ADVENT: AN INSIDE JOB

This Sunday, the person of John, that wild looking Baptizer, steps out of the desert and gets in our face. What is it about deserts? And why is John calling us to repent as we prepare for Christmas? I think deserts are places of simplicity and poverty, bereft of distractions and superficial things. Deserts have a way of stripping us down to basics. Blaise Pascal said: 'Much of our lives are taken up with distractions. Only when they are set aside do big questions emerge.'

Genuinely spiritual people have an instinct for the desert. They recognize their lives are not where they are supposed to be. They have experienced patterns of addiction, self-absorption and attachments, and see the desert as a place of clarification and an opportunity to revise their priorities. That's what 'repentance' means; a different way of looking at life. To repent means to stop thinking that your life is about YOU. My life is not a project given me for my self-satisfaction.

John the Baptizer was a big time preacher in the Judean desert in the time of Christ. For the Jews, Jerusalem was the center of their lives. The temple was their 'Vatican.' And here's John luring them away from looking at the temple. It must have been a nightmare for the Jewish leaders to see everybody - 'Jerusalem, all Judea, and the whole region around the Jordan' - turn away from gazing at the temple, the holy dwelling of God, and go out to the desert. Maybe John was trying to tell them that from now on God's dwelling would be in the midst of the people, the assembly of the baptized.

Advent is a season of discovery, a time when we ask 'What's inside?' We ask that question each time we start to open a Christmas present. 'What's inside?' Advent is not so much waiting for God to come from 'out there,' or from 'up there,' or from 'over there.' Advent is an inside job. Our Advent task is to discover God within us - Emmanuel. Christ is not coming at Christmas from somewhere far away simply to drop by for some afternoon tea and crumpets, or to amuse the kids.

Christmas is about discovering anew the presence of the living God in our midst - in the midst of the world, the cosmos, history - and breaking through it all as one of us. Incarnation, Word made flesh, is no recent arrival of a mere two thousand years ago. God was present from the first moment of the universe's birth some fifteen billion years ago, seeking to be discovered by human consciousness. That's the purpose for which we were created.

PASTOR EMERITUS