O come, O come, Emmanuel. Amen.
“Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God, but only they who see takes off their shoes; the rest sit round and pluck blackberries.” So writes the poet Elizabeth Barret Browning. As this morning’s Psalm notes, the LORD has done (and is doing) great things for us. Whether or not we recognize and rejoice in this saving love of God really is the question of faith. We have all been given the gift of grace, so it’s not a question of earning it, it’s a question of enjoying it and being transformed by it. Like a gift on Christmas morning that sits under the tree, salvation has been purchased for us, it has been presented to us, our name is on the tag. But if we let it sit under the tree, while it will still look quite festive and beautiful, the gift will never be enjoyed and used in the way it is intended. Going back to the poem, it’s a question of whether or not we take off our shoes because we realize that we are standing on holy ground, or do we just sit around and pluck the berries off the burning bush?
And the obvious question is how is that some people see burning bushes all around them and others don’t? Why do some have the eyes of faith and others seem to have blinders on? It’s a question of how we see the world and what we are looking for. This is why Advent is such an important season, as it prepares us for Christmas, for Jesus’ ongoing presence with us, and for the coming again of Jesus Christ in clouds descending. Advent reminds us that we live in an enchanted world, a world where a young peasant girl can birth the very God who created and sustains the universe, a world in which a crucified rabbi can be the Lamb of God, a world in which a piece of unleavened bread and a chalice of wine can be said to be the Body and Blood of the Messiah, the bread of life and cup of salvation. Only if we live in an enchanted world where every common bush is afire with God are such beliefs about faith instead of lunacy.
There are many ways of understanding what faith is all about – good cases can be made based on Scripture and Tradition for understanding faith as being about relationship, allegiance, loyalty, trust, commitment, and love. And those really are fine ways of understanding faith. But there’s another that I want to focus on this morning. It’s one that doesn’t get as much attention and that is faith as enchantment. Typically, when we think of something being enchanted we think of children’s stories that involve fairies, dragons, and wizards. Jesus himself tells us though, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” There is something childlike about faith – open to wonder, full of awe, and a with wide-open imagination.
The question that the preacher so often has to address is “so what?” And while I’m always happy to draw out the implications of particular Bible passages, it’s really a rather ridiculous question to ask of God: “so what?” The fact that we live in a world created by a loving Triune God, that this God took on flesh and dwelt among only to be killed and then rise again on the third day really should make us say “wow!” not “What’s that have to do with me.” That’s only the sort of question that we ask in a disenchanted world.
One of the great theologians in the Church right now is Willie James Jennings – he used to teach at Duke and is now at Yale. Ten years ago, he wrote a book called The Christian Imagination and notes that we have a diseased and impoverished imagination in our culture. He says that the problem isn’t as simple as us having theological formulas wrong, it’s that our imaginations are planted in bad soil – soils of division, of violence, of rugged individualism. So much of what has gotten off track in our world is not due to intractable problems, it’s not due to an inability to compromise, it’s not due to a lack of solutions – it’s that our imaginations prevent us from seeing the future as anything other than more of the same, just with better technology.
Also written about ten years ago was Charles Taylor’s monumental work call A Secular Age which explores the rise of secularity in our lives and world. And with the rise of secularity has come a less enchanted world where facts have replaced wonder. One quote worth sharing is, “Curiosity about higher things comes naturally, it’s indifference to them that must be learned.” Well, no doubt about it, we’ve learned about how to be indifferent to those burning bushes all around us.
So much of our society is built on the assumption that everything is masterable by the right set of experts, that mysteries exist only to be solved, that everything is explainable and predictable with the right data, that nothing surprising can happen with enough planning. And the result of living in that lie is a lack of humility, we forget that we are not God. We end up thinking too much of ourselves and too little about God, and so we end up with a disenchanted world, a world that lacks the possibilities of grace and transformation.
