December 6, 2009 | 8:00 a.m.

At the Threshold

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 148
Isaiah 40:1–11
Luke 3:1–6

Many times today
I will cross over
a threshold.
I hope I will catch
a few of those times.
I need to remember that
my life is, in fact,
a continuous series of thresholds:
from one moment to the next,
from one thought to the next,
from one action to the next.
Help me appreciate how awesome this is.
How many are the chances to be really alive . . .
to be aware of the enormous dimension we live within.

Gunilla Norris
Being Home: Discovering the Spiritual in the Everyday

The fortieth chapter of the Book of Isaiah, from which the first scripture lesson was read, marks the beginning of a prophetic literature of hope and promise. Prior to this period, prophets such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel primarily conveyed tough messages of judgment. Written at the time of Israel’s defeat and exile by the Babylonians, the older prophetic literature interpreted Israel’s misfortune as divine punishment for their disobedience. In contrast, chapters forty through fifty-five were written by a prophet, sometimes called Second Isaiah, who, though he knew firsthand the experience of exile, lived to see the Babylonian empire come to an end and the more benevolent rule of Cyrus of Persia take its place. It was in this context that Second Isaiah wrote the prophetic literature that we all know and love for its consoling and hopeful message: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid.”

Not only was Second Isaiah’s message and tone of consolation new and distinctive for prophetic literature, but the idea of being rescued by a Gentile was also a radical departure from older prophetic books. Whereas earlier prophets perceived Gentiles to be agents of divine punishment, Second Isaiah treats Cyrus of Persia as a restorative agent in God’s plan to redeem Israel.

In an essay on Second Isaiah, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes that “it is important that the ‘new thing’ of 2 Isaiah comes after a long season of exilic discontent.” Only then can we grasp the power of the hope expressed in this prophetic poetry.

Now let’s turn to our second lesson. Most New Testament scholars agree that the third chapter of Luke was the original beginning of Luke’s Gospel. The infancy narrative that precedes it was most likely added at a later time. In the beginning verses of chapter 3, we find Luke preparing us for Jesus’ public ministry. Interestingly, he prepares us by first introducing to us the figure of John the Baptist. In fact, all of the Gospels, including Mark—in which there is no infancy narrative at all—relate the beginning of Jesus’ ministry to John’s ministry of preaching and baptism.

John the Baptist was a precursor of Jesus. He was our first preacher. His ministry was one of preaching baptism and repentance in preparation for the salvation of all. As Luke tells us, John came on the scene when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea and Herod was ruler of Galilee, the period of time when Jesus was just about to begin his ministry.

John was not only a precursor of Jesus. He was also the last of Israel’s prophets. The word of God, Luke tells us, came to John just as it had come to the prophets of old, and the word came to him in the wilderness, as it had come to Moses during Israel’s exodus and to the prophet Isaiah while Israel was in exile. In addition to introducing John in a manner typical of Israel’s past prophets, the Gospels even portray John as fulfilling the words of Second Isaiah: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. 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.’”

Like Second Isaiah, who lived and wrote on the threshold between two prophetic periods—a period of judgment and a period of promise—John the Baptist was “a figure on the threshold of two eras” (Francois Bovon, Hermeneia: Luke 1, p. 2). With one foot in the age of prophecy and the other foot in the age of fulfillment, John was a transitional figure.

Many scholars underscore the idea that for the earliest Christians, history was divided into different eras: that of prophecy and that of fulfillment. Furthermore, it seems that Luke thought the era of fulfillment was subdivided into the time of Jesus and the time of witnesses, and that the time of witnesses could be further subdivided into the time of eyewitnesses and the time of later, second and third generations of witnesses. It is in the last category that Luke himself fell. For Luke, who set out to record “an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled . . . , just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses” (Luke 1:1–2), such an historical view of things was very important—not simply because Luke had a penchant for history, but because Luke, like Second Isaiah, believed in a God that acts and has always acted in history to save his covenant people. Differentiating, dividing, subdividing, and reinterpreting history was for Luke necessary work to adapt to new times, to keep up with the new things that God was doing, and to include new people into the covenant.

