December 17, 2023

There’s something about the season of Advent that always draws me to poetry. It may be the ambiguity of the season, the idea that we are waiting for Christ coming to us in multiple ways. It may be the binary opposites of light and darkness, goodness and evil, that permeate the traditional imagery of the season, of our hymnody and scripture readings.

This week I’ve been reading the latest work by Christian Wiman, a poet and theologian who now teaches at Yale Divinity School. For many years, he was the editor of Poetry magazine. He writes with beauty, power, and elegance about his ambivalent faith and his decade-long struggle with cancer. His latest book is entitled Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair. 

While there is a great deal that is worthy of reflection, the thing that stopped me cold—and keeps drawing me back, is a poem by Anne Carson that he includes and upon which he reflects. It’s entitled “God’s Justice”

I love that image: “on the day He was to create justice God got involved in making a dragonfly and lost track of time.” It alludes to something that I have come to believe more and more strongly—God’s boundless and infinite creativity, a joyfulness and play at the heart of creation and at the heart of God. 

But there’s something else here that’s poignant and sad—perhaps. The sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with the world as we experience it—that it isn’t just and right. We know that all too well—the suffering in the world and in our lives, the pain inflicted on human beings by other human beings and the inability, unwillingness to try to make this right. We know the evils of the world and, as the prophet does in today’s reading, we cry out for justice. 

In the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks
On the day he was to create justice 
God got involved in making a dragonfly
and lost track of time.

It was about two inches long
with turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall.

God watched it bend its tiny wire elbows
as it set about clening the transparent case of its head.
The eye globes mounted on the case.

rotated this way and that
as it polished every angle.
Inside the case

which was glassy black like the windows of a downtown bank
God could see the machinery humming
and He watched the hum

travel all the way down turquoise dots to the end of the tail
and breathe off as light.
Its black wings vibrated in and out.

Our lessons today remind us of where our focus should be, where and how we should proclaim Christ, where and how we should work for justice. 

The reading from Isaiah, the first verses of which provide the text for Jesus first public proclamation in the Gospel of Luke, offer both reassurance and command. As Christians, we read these words as promise of Christ’s coming, of the future reign of God that he proclaimed and for which we hope. We see ourselves as recipients of that good news, and of the promised healing and release.

At the same time, we must see ourselves in this story, not just as recipients of God’s grace and justice but as participants in the coming of that justice. We are called to rebuild the ruined cities—and here we might think not only of literal cities, but of all the ways that human community, the common good, have been undermined and attacked in recent years.

Even stronger are the words from the Song of Mary. It’s always helpful to remember just who she was—a young woman, likely a teenager, mysteriously, shamefully pregnant, as vulnerable in her historical context as a similar young woman would be in our day. Yet from that small, unlikely, reviled person, comes this powerful hymn that witnesses to God’s redemptive power:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,

my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; * 
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.

From this day all generations will call me blessed: *
the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.

He has mercy on those who fear him *
in every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm, *
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *
and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things, *
and the rich he has sent away empty.

This familiar hymn has suffered for its popularity and familiarity. Its use in worship over the millennia has numbed us to its revolutionary power. We need to reclaim it today, sing it with meaning. We need to do more than sing it, we need to work so that it comes into being. We need to imagine the possibility that God is working in this way, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, in spite of all our fears, doubts, and despair. We need to believe that the words of a first-century teenaged single mom can inspire to see God at work in the world around us. For remember, the world in which she lived was unjust and violent as well, and for many people hopelessness and terror were ways of life.

Like the poem with which I began, Mary’s song is a thing of beauty, sung in the midst of injustice. It calls us to see beauty in the broken world around us. It calls us to see God at work in those beautiful things created by God, even in us. It calls us to to the hope that in spite of the ugliness and suffering in the world, God’s beauty and justice are present, making all things new, and through God’s grace, remaking us as well.