KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 3 December
What seek ye?
What do we really and truly desire? Do we know what is to be rightly and properly wanted for our good and the good of others? Advent is the season of questions that open us out to what God seeks for us which is always good. The question for us is whether we will be teachable. To be a disciple, after all, is to be a learner. At issue is a respect for learning.
The Advent Pageant of Lessons and Carols is the great parade of God’s Word coming to us illumining the darkness of our hearts and our world. Only in confronting our darkness, both our sins and follies as well as the limitations of our thinking and doing, can we begin to discover what God seeks for us which is the good and the dignity of our humanity. The motion of God’s Word coming to us in the stirring words of the great lessons of the Advent Pageant is about the presence of God’s truth calling us to account. It is at once judgment and mercy.
It is all in the questions. “Where art thou?” and “Who told thee that thou wast naked?” are the great questions which God asks as we heard in the first lesson from Genesis. These are questions which belong to the story of the Fall, to the story of our separation from God and the world and from one another, the story of the form of our awakening to self-consciousness. Then through the recollection of the Abrahamic covenant through which all nations and “all peoples of the earth shall be blessed,” through the prophecy of Micah about “little Bethlehem,” through the prophetic insight of Isaiah about “the Prince of Peace” and about a renewed paradise where “the wolf lies down with the lamb” rather than eating the lamb, through the Annunciation and the story of Christ’s birth, and finally through the great Christmas Gospel of “the Word made flesh”, we are being offered another way of thinking about life than the despairing dog-eat-dog world of domination and bullying, of power without truth.
The questions of Mary, “troubled at the saying” and wondering in her mind “what manner of salutation this should be” and “how shall this be since I know not a man?” emphasize that Advent is anything but mindless. It offers a profound critique of the dangerous and destructive forms of instrumental reason which have largely defined modernity. The counter is found in the encounter with God. Advent is about God’s deep and profound engagement with our humanity. We are in the presence of God as truth through the coming of the Word.