I hear Brueggemann reminding us that biblical prophets
offer more than predictions of disaster and demand far more than “eye for an
eye” retribution. Biblical prophets invite us into new understandings of what seems
to be emptiness and hopelessness. True prophetic crises reveal the creation as
the canvas of God’s ongoing work of self-revelation. They declare humankind and
the earth itself as incarnate expressions of God’s reality, and as the very
reason for and object of gratitude and generosity.
Now, how does all
that positive affirmation hold up against the realities of ISIS and Abu Ghraib,
of San Bernardino and Colorado Springs, of Sandy Hook and Columbine, of cancer
and Parkinson’s, and on and on and on? With headlines like these, is it not
absurd to imagine the earth as a place of potential and promise?
It seems to me
that by the transforming grace of God, the Church is created and called to be a
community of the absurd. We are called to be a prophetic presence in and for the world. We are called to be a place in which human beings
are equipped for living lives of infectious faith, willful hope, and
transforming Love. An authentic, Jesus-following witness embraces absurdity and
declares that the violent dis-ease that surrounds us, the asphyxiating fear that
inhabits us – these things, as real as they are, are not our defining realities.
To give in and accept violent despair as the only reliable perception of
reality is to wither into a faithless quest for self-preservation. And along
that path, our feet will never find “the way of peace.” We must be delivered into it. Advent prepares us
for that gloriously absurd deliverance.
Jesus can be
himself through us, but only Jesus can be Jesus. And he empowers us to channel
our inner prophet and live Advent lives – “crying out in the wilderness” lives.
Condemned for
his resistance to Hitler, and for refusing to renounce his Jesuit vows, Father
Alfred Delp wrote the following words shortly before being hanged: “Not for an
hour can life dispense with these John-the-Baptist characters, these original
individuals, struck by the lightning of mission and vocation. Their heart goes
before them, and that is why their eye is so clear-sighted, their judgment [discernment] so incorruptible. They do
not cry out for the sake of crying. They cry for blessing and salvation…They
summon us to the opportunity of warding off, by the power of a converted heart,
the shifting desert that will pounce upon us and bury us.”3
Do you hear
Father Delp’s prophetic poetry? Do you feel his absurd invitation into a fresh
perception of reality?
Like John the
Baptist crying out in the wilderness of first century Rome, Father Delp cries
out into the wilderness of Nazi Germany. And both prophets call for “converted
hearts.” The repentance to which they call us guides our feet into the way of
peace, but not by drowning us in the emptiness of guilt. Prophetic repentance baptizes
us with new and overflowing abundance.
As Frederick
Buechner says in gracious, poetic absurdity: “To repent is to come to your senses. It is not so much
something you do as something that happens. True repentance spends less time looking
at the past and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ than to the future and saying, ‘Wow!’”4
Into which future will our feet be
guided? The calculated and reasonable future of fear? Or will we live into the
absurd future of converted hearts? The absurd future of prophetic promise and
hope?
It is a toss up most days. But I pray
that we all choose to be guided toward a future of hope and peace.
Amen.
1Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament Theology: Testimony,
Dispute, Advocacy, Fortress Press, 1997, p. 625.
2I was deeply grieved this morning to read of the comments of
Jerry Falwell, Jr. president of Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/12/05/liberty-university-president-if-more-good-people-had-concealed-guns-we-could-end-those-muslims/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_aof-libertyuniversity%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
3Watch for the Light Readings for Advent and Christmas, The Plough
Publishing House of the Bruderhof Foundation, INC, Farmington, PA (editors not
named), pp. 92-93.
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