Sunday Musings: Advent 2
Do we long for righteousness? Or have we become too cynical to understand?
Today is the Second Sunday of Advent.
Advent at the Cottage this year centers on justice and joy. Yeah, I know. Justice is under threat and joy is scarce right about now. Things seems pretty bleak.
But we’re going to help one another find traces of both this December.
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Baruch 5:1-9
Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem,
and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God.
Put on the robe of the righteousness that comes from God;
put on your head the diadem of the glory of the Everlasting;
for God will show your splendor everywhere under heaven.
For God will give you evermore the name,
"Righteous Peace, Godly Glory."
Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height;
look toward the east,
and see your children gathered from west and east
at the word of the Holy One,
rejoicing that God has remembered them.
For they went out from you on foot,
led away by their enemies;
but God will bring them back to you,
carried in glory, as on a royal throne.
For God has ordered that every high mountain and the everlasting hills be made low
and the valleys filled up, to make level ground,
so that Israel may walk safely in the glory of God.
The woods and every fragrant tree
have shaded Israel at God's command.
For God will lead Israel with joy,
in the light of his glory,
with the mercy and righteousness that come from him.
Philippians 1:3-11
I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.
It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because you hold me in your heart, for all of you share in God's grace with me, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus.
And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.
Luke 3:1-6
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.
He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,
"The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
'Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'"
Hypocrisy, always one of humanity’s least appealing traits, seems to be at high tide right now among leaders in both religion and politics. In general, hypocrisy means saying one thing and doing another. But there’s a certain form of it that is particularly odious — self-righteousness.
The self-righteous parade their superior beliefs and morals in front of the rest of us, often scolding those deemed beyond their level of blessing and perfection. There’s nothing worse than a finger-wagging hypocrite proclaiming their own moral rectitude.
The list of the self-righteous dominating American news is long and it is tempting to make an example of a number of them. But even amid this roster, few exceed the recent actions of an English church leader — the now-former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.
The current scandal in the Church of England (of which Welby was head) is grieviously familiar. The founder and director of church summer camps and a noted “morality campaigner” against LGBTQ rights, John Smyth, was discovered to have abused scores of children in his care. His crimes had gone on for decades. But church leaders did not know the extent of his transgressions until 2013 when they received a detailed report of the allegations.
Despite the horrendous nature of Smyth’s abuse and the trauma he caused, church authorities buried the findings under insider reviews and pseudo-investigations. They did not report the abuse to the police. Priests who allegedly abetted Smyth’s abuse continued in ministry. (Smyth himself died in 2018.)
In other words, the Church of England’s leaders did nothing except cover-up the crimes for another decade — a time in which more children were (most likely) victimized.
The Archbishop, who, in the past, crowed of his own successes addressing church abuse more widely, resigned. In a speech before the House of Lords, he asked for pity — for his secretaries and for himself, having suffered a great inconvenience in scheduling due to the resignation. But he never mentioned the victims or seriously reflected on his own complicity in the cover-up while making these jokes in front of the peers. It didn’t go well. The whole thing dripped with self-pity and self-righteousness. The Church of England is in an uproar.
Marina Hyde, a columnist for The Guardian, wryly observed:
The entire way in which this business has played out and is still playing out confirms not just that “justice cannot be replaced by religious observance or pious comment” – but that “the justice of the powerful is not justice at all.”
She attributed this profound quote to its author — yep, you got it — Archbishop Justin Welby. You can listen to his remarks on justice here, in this two-minute clip from 2013, the same year that he learned of Smyth’s abuse.
I recommend it as a first-class example of religious hypocrisy.
And that brings us to today’s readings. When we hear the word, “righteousness,” we may wince. We think of church scandals and politicians parading their piety. We think of hypocrites claiming to be righteous, all the while pontificating and rebuking anyone who fails to meet their high standards.
But there’s a big difference between self-righteousness and genuine righteousness. Self-righteousness is to believe one’s self to be right. Righteousness means to make things right.
