Paul Lim (Ph.D., Cambridge) serves as the interim Director of NIFW. He is an award-winning historian, and teaches History of Christianity at Vanderbilt, with particular focus on Reformation history and the rise of modernity and religion’s role therein.
“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” (Isaiah 9:6)
Advent beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday???
Advent Season, more often than not nowadays, is marked by longing and anticipation, waiting and amplification of desires, manifesting itself commercially in what type of gifts we should be giving and receiving! For others, Advent is a season of pain, loneliness, and invisibility. What does the Bible have to say about Advent? It does not mention the word (whether in Greek as parousia, or in Latin as adventus, both of which means arrival or coming of Christ in human flesh) explicitly, but it does speak of the experience and sense of anticipation as the people of God waited for divine righting of all human wrongs, as Israel in both its pre-exilic, exilic, and post-exilic experience of foreign captivities—whether Assyrian, Babylonian, or Roman vagaries—did ardently long for the arrival of the figure who would fulfill the words written above from Isaiah 9:6. As Isaiah was likely to have been written during the 8th century BC, before the capture and subsequent exile experience caused by the Assyrian invasion, Isaiah’s prophetic vision was longing for the person who will vanquish Israel’s foes and usher in the reign of YHWH’s Shalom. The mysterious referent who will embody the qualities of a child, son, counselor, God, father, and prince reduces the number to an extremely small numerical minority: who would be that? In the same way, in Acts 1, we find the disciples who, even after the resurrection of Christ, interpreted the kingdom of God mostly in ethnic-national terms: “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). Jesus’ answer to this question just happens to be the very last words before he was ascended into heaven (Acts 1:7-9). So, the biblical perspective on Advent—if understood as an experience of waiting of the people of God for God to intervene and redeem—shows both in Isaiah and Acts that they knew that unless God showed up, all human aspirations and ambitions and anticipations will lead us further away from the goal that God has in mind. In that regard, Zygmunt Bauman, a leading social critic of our time (whose conversion from Marxism to Christianity is often under-reported), wrote a fabulous book, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity (Polity, 2013) where he argues that a life and society built upon the foundation of consumerism is fundamentally at odds with a system that favors and privileges an ethic that cares about the disenfranchised and socio-economically marginalized, thereby pointing us toward the possible world beyond consumerism. He writes: “a consumerist attitude may lubricate the wheels of the economy; it sprinkles sand into the bearings of morality” where instant gratification is the name of the game. Yet, life is vastly different. We wait in the middle of the truce talks between Israel and Palestine for a penultimate peace; we anticipate and pray for the cease-fire between the Russians and Ukrainians; we pray for the cessation of trafficking of humans, whether for factory, quarry labor, or sexual exploitation; we wait and wait. Advent Season reminds us that God has, in fact, broken through our temporal waiting game, and yet God has done so in a most unexpected way. When you read—honestly and without the hermeneutical lens of “knowing” that Jesus the Messiah—the text of Isaiah 9:6 above, you would hardly conclude that this divine messianic figure would be born in a manger (undeserving even of a low-price first-century Jewish equivalent of a Motel 6) and that he would be a refugee (spending some time in Egypt, a country not of his birth and a country not traditionally friendly toward Israel). Bingo! God’s ways are not our ways precisely because his ways are higher than our ways. Advent Season cleanses us of our self-exalting perspective that we actually do know what’s best for me, us, and humankind, even as we dare into transhuman societies.
Transitions
Since the last time I wrote for this blog, there have been people who have transitioned from one position to another, or are in the process of transitioning without knowing where they will end up for their next phase of intersection between faith & work. I have a few friends, whether in California, New York, or Tennessee, who are in this phase. I am sure you also know a few folks like that. What words would you impart to them, what words would you impart to your own self if you are in a period of transition? Advent season is a great reminder for us for these two key truths:
(1) Life can be weird, but God is good, and experiencing both the weirdness of life and goodness of God is not a sequential thing, but a concurrent reality. We experience the goodness of God precisely in the middle of life’s weirdness. 1
(2) Sanctification is a team sport. 2 You need a community or village or church full of people to remind you of God’s goodness and Christ’s sufficiency, and (y)our desperate hourly need for the Savior and our Substitute, especially when we are in transitions, in between positions, as we anxiously wonder/worry about our securities of various types—financial, reputational, relational, emotional, and spiritual. I don’t know about you, but what little humility I’ve learned in life has always come through humiliating circumstances and outcomes. Although I would shudder at the thought, I learn more about life from its bitter fruits (and vegetables) than from its sweet counterparts. That’s why I need other beloved friends, family, fellow believers to remind me that my work matters, and God is good, that life is weird, but God is indeed good.
North African Pear Stealer
One of the key texts we tackle early in the fall of the Gotham Fellowship is Augustine’s Confessions. That’s the North African pear stealer I am referring to! In this classic text of the quest for discovery of self and Savior, thus meaning of one’s life, Augustine, a fourth-century North African—born of a pagan father, and a devout Christian mother—spends much more time describing sin either as “not the way it’s supposed to be,” “privation of good,” or “disordered desires.” Whereas we ought to desire the good, thus God, we inescapably find ourselves desiring that which will eventually lead us to destruction, nothingness (which Augustine calls as the substance of evil: no-thing), and death and separation from the Good God. He talks about the triviality and tragedy of disordered desires in the way he stole a bunch of pears from his neighbor’s orchard when he was 16 years old. He said, he liked nothing about it except for the “wickedness which I took pleasure in enjoying.” Evil for evil’s sake; sin for sin’s sake.
In my experience in pastoral ministry of various types since 1992, I have learned that many people's eyes light up when I use the story of Augustine’s pear stealing as a concrete expression of our “disordered desires.” God desires that we desire that which is good, true, and beautiful, all of which are ultimately from God and will return to God. That’s why Augustine could confidently confess these words, which are arguably the most often quoted dictum from him, right at the end of the first paragraph of Confessions: “You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”
May we all find our disordered desires redirected in the Lord of the Advent, whether we find ourselves at work or at home, at the gym or at a restaurant, whether on a work trip or around the proverbial water fountain! For unto us not only is a child born, but also a son given, a son who is THE Son of God incarnated for us and for our salvation.
1 – This maxim is not my original. A friend of mine—Jon Butterworth—said that “life is weird but God is good” in his Instagram post a few weeks ago, and that’s been stuck (in a good way!!!) in my head.
2 – Again, not original to me! This is from Barney Zeng, a former Gotham alum, who rendered it as “Sanctification is not an individual sport.”