I’ve been reflecting on the conflicts that we so often have in our society, in our churches, in our families – the vast majority of our disagreements are about how we divide infinity. Which, mathematically, is impossible, but it doesn’t stop us from trying. God has gifted us with a planet with enough resources for all, with hearts big enough to love all, with faith wide enough to welcome all – and yet we fight about how much is ours. We get fearful and resentful when someone might get something we think they don’t deserve. We hoard beyond what we need. We get offended when someone reaches a different opinion than we do about the infinite nature of life and the deepest questions of philosophy, politics, or economics. And this is because we’ve become disenchanted. We count everything, and trying to count infinity is a losing proposition.
In such a worldview, there’s simply no room for burning bushes, for miracles, for amazing grace to break into our hearts. Consider the prophecy we heard from Isaiah 61 – it’s a prophecy that Jesus himself draws from when beginning his ministry. God seeks to “bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion – to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.” That really does take a sense of faith to imagine a world where the brokenhearted find comfort, where the guilty find forgiveness, where the lonely find love. But this is exactly what God promises and delivers through the Church, through the Sacraments, and through the movement of the Holy Spirit in us and among us. But if we’re busy counting blackberries, we’re going to miss that the bush is on fire.
And while disenchantment is a largely modern tragedy, it is not uniquely modern problem. Consider those who were questioning John the Baptist in today’s Gospel text. The emissaries from Jerusalem have been sent out into the wilderness to the Jordan River to see what this John character is up to. “Just who do you think you are?,” they ask. Despite the fact that God Incarnate is breaking into their world, something that they have never seen before, they are trying to fit this experience into a box. To be fair, we ought not to blame them, as we do this sort of thing all the time. Once we can label something, we can get our heads around it and even control it. But God is not something to be put in a box. Now, the idea of the Messiah was something they could grasp – and if John had claimed to be the Messiah they would have likely killed him for blasphemy, as they eventually did to Jesus, or they would have told the Messiah that it’s time to overthrow Rome, as they tried to get Jesus to do. But that’s not it. How about Elijah – are you the great prophet of Israel come back to usher in some new age of history? No. Fine, you must a prophet of some sort, God hasn’t sent us a prophet in a while. No? Then who in the world are you and why are you baptizing?
John gives an enchanted answer – he doesn’t give them a title or a job description, rather he quotes from Isaiah and says that he’s a voice crying out in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the LORD.” He’s inviting us to imagine that something new is about to happen. It’s an invitation to listen for the voice and to participate in making straight that pathway. John doesn’t give them a piece of information to file away or analyze, he gives them a narrative to participate in. Perhaps more than anything else, our Christian faith is a story of enchantment that we are brought into. It is up to us whether or not we want to sit on the sidelines and eat blackberries or if we want to stand in awe and wonder before the burning bushes of love and grace that lead us into the abundant life that Jesus gives us.
Consider this morning’s Psalm: “When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, then were we like those who dream.” Again, it’s the language of enchantment – salvation is something like a dream, it’s a world that doesn’t always seem possible. The Psalm prays for God to restore the dried-up waterways of the Negev – which is a desert in southern Israel. Now it takes some hope and some imagination to pray for water to flow through the desert. But it happens. When storms come up, the water of life flows through those dry channels, bringing life to what seemed like a barren land so that even the desert becomes a place of enchanting possibility. And the Psalm includes a great verse for those of us who wish to live with enchantment all around us – “The LORD has done great things for us, and we are glad indeed.”
That’s a wonderful refrain for us to bear in mind as we approach Christmas and live with an eye towards the coming of Christ – “The LORD has done great things for us, and we are glad indeed.” It is a refrain of enchantment, helping to remind us of the burning bushes that are all around us. So as a spiritual practice this week, you might sit down and reflect on the great things that God has done for you, and for us. Give thanks for those things. This keeps us humble, always putting us in the posture of receiving the bountiful grace and mercy from God that we sorely need. Earth really is crammed with the goodness and love of God, may all the earth be filled with and enchanted by his glory. Amen.
