Saturday 8 December 2012

Advent: How Deep is You Love (God)?

How bleak, how awful were things for her in recent days. How desperate that she felt that the only way out of a situation was to take her own life. She decided that taking her own life was the permanent solution to the short term problem she found herself in. How utterly utterly awful.

How awful that she was not able to live with the consequences of her actions. How awful that she was not able to see herself as how people described her in death, as an excellent. How awful that she could see no other way through. And her family are utterly utterly broken, devastated at their loss.


I am speaking of Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse who made the headlines this week but I could also be speaking the words and sentiment of Israel, to whom God spoke through the prophet Baruch.

Like last week’s first reading from the prophet Jeremiah, through Baruch, God is speaking to His people in exile after the Assyrian attack of Jerusalem. Many are now slaves in Babylon or dispersed to other parts of the Mediterranean. Earlier on in the book, God chastises Israel for their lack of faithfulness to Him, and the exile is God’s judgment for their waywardness.  She, God’s people Israel, is bereft of her home, in a wilderness of hopelessness, bleak, broken, grieving, unable to see a way through. Yet, says God through Baruch, that is about to dramatically change, and change because God alone wills it.

Israel is pictured in mourning after a bereavement - wearing sack cloth and ashes. Into that bleakness and barren hopelessness, God offers hope. He reminds them that they are His much loved people. The language is tender, like a newly married husband to his much loved wife. God will restore his people in hope like undressing from funeral attire and redressing into the beautiful clothes of a princess and the dignity He gives to Israel is His to give - there is a call to share in again the divine life and purposes of God.

And lets face it - everyone loves this sort of rags to riches story. It feeds right into our own inbuilt longing for justice and into our celebrity obsessed, lottery roll-over mentality. God is the handsome Prince Charming to Israel’s Cinderella.

With that image in my mind, Baruch then goes on to portray God as reaching down to the cowered Israel in all her finery. Unsure that she deserves all this lavishness. He helps her stand, and leads her to the dancefloor in the sight of many wealthy guests. This is full to overflowing with the romance of a Jane Austen novel.

God will restore Israel and give her a new dignity, but will also restore her children to her from the places that they have been dispersed. Again the imagery is deeply intimate. This is the tear-streaked face reunion that we all long for for Kate and Jerry McCann with their daughter Madeleine.

But this isn’t simply an undoing of all that has gone before. This isn’t a raising to life of a tragically dead husband returning to his grieving widow; nor is this the reunion of missing children to a distraught and worried mother. This is God doing something new in His love for His people. The love that God has for His people is so intense that the landscape is physically altered so they can return to Him in safety.

It’s like the love that flows and shapes the landscape of God’s heart is so intense, like the Colarado river carving the Grand Canyon, that it flow from His heart in a way that shapes and reshapes the world in the same way it did when all things were created. Even the stuff of that natural world will be used by God, the trees will bow low to shade His people from the scorching heat of the sun, to ease their journey home. God is not just in the business of renewing a relationship. He is doing something completely new, with such intensity of love, that it captivates the heart and reshapes the physical world as we are called home.


It is into the wilderness of our lives that God speaks and continues to speak and into which John comes. But through John, God comes to a very specific time, to a very specific place, to very specific people, but his message comes again and again - resonating down the years of history.

That message that we hear echoing through this Holy season. It is Baruch’s message but for all people. Many of us are enslaved and far from God’s intimate and intense love.  We self obsessed, unwilling to look for Him or now too blind to see Him - are focussed on our rights not our responsibilities to others; on what I can gain not what I can give; on the language of ‘me’ not ‘you’ or ‘us.’ Many of us are literally and metaphorically in a wilderness of hopelessness, bleak, broken, grieving, unable to see a way through.

It is normal and commonplace these days to deny this loving God and to shake our fists at the sky... If these’s a loving God how can He allow such and such. He cannot be.  And yet we all too easily forget that we are far from loving too -  to ourselves and others and especially to those whom we say we love the most.
Advent calls to our heart and in these days of bleakness and hopelessness, and God woos us like a lover. He sings songs of love and hope to all things created, in the climax of which He reaches down to even to us, having dressed our brokenness and failing with lavish love and outlandish hope, and in His coming among us, calls us to dance with Him in His Divine life and purposes.

Cinderella’s story only really begins when she recognises what she has been, and with the guidance and gift of her Fairy Godmother and the determined love of Prince Charming, she then accepts what she is - beautiful and worth loving whether dressed in a ball gown or not.

The same rags to riches story is God’s call to us - it begins, when we recognise what we have been - broken, failing, hopeless - and then filled with the intense love of God, we begin to accept what we are - beautiful and worth loving no matter what we have done, no matter who we are.  This is the repentance that John calls us to still - God doing a new thing - that this Advent God comes to us with a love for us so intense that it leaves the glories and grandeur of heaven and reshapes the intimate landscape of our hearts, and He asks us, even us to dance with Him in Divine life and love.

And I now have this song in my head...


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