Monday, December 14

Scripture: Isaiah 11:4-5, 33:22
But with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins...For the Lord is our judge; the Lord is our lawgiver; the Lord is our king; he will save us.

Poem: O Adonai
Author: Malcolm Guite

O Adonai

Unsayable, you chose to speak one tongue,
Unseeable, you gave yourself away,
The Adonai, the Tetragramaton
Grew by a wayside in the light of day.
O you who dared to be a tribal God,
To own a language, people and a place,
Who chose to be exploited and betrayed,
If so you might be met with face to face,
Come to us here, who would not find you there,
Who chose to know the skin and not the pith,
Who heard no more than thunder in the air,
Who marked the mere events and not the myth.
Touch the bare branches of our unbelief
And blaze again like fire in every leaf.

LAW AND FIRE

There is an inescapably apocalyptic tone to Advent. Yes, we are counting down the days till we celebrate the arrival of the holy babe, small and helpless. But even as we remember his first coming, we anticipate his second.

And that second coming will be doomsday.  As the famous prayer, the Te Deum, declares: “We believe that thou shalt come to be our judge.” In the scripture we consider today, Isaiah elaborates, “He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.”

The Lord who came to the earth as a weak infant shall return as a mighty king, fearsome in aspect and action.

He will be a fire: destructive, inescapable, unanswerable.

And yet, for those who love his appearing, he will be a fire: refining, purifying, glorious.

Judgment is a terrible prospect to us—and it should be, for we are desperately wicked—and yet, over and over again in scripture, we find the people of the Lord begging for judgment. Rise up, oh judge of the earth . . . The people of the Lord ache at the injustice in the world, and they know their Lord, the righteous Lord, is the only one who can set it right again.

When we read of another child abused, another madman gone on a killing spree, yet more Christian brothers and sisters martyred for their faith, another friend betrayed, another poor person oppressed, our hearts cry out for justice. We long for a judge who can see perfectly, decide truly, and bring the evil of the wicked down upon their own heads.

And yet, and yet . . . in the face of such a judge, we would find ourselves condemned. For we ourselves are lustful, selfish, dismissive, and false.

Looking again at the Te Deum, we find the proper response to this picture of justice, judgment, and fire. After proclaiming, “We believe that thou shalt come to be our judge,” the next line of the prayer offers up the only sensible plea that could follow: “We therefore pray thee, help thy servants.”

Because this our Judge, our Lord, our Righteous One, has offered his very self for our redemption. Our salvation is the very reason he came in the first place.

And so we find the answer to the terror of Christ’s second coming in the story of his first.

Look at the piece of art that accompanies this devotional, “Firestarter”, by Julio Reyes. The fire looks almost more alive than the man who is walking past it. The fire rushes to the foreground and dwindles in the distance—only of course, it is not dwindling: the distance it covers means that it is growing. It may soon consume everything.

Today’s O Antiphon prayer says, “O Lord and Ruler of the house of Israel, who appeared to Moses in the flame of the burning bush and gave him the law on Sinai: come, and redeem us with outstretched arms.”

That law that was given is a law we have broken and it is a law we desperately wish was kept. Oh, that the Lord was loved above all others, that we did not covet that which is our neighbor’s, that children regularly obeyed loving parents, that marriages were always secure and faithful relationships, that our homes were not broken into nor our goods stolen!

We long to keep this law and to have it kept by our neighbors.

But we are weak and frail, weaker by far than that baby who was born so long ago in Bethlehem. And yet, and yet . . . we remember that burning bush, the bush that was burned and was not consumed. And we trust, by God’s almighty mercy, that we will become that bush.

That we will be burned in the purifying fire of the Lord’s wrath, but that it will not consume us.  That instead we will become, like the bush, the place where the Lord himself is present.

Prayer:

O Christ, Adonai:
Leader of the House of Israel, who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush and gave him the law on Sinai: Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.
Amen.

Jessica Snell, Alumna (class of ’03)