Fr Mark Schultz
Dear Friend,
One of the blessings of returning to Year One in our Daily Office Lectionary at the beginning of a new church year is that our Office Readings from Isaiah are the same readings that have formed the ancient office of Matins for centuries. We’re engaging in a pattern of reading and prayer that has shaped generation upon generation of Christian folks. So like our ancestors in the faith, the Church is calling us to hear the voice of Isaiah in this Advent season.
And it’s no wonder that Isaiah has formed the heart of the morning office in Advent for so long. Isaiah begins with a call to repentance, appropriate for Advent—a call to cast away those things of darkness, death, and un-light (our idols) into the darkness to which they belong, from which they come, and to which they lead. And this call away from idolatry is embedded within a larger prophetic movement that calls us to compassion, love, mercy, justice, all of those gifts and graces which will be fully revealed in the Anointed One Jesus whose name will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Indeed, wherever you find idolatry in the Bible, you will always find these gifts and graces sorely lacking in a world completely out of sorts, a world of injustice, a world about to collapse in on itself from the weight of its violence and abject oppressiveness, a world in need of a savior.
Which is precisely where we find ourselves today, and not simply due to the accidents or circumstances of the moment: this fallen world is always in need of (indeed, is yearning for) its savior. So it’s needful, in these long-nighted days of winter and of human history, that we hear that prophetic voice calling us to “walk in the LORD’s light” (Is ii.5). This morning, Isaiah gives us a vision of the ways in which our pride, our lofty things, the heights of our ambition and power, our walls and towers, our deathly “civilizations,” all of our great accomplishments of art and industry and economic or military or political might to which we cling and pay homage, all the things that we have attempted to raise above God and that have produced a world of injustice and death…God will lay it all low. And this is the paradox of God’s judgment: God levels our mountains and cuts down our cedars of pride because they’re not good for us. God’s judgment is a salutary thing, the uncompromisingly fierce medicine of love, working to remove from us all that is of death, working to heal and restore all that is death-infected.
And that is precisely what God is up to in the Incarnation we anticipate this season. The One who will be exalted, who will judge and save the living and the dead and the world through the fire of his love, that One who will come again in power and great glory comes to us first as a humble infant; the High King of the Universe makes a throne of a simple manger; the Eternal enters time; the Infinite Undying One lives a finite mortal life. The humility of God undoes all our pride, all our loftinesses, revealing how flimsy they all are, how illusory, how full of sound and fury, signifying nothing (as our friend Shakespeare would say)…because it is the humility of God, consummated on the cross, that will break death and restore the world. It is the humility of God that will reveal the lengths to which the endless love of God will go to save us, to show us that love is stronger than death, and that through such love a new world is coming to be, visible even now in Christ’s Body, the Church. The exaltation of God in Christ our King and our Judge looks like lowliness to us because we are death-blinded and sin-sick: we don’t recognize that those things we do to exalt ourselves degrade us, while the things that humble us exalt us.
Beloved, let us allow Love to humble us at the feet of our Infant Lord (the Speechless Word!) today, this season, and in all the seasons of our lives! Let us allow our heights to be toppled so our hearts can grow in love! Let us, by grace, cast away the works of darkness, so that at last we may rise to the life immortal!
Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+