It seems appropriate then that every year during Advent the lectionary focuses on texts in which Second Isaiah and John the Baptist are prominent. From them we can learn the importance of situating ourselves on a new threshold, straining our necks to look for signs of what God might be doing next. They can teach us that Advent is a time for each generation of witnesses to reexamine and, when necessary, to reinterpret our history.

For Second Isaiah, history required reinterpretation when it seemed that God involved other nations not only as agents of retribution, but also as agents of restoration for Israel. For Luke, history required reschematization, and thus reinterpretation, when it seemed that in Jesus Christ God was extending the offer of salvation to all peoples.

Such reexamination and reinterpretation, however, require time—time for wondering about and mulling over the signs of the times. When do we take time to wonder and mull? While it is challenging to find such time ever, it is especially difficult during the season of Advent. On top of everything else we do, the extra shopping, Christmas card-writing, cooking, hosting, or traveling can easily fill up the month of December.

I suspect, however, that it is not simply the extra-long checklists and checking them twice that keep us from paying attention to the ways God is at work in the world. Could it be, more fundamentally, that we have developed a particular orientation toward time that stands in our way?

I have been struck by how fundamentally difficult it is to comprehend the ancient notions of time. I find so strange their ways of marking history into eras of judgment and promise, of prophecy and fulfillment. And each time I face this strangeness, I am reminded that the Bible, though we may read and study it every week, opens up to us a world—a time and a place—that is quite radically, and wonderfully, different from our own.

Given the strangeness of the world of the Bible, applying the scriptures to one’s life requires a paradigm shift. By a paradigm shift, I mean a shift in perspective so fundamental that the conditions that shape and orient our lives would change. That is what I think Advent may require from us. In order to grasp Advent as a historical threshold in which God is poised to do something new, we might need to undergo a paradigm shift in our conception of time. Nothing conditions and shapes our lives more than our conceptions of time.

In a new book entitled Time, author, essayist, and journalist Eva Hoffman explores how we have come to conceive of time. “What has become of time in our time?” she asks. Although we live longer today than ever before, we compress time into ever more minute segments. We organize our thoughts, tasks, and communications into shorter units of time, and as things speed up, it is not uncommon for each moment to become overcrowded. “The overcrowding of each moment,” she writes, “extends not only to our actual activities, but to the activities available to us, all the time and at any time. Each temporal point holds a proliferation of possibilities and claims on our attention, which can be summoned—or dismissed—by pressing the relevant key on the appropriate keypad” (p. 145).

Hoffman goes on to observe that

indeed, not only do we have multiple options for filling each moment, but none of these options need ever be lost. If we miss the film, we can rent the DVD; if we miss the TV program, we can access it on YouTube; if we miss a significant political article in a newspaper, we can find it on the web. The quanta of information are not only available simultaneously; they are, increasingly, available in perpetuity. (p. 145)

Given the emergence of new technologies and all that they make possible, French theorist Jean Baudrillard worries that “we are losing the very notions of historical time” (Eva Hoffman, Time, p. 173). Splitting time up into such small units, we can lose perspective; we can fail to consider the relationships or connections between and among events. Without this larger perspective, we may miss emerging patterns and constellations, and as a result, our responses to things that happen will be just as disconnected as our perceptions of the world around us.

Knowledge of history is important. For Christians, however, history is not simply world events, but rather it is the arena in which everything that exists exists in relation, somehow, to a God whose love for the world will, in time, redeem the world. From this perspective, all of history is a history of salvation. As we learned from Second Isaiah and then from John the Baptist, one historical paradigm is never enough to perceive all the ways by which God is redeeming his world. It will take generations of people situated on the threshold of time to behold the amazing works of God. Amen.