Zechariah’s life was interrupted by a wake-up call in the form of an angel. God was doing new unexpected things. The child promised would provide a wake-up call to many, many more.

In the middle of the busyness of holiday preparations, a voice still calls out in the wilderness.

Both Malachi and Luke remind us of the voice  calling out to wake up the people. Shake up the people. The voice calls out trying to get us to open our eyes, come into the light out of the darkness, emerge from our comas, our sleepwalking, our amnesia.

The prophet’s words sound like the persistent irritating ring of an alarm clock in the early morning hours; those who sleep deeply will never welcome these words.

Those who have forgotten who they are and whose they are and why they are here and what they are about need to have their memories restored.

Not just for their sakes, but for the sake of all.

The theological term is salvation. The meaning is consciousness. Awareness.

Why is it so hard to recognize?

Why is it so few ever experience what God offers all?

Why do we continue to reach over and press the snooze button or turn off the alarm altogether, pull the covers up over our heads and return to our small private dreams?

I once thought it was because we couldn’t see what was going on, because we lived in the darkness.

 Now I know better. I now think it is because we have seen shadowed reality. And we are overwhelmed. We have seen need, we have seen violence, we have seen injustice, and it is too much. We are small. We are powerless. It is too painful to see. Who wants to wake from dreams when what awaits can seem a living nightmare? And the culture relies on our sleepwalking, our blindness, our unconsciousness. That seems clear when what we are asked to do in a time of national crisis is to ‘keep shopping.’

Because we are somewhat comfortable, we do feel guilty when we know others are hungry, others are hurting, others are in need.

There is a lot of pressure this time of the year, and a lot of activity around the holidays to help to compensate for the rest of the year. Too assuage our guilt. We know of the injustice. It just seems too big to tackle.

I think we often expend our energy on small compensatory activities because we want some instant results and we feel powerless to change the systems. So we settle for band-aids when the prophets call for a ‘refiner’s fire.’

Tokenism --band-aids --will not satisfy God’s hunger for justice. Or ours.

The prophets want us to prepare for a more just world. The prophets want us to regain our memory.

The message of Advent is not to run from or deny the darkness, but to wait, to prepare, to get in touch with our discomfort with the way things are, so we can hope in that for which God is also longing.

There is a problem with our seeing. We are not seeing it all. We are seeing with limited perspective.

We forget there is more to remember. There is more to reality. There is more to what God is doing and wants us to do. The time is pregnant with possibility. 

We need to learn how to see as the prophet’s see.

Prophet’s see with different eyes. Just as an artist learns how to see the world in a different way: light, shadow, textures, edges, focus, perspective, colors, shadings, whole, parts, looking at life from different angles, seeing in layers and seeing with fresh eyes . . .

so, too, do we need to go back to beginning and start fresh. Prophets, poets, artists teach us how to remember truth. Remember light. Remember ourselves. Remember God moving in history.

We must ‘remember.’ Note, if you will, the emphasis this time of year on the making of memories. The carefully crafted nostalgia of times that never were in order to further stimulate our holiday spending.

Ignore, if you can, Madison Avenue’s involvement and note that what they have found (by spending lots of money on psychologists) is a deep longing in our hearts for things to be different than they are. I’m not talking about nostalgia. Just as prophets are not predicting the future: remembering is not something stuck in the past.

Present.

We are always called to live in the present. Remembering is about now.

Member . . . as a hand or a foot is a member. . . severed, these parts are said to be ‘dis-membered.’ ‘Remembering’ is to bring what was severed back together, we ‘re-member.’ As we remember, we move toward healing: we remember whole-ness. Whole-y-ness. Holiness. (This is, by the way, why I long for you to come to the communion table with joy. For when we come to this table, we are remembering not just Jesus’ death, but his life, his mission. God’s dream. God’s love triumphing over all. And as we remember, we actually become -in that brief moment in time- the dream itself incarnate. 

We celebrate because of the justice we practice in sharing that meal with one another. Nothing divides us: not race or gender or sexual orientation or age or wealth or lack of it or age or anything else. We are re-membered as the body of Christ. I want you to sing because it is such a beautiful thing to be on the cutting edge of the kin-dom of God: the family of God, here in this place, for the sake of all. And nothing expresses sheer joy better than song. I want you to sing because angels sing and we are all of us angels – messengers of God’s when we share this meal. The kin-dom is here, among us, in those moments, but it does not, cannot, will not, end here. I want the joy of the Beloved kin-dom to be carried out into the world through our singing.) 

Irony abounds. God sets a people apart (makes them holy) in order  to make us all aware of how we are connected, how we belong together. How  all are holy. We sing because we remember! 

Richard Rohr says:

“Memory is very often the key to understanding. Memory integrates, reconciles, and puts the individual members into perspective as a part of the whole. It seems that God has drawn out love for us in a medium that we call time. For us to recognize what God is doing and therefore who God is, we must pray like Paul "that your love may more and more abound, both in understanding and wealth of experience." Love, in terms of good will, is not enough. For love to happen effectively it must be ordered and timed and cut to fit the receiver. I think this is how God loves us! But we will never know it unless we re-member.

Our remembrance that God has remembered us will be the highway into the future, the straight path of the Holy One promised by John the Baptizer. Where there is no memory, there will be no pain, but neither will there be hope. Memory is the basis of both the pain and the rejoicing. We need to re-member both of them; it seems that we cannot have one without the other. Do not be too quick to "heal all of those memories," unless that means also feeling them deeply and taking them all into your salvation history. The prophet seems to be calling us to suffer the whole of reality, to remember the good along with the bad. Perhaps that is the course of the journey toward new sight and new hope. Memory creates a readiness for salvation, an emptiness to receive love, and a fullness to enjoy it.”

