The first Sunday in Advent is a week or soo away. I am finding it very difficult to move into any mood of anticipation, eager waiting, and that determined hopefulness sung so confidently in Christmas carols.
The past seven weeks have been hellish for all the peoples entrapped in violence in what it is becoming impossible to call "the Holy Land". Every Advent, forced by that horrendous story in Matthew's gospel, I grieve the slaughter of the innocents, those far too easily forgotten infants who were collateral damage for Herod's paranoia and state sponsored terrorism.
Long before Christ came, and in the two thousand years since, the slaughter of the innocents has continued. With modern technology and pervasive social media, we are now able to witness the human cost and consequences of war in all its destructive terror. The phrase 'the slaughter of the innocents" takes on not only biblical, but digitally enhanced proportions.
What is happening in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and the border with Lebanon, gives little hope of peace with justice, of reconciliation and co-existence. So Advent comes at the right time. Just as it seems the darkness wins again, the genius of the liturgy brings us back to God's invasion of our broken, often cruel, and sin-darkened world.
I believe that Bethlehem is a place where the unthinkable can be thought, the impossible can be conceived, and the hopeless can be redeemed. Yes, what else are we to make of that ridiculously hyped-up choir and orchestra beating out their peace anthem? This Advent, more than ever, Christians are called to hope against hope, to defy despair, to insist on peace as possible, and to echo the words that contradict all military orders, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace and goodwill amongst all people." Oh, yes – God help us, yes!
Thomas Merton, in the remarkable essay collection, Raids on the Unspeakable, wrote the following words at a time when the Vietnam war was spiralling into yet more slaughter of the innocents, Civil Rights protests were violent, and whole communities conflicted and at each others throats:
“Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited.”
“But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room.
"His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world.”
In a world where the innocent are still slaughtered, where power is militarised and mobilised, apparently there is no room for the Prince of Peace. But still He comes. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself." So we wait, in quiet and defiant trust, for the Advent of God.
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