Self-righteousness results in meanness and indignity; righteousness ends with mercy and justice.
Self-righteousness protects the deluded; righteousness shields the defenseless.
Self-righteousness fuels cynicism; righteousness nurtures compassion.
Self-righteousness is about separation and superiority; righteousness creates connection and community.
Self-righteousness is for me; righteousness is for others.
Advent anticipates righteousness — the time in which all things shall be made right. The texts for this Sunday extol the beauty of righteousness and is interchangeable with a biblical vision of justice.
God desires the end of hierarchies of status, power, and wealth — the chief source of human suffering throughout the scriptures. Baruch, perhaps a scribe to the prophet Jeremiah, wrote of the Age To Come: “every high mountain and the everlasting hills be made low and the valleys filled up, to make level ground.” That’s not an infrastructure program. That’s a promise of equity and equality — no more domination of one group over another. In Philippians, Paul equated love and righteousness with true freedom. John the Baptist echoed Baruch, insisting that righteousness would level all suffering and oppression — that the entirety of creation will see the healing and liberation of God.
Righteousness means living in right relationship with God, with others, and with the Earth and her creatures. And, when those relationships are aright, justice is the result.
Righteousness isn’t priggish. It is beautiful. It is the “harvest” that grows from love. Righteousness doesn’t pontificate. It woos. It is the longing of every heart.
Or, at least, it should be. Can you hear its voice crying from the wilderness? Listen….listen well.
INSPIRATION
Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling! You scatter all my winter dreams.”
Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling! Songless, peevish thing! You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.”
Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept. And when spring came she waked again — and she was a blade of grass.
And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves! They make such noise! They scatter all my winter dreams.”
— Kahlil Gibran, “Said a Blade of Grass”
Why the holy lies?
Why twisting the holy books
in your favour and disfavour
their hearts,
They struggle to eat a square meal
Why you fly in the air.
Then confusion sets in
Family members at war
He said “your mother is a witch”
Ancestral agwu at work,
Division and disunity mock them.
Shepherds eat their sheeps
Prophets and prophetesses milk us dry
Why not sit and think?
Retrieve your steps
The enemy is within.
— Jude Chukwuemeka Muoneke, from “The Religious Hypocrisy.” Muoneke is a contemporary Nigerian poet.
Each of us must decide whether it is more important
to be proved right or to provoke righteousness.
— Bernice King
One of my favorite Advent hymns, traditionally sung on Advent 2, is “There’s a Voice in the Wilderness Crying.” This version is from the National Lutheran Choir.
Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare.
— W.E.B. Du Bois
I read about this scandal and Welby resigning over a week ago. I first felt shock and then very deep sadness and deja vu. Very sadly, I realized I trust almost no one in a position of power. Not those in the church (any church), politicians, those who hold power in sports, those who hold power in the legal and law-enforcement arena (from local sheriffs to the supreme court), etc. Living without trust in leaders and not being shocked and surprised by injustice and hypocrisy is a dreadful way to live. Power so often corrupts. Thank you for your very strong rebuke of hypocrisy and self-righteousness. We are all capable of these maladies. I continue to be resolute in my attention to right living and justice and truth.
The sentence: righteousness is living in a relationship with God, our world, and all the creatures in it: I would like to add: righteousness is also living in right relationship to self. So much hubris can come from an unexamined self—not addressing our dark side, the unfinished business of forgiveness for past hurts, having an empty hole where love was denied or twisted that we can often cover up with arrogance and self-righteousness, or “believing our own press” e.g. I’ve made it to the top, I must be really good. A right relationship with self means holding the pain of our lives with the successes openly and forthrightly. This is often achieved in a deeply Wesleyan tradition of a “band”—a small group of likewise committed believers who hold your feet to the fire insisting on radical honesty, not just to the dark side but also to the lightness and beauty of God in you. Thank you, Diana, for prodding us to greater more honest righteousness.