In the Living the Questions study this month, the topic is Social Justice. I didn’t choose the topic for Advent. It simply fell that way. Serendipity, it seems to me.

We have heard Marcus Borg tell us that if we take the prophets seriously, we will be both passionate about God and passionate about justice.

And Emile Townes defines justice in this way:

“Justice is recognizing that each one of us has dignity and worth that needs to be recognized. And that extends not just to human relationships but beyond, out in creation as well, and spinning a world out of that dignity and worth of all people, rather than just pockets of grace.”

The message of the prophets, and the message of Christ is about justice. We prepare for Christmas by daily and even in seemingly small ways living and being in ways that reflect the dignity and worth of all peoples. By caring for others—ALL others__ and by caring for creation. Justice begins in our hearts – but it moves us beyond our comfort zones – into the larger circles.

Borg, again, says, that the prophets were speaking of systemic justice, that we, as God’s people are being called to pay attention to and try to change those systems.

We cannot fully celebrate Christmas until we are committed to Christ’s work.

 “Systemic justice,” according to Borg, “is concerned with the way the structures of society work. . . . The litmus test for whether or not a system is just is this: Look at the results. Systemic justice is a result-oriented justice. A system that produces a pretty large and radically impoverished class of people is an unjust system. No matter how fair the rules are enforced and no matter how democratically those rules are made –  it’s not a just society. If you have a society in which one percent of the population own forty-three percent of the wealth then it’s pretty clear that the one percent have structured society so it kind of worked out that way and they have a tremendous amount of power to sustain it. (That’s the figure in the US, by the way: 1% of the population control 43% of the wealth.)”

Borg points out that this is not about making the middle class guilty, which is an easy place for us to go. “Oh, my, people are starving and I live in a nice home.”  Guilt can paralyze, and is not a friend of those seeking justice. That kind of guilt keeps us from focusing on the systemic nature of the problem.

Guilt does not motivate, energize, or serve much purpose in obtaining systemic change.

Discomfort, now that is useful. When we are uncomfortable with the way things are . . . when we move toward that discomfort . . . when we see that discomfort as God working in us to help us remember, to help us repair the breaches . . . that can be used. (A lot of what passes for ‘charity’ this time of the year may actually be the way we seek to put a salve on our discomfort. A quick fix that has a temporary feel-good effect, but may actually mask the need for systemic change.)

Borg  says that rather than be paralyzed by guilt, he wants to see “the bottom 98% get mad as hell about how the elite are structuring society in their own narrow self interest to the detriment of the rest of us.”

I cringe this time of the year when it all seems ‘writ large.’ The median family income is roughly $28,000 in our country right now. Some of you may be living on that. But it has to be hard, nigh unto impossible, to raise a couple of kids on that. Imagine the added pressures this time of year. I ache when I see the ads for pay-day loans for folks who are struggling financially. Those loans offer interest rates even higher than the credit cards get away with. So the birth of the Great Liberator ushers in deeper bondage to a debt load that may lead to bankruptcy . . .  though the same folks who charge exorbitant interest have also used their power to tighten restrictions on filing for bankruptcy, to make relief that much further from those who so need it. (Just to illustrate Borg’s point.) It is not just our holidays that have been hijacked. It is our imaginations, as well. Who is being impoverished by our cultural holidays and just who is it that is being enriched?

‘Wake up’ the prophets cry. Not to feeling guilty, but to consciousness about how this society is structured to serve the self-interest of the wealthy and powerful. Remember who you are and what you are about. Who God is and for what God longs.

Dare to imagine what could happen if we diverted just one-fourth of our holiday budgets and energies and time to changing the system – through organizations like Bread for the World, Habitat for Humanity, the Amos Project – or even standing with Don Rucknagel in his efforts to provide health care for all.

(Which is why, by the way, we belong to the Amos Project. It is a faith-based coalition  organizing  to work for systemic change that will benefit those on the bottom rungs of the ladder, not the one percent at the top.

It is an interfaith organization where we can stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters and ‘get mad as hell’ while we work to effect change in terms of education, medical care, housing, jobs, and the minimum wage.  Because as our gospel reminds us, the change we seek is not going to come from on high, it is not going to come from the mighty and powerful. It is going to come from the least expected places. The wilderness. Those we consider powerless. It’s going to come from people who have become passionate about God and passionate about justice.

The Amos Project is about remembering God at work in the world and in us. In remembering what God has done in the past and continues to do, in remembering the dreams of God, the connectedness of all, can we find the strength to challenge the systemic injustice of our day and time.

And then we can hear the good news in these wake-up calls; we can hear truth and justice emerging as we respond to God’s invitation to “prepare a way for the Holy One, make the paths straight.

It is not sexy this work. There isn’t the instant feel-good of putting a toy in the hands of a needy child. It takes perseverance and steadiness and remembering that long after that toy finds its way into the trash – this work can make a more lasting difference.

I’m not saying we can’t do the short-term things. I’m saying we can’t pretend that those take the place of our real caring, our real mission.

Don’t forget! Wake up! Remember to dream God’s dream: a dream of a more just society. “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.”

Richard Rohr says:

“The repentance that the Baptist calls us to is one of remembering, and of remembering together, and then bearing the consequences of that remembrance. It is no easy matter, for the burden of remembering is great. But we must try for the sake of truth, and we can try within the protective walls of church.

So see what God has given freely. Your hope lies hidden in what God has already done. "And rejoice that you are remembered by God." “

This is radical stuff, the Advent message.

Remember the life of the one who came and is coming again. Remember we have work to do. For God’s sake.

Remember we are not expecting just an innocent baby.