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The 2021 Richard McKinney Memorial Ecumenical Advent Lecture – Advent in a year of plague and ecological emergencies

Advent in a year of plague and ecological emergencies
The 2021 Richard McKinney Memorial Ecumenical Advent Lecture as broadcast at 7.30pm on Tuesday 30 November 2021, St George’s East Ivanhoe, Diocese of Melbourne, for Banyule Churches Together

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Text version as supplied by Revd Dr. Carla A. Grosch-Miller

I have long loved the first Sunday of Advent as the beginning of the church year. It is an awakened and awakening cry; a look round the world as it is and the realisation that we are well and truly in trouble, drowning in our own hubris, beyond our capacity to save ourselves.

Advent 2021 is all that and more. It has been a year of plague and ecological emergencies with no end in sight as we move towards 2022. People are weary and stretched, older than their years; hope is thin. Stir up your might; come save us!, we cry with the psalmist. Restore us; let your face shine that we may be saved. (Psalm 80) It’s a good place to start: Reality. Much healthier than burying our heads in the sand. Ultimately more hope-bearing than the deflected or deluded eye.

On the first Sunday of Advent we read from the gospel of Luke: Then he told them a parable:

Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already here. So also, when you see these things taking place [signs in the sun, the moon and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves; people fainting from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, vv25-26], you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven
and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. (Luke 21: 29-33)

Jesus assumed that the cues of nature were reliable – one could read the trees, the skies, the ripening grain, the seasons. He is right, of course. Nature speaks. She has been shouting for some time; we mostly turn away. A plague comes, apparently the product of zoonosis – disease that hops species as humans interact with animals, through agriculture, destruction of natural habitats or eating wild animals. More and more new and devastating human diseases come about this way. Flooding, fires and famine – all on the increase. Land and sea temperatures on the rise; glaciers and polar ice sheets melting, the tundra unfreezing. The sixth mass extinction accelerating as we lose species at a rate over 100x that of natural evolution. Oceans are filled with plastic, killing seabirds and marine animals. We are well and truly deep in the Anthropocene, the first planetary epoch when human activity is the key shaper of the natural world. We have taken our capacity for dominion and run with it, with no thought for the long-term consequences for any other life forms or the earth itself…or even (ironically) for ourselves.

Yet we were warned. The theologian Ellen F. Davis writes about the deep understanding in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament that the well-being of the people is interwoven with the well-being of the land: there can be no long-term flourishing of the one without the other (Davis, 2009; On Being podcast 2010/2020). Yes, we think…of course. We are part of nature, of an intricate web of life and death, made for balance and renewal. We are getting that, now.

But in recent centuries, rather than seeking to read the language of the natural world, we assumed we were above it, literally over it. That’s how the word ‘dominion’ in Genesis 1:26 was interpreted, as permission to dominate. Yet the same Hebrew word was used for the how the sun is to rule over the day in Genesis 1:16 and 18… a sovereignty that is about the giving and flourishing of life, not exploitation. And we forgot that God is manifest not only in the Word but also in the world God created. We privileged the Word over the world, letting our allegiance to the Holy Book blinker and blind ourselves to what was happening in the creation.

These were fundamental errors, fuelled by Christianity’s unholy alliance with colonialism and capitalism which has brought us to this point, where short-term profit is the primary driver. And now we feel stuck in economic systems that perpetuate the harm. It is a reality that we feel powerless to change. But at least we have begun to see Reality with new eyes. Covid has helped. It has been an
apocalyptic event; the meaning of the Greek word apocalypse is a great revealing or uncovering. Much has been revealed in the nearly two years since it sprang on the scene: what happens on the earth when we cease and desist; the profligacy of some of our work and life habits; who key workers really are and how much they are paid; the real value we place on human lives; our  ulnerability. COP 26 and all the information and advocacy surrounding it also was eye-opening. If we stay awake, which is the primary message of the gospels’ little apocalypses with which we begin the season of Advent, we know we are knee-deep in the Reality of the Anthropocene.

The temptation always, of course, is to fall back asleep; to hit the snooze button, move in to auto-pilot. It’s just easier. Humankind never could bear much reality, as TS Eliot observed. Hence the gospel writers insistence at the beginning of Advent that we be alert at all times, praying that we may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place (Luke 21:36)…even they were hoping for escape. But I think the blueprint of Advent offers much more than hoping for escape. Because of course there will be no escaping the consequences of the Anthropocene. Right now many people, mostly but not exclusively in developing nations, are suffering those consequences more, but no one will be immune. There is no vaccine against the Anthropocene; even extreme wealth is simply postponement.

