To the moles and the bats – 6 December 2013

Here is part of a real flesh and blood Advent reading – the kind of reading ministers may be tempted to avoid if they can, but if it does get read, people’s eyes start to glaze over:

The haughtiness of people shall be humbled,

 

            and the pride of everyone brought low;

the Lord alone will be exalted on that day.

The idols shall utterly pass away.

Enter the caves of the rocks and the holes of the ground,

from the terror of the Lord,

and from the glory of his majesty…

On that day people will throw away to the moles and the bats

their idols of silver and their idols of gold

which they made for themselves to worship…  [Isaiah 2:17-20]

Rowan Williams identifies two very personal issues in Advent.  The first is to realize yet again that there are things we cannot do for ourselves.  Alone, as we know, we can’t learn language and communication.  Alone, we can’t learn to love and to be loved.  Alone, we can’t know whether we are worth anything or not, or actually visible to anyone or anything.  It is trendy now to have taken leave of God and religion and to be self-sufficient.  And our generation is left with what Rowan Williams calls paralyzing unhappiness and anxiety.  We would love to hear a voice of recognition and reassurance, but it must be on our terms and say the things we want to hear. 

So – and this is the second thing -- we make idols.  We project on to the empty space before us the voices and images we want – typically in western culture they include wealth and power, sex and so-called freedom, sport and entertainment, family first and last, happiness, the illusion of safety, personal appearance…  For Jews the covenant was always about the forsaking of idols.  We cannot make God, least of all in our own image.  We cannot domesticate God to our own life and preferences and what we imagine are our needs.  In the Christian Advent we become, as it were, Jews again.  We are reminded how, surrounded by all our goods and fortified by all our knowledge, we still need to be touched into life by a word from God – a word which brings all our idolatry to judgement. 

The wondrous thing is that, after our weeks of Advent waiting, this word turns out to be spoken in the birth of a baby, in a story which the secular world and much of the church have turned into a charming nursery tale.  In our contemplative life and prayer, our thoughtfulness and attention, but also in our silence and stillness, we are not strangers to mystery and awe, to the truth that may lie in the shadows, and the love which never lets us go.  And we are very ready, when we see our idols, to cast them to the moles and the bats.