What does Advent offer us, in this year of plague and ecological emergency? Immediately after homing in on Reality, the season moves us to consider the choices and actions of individuals (John the Baptiser; Mary; Elizabeth) who say Yes to God, who become truth-tellers and risk-takers, who countenance public disapprobation and choose the narrow way, who affirm life and leap for joy.
The Biblical witness is that when times get tough, God calls and equips people to do what needs to be done. In the fig tree parable, Luke writes that Jesus says when you see all these terrible things happening, You know that the kingdom of God is near.You know that the kingdom is near. Apocalyptic times are times of calling and equipping, of courageous faithfulness, truth-telling and risk-taking. Faith takes on flesh when the going gets tough. It is incarnation, springing up wherever people are willing.

There are some people of faith who expect God to swoop in and miraculously rescue us from ourselves. But that is not the biblical witness. God empowers the willing, the Yes-sayers, to play a part in the salvation of the whole. God created human beings with the power to choose, to create and to destroy. God honours the creation by respecting our autonomy; but God does not leave us to our own devices. Archbishop Desmond Tutu paraphrased Augustine’s famous dictum this way: Without us, God will not. Without God, we cannot. That is the biblical witness: God calls and equips frail, fragile and fallible human beings to rise to meet the challenges of the times, for the flourishing of all life.

These days I think of God as a kind of force field that wills the best for life – moving constantly through the universe instigating life and love, spurring creativity, on earth nudging humans towards the possibility of divine, self-giving action. The power of Christmas is the reminder that human flesh can hold that divine spark; our frailty itself becomes the cradle. The wee baby, wrapped in swaddling cloths and laid in a manger, vulnerable to cold and wind, hunger and thirst, calls forth our love and our Yes. We rise to all we can be, by the grace and power of God.

Advent prepares us for our Yes. Starting with a huge Reality check. In 2014 the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann wrote a book titled Reality, grief and hope: Three urgent prophetic tasks. He looked back at the devastating, cataclysmic events of the 6th century BCE – when Jerusalem was besieged and battered, the walls and Temple destroyed, people starved, maimed and murdered, treasure and skilled people carried off into exile in Babylon – a time when the unthinkable happened and God’s very dwelling place lay in ruins.

In moments of devastation, the prophet’s job is first to face fiercely into reality – not sugar-coat or avoid it; (2) to name and grieve the losses, raising a voice of lamentation and protest before God and the people – if you don’t name and grieve what it is lost, you are either ignoring reality or stuck in the pain; and (3) finally to nurture hope. Not the false, flacid hope that we will miraculously escape the consequences of our choices…but the strong, muscular hope of adult faith that when we turn towards God, we are called and equipped to respond to the challenges of the day.

The biblical witness of the devastation of the 6thc BCE is that facing into the reality of what happened, crying out in grief and lamentation, and insisting on staying faithful in trying times, the people came to new understandings of God. From that long period of suffering (including the difficult period of rebuilding in the aftermath) came the widespread acceptance of monotheism, a theology of covenant and consequence, and the creation of the Book as the repository for faith. The Bible, as we have it now, is as it is because of the survival of the faithful through those and other adverse times. Clinging to God, exercising adult faith, our sight and insight are honed, our knowledge deepened, our capacity for love strengthened.
***
The question that has haunted me for the last 18 months or so is: how are we to live in these times? The future is uncertain but for the assurance of more suffering and dislocation in the face of plague and ecological emergency. What does it mean to be a person of faith when the world around us has begun to fall apart? When we may be facing the very end of the human species, having already sealed the fate of other life forms? Advent helps, its blueprint giving courage and fortitude. Facing into Reality, broadening my horizon to encompass the world as well as the Word as God’s arenas of revelation, I hear the Baptiser’s call to prepare the Way, flattening the high places and raising up the low. I see his odd, lonely figure, unafraid to court disdain, utterly committed to the telling of truth, to the need for repentance/metanoia…to a complete change of direction that can herald the coming of the new day. I stand with Mary, ear bent towards glimmers of possibility,
whispering Yes to allowing new things to grow within her, willing to bear God into the world as one lights a candle in the night. I celebrate with Elizabeth the wee good things, the harbingers of hope.

Advent is a gift to us in apocalyptic times: awakening us to alertness, calling us to pay attention; to tell the truth, take the risk, make the change; to affirm life and goodness and beauty. To live in gratitude and possibility, cherishing vulnerability as an opening for grace and an invitation to love. God bless you and this world God so loves in these challenging times. May we rise to all we
can be, by the power and grace of God. Amen.

Resources
Walter Brueggemann, 2014, Reality, Grief and Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks (Cambridge and Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing).
David M. Carr, 2014, Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
Ellen F. Davis, 2009, “Learning Our Place: The agrarian perspective of the Bible”, Word & World 29.2 (Spring), pp. 109-120.See also, 2009, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Ellen F. Davis and Wendell Berry, “The Art of Being Creatures”, On Being with Krista Tippett [podcast], National Public Radio (broadcast 10 June  2010, updated 16 April 2020), https://onbeing.org/programs/wendell-berry-ellen-davis-the-art-of-being-creatures/.
Carla A. Grosch-Miller, 2021, Trauma and Pastoral Care: A Ministry Handbook (Norwich: Canterbury Press).