Faith Filled Friday: Uncover to Bear Fruit for Advent

Since I’ve started my “Sunday Meditations” posts, I have unfortunately not had as many “Faith Filled Friday” posts.  Well, there is only so much I can get in.  This coming Sunday starts Advent, but I wanted to get a pre-Advent post in to focus your thinking and devotions for Advent proper.

This quote comes from a book recommended to me by a friend on Advent written Fleming Rutledge, an Episcopal Priest.  She has her own Wikipedia entry, so she must be of some notoriety.  (No I don’t support women priests in the Catholic Church, but who am I to opine on Episcopal Church matters?)  The book, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ (currently on sale in Kindle format), is organized around sermons she has given over the years on Advent.  I’m 50 pages or so in, and I’m quite impressed with her literary knowledge—the main reason I think the book was recommended—and her homiletics, if that is the correct word.  Though there might be an item or two we Catholics might have a different way of seeing, for the most part I’m surprised how much we have in common here. 

The quote I want to highlight from her book was from a sermon on “Advent II”—I take that to be the second Sunday of Advent, but I’m not entirely sure—given in 1999, titled “Cover-Ups.”

 

The premier personage of Advent is John the Baptist. When he appears on the banks of the Jordan, the cover-ups come to their appointed end. Two thousand years before all the Watergates, Irangates, and other sordid “-gates,” John came proclaiming God’s imminent judgment on the venality of governments, the corruption of police departments, the greed of financiers, the selfishness of the rich, the self-righteousness of the religious establishment. In the end, he became one of los desaparecidos himself, executed without a trial in the dank dungeon of the local strongman, thus becoming truly the precursor of the One whose way he prepared, the One whose death at the hands of the political and religious ruling classes signified the final judgment of God on all the powers and principalities.

 

There are cover-ups of all sorts. There are families that will not acknowledge the alcoholism that is destroying them. There are people who are making their loved ones miserable but will not go to a therapist. There are secretaries who cover up for bosses, business partners who cover up for each other, colonels for generals, bishops for clergy, parents for children. Advent is the season of the uncovering: “Bear fruit that befits repentance. . . . Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees”! This is the right time to root out the cover-ups in our own lives, as we wait with bated breath for the lights to come on and the announcement of the angel that God is not against us but for us. (p. 42, Eerdmans. Kindle Edition.)

What caught my eye here was the term, los desaparecidos, which my poor Spanish initially took for “the deplorables.”  Perhaps politics has more an influence on my word associations than I think.  Still, despite several years of schooling in Spanish, I decided to look it up.  From Wikipedia:

Desaparecidos are people who were victims of enforced disappearance, who were secretly arrested and killed in Argentina during the "dirty war", between 1976 and 1983 during the military dictatorship of General Videla.

So what started as a specific immoral, political action in Argentina in the late 1970s, took on a more comprehensive definition:

 

The Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons, signed in 1994, considers it an imprescriptible crime against humanity and defines it as follows:

 

“Enforced disappearance is the deprivation of the liberty of one or more persons, in whatever form, committed by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons who act with the authorization, support or State approval, followed by the absence of information or the refusal to recognize said deprivation of liberty or to inform about the whereabouts of the person, by which the exercise of legal remedies is prevented and relevant procedural safeguards.

The forced disappearances of people in Latin American countries fall under the term los desaparecidos.  It is a word I want to remember, and perhaps use myself somewhere.  It is unfortunately too common for people in Latin America to just disappear, but frankly as one thinks about it, the practice has to be internationally widespread.  Dictators and criminal organizations have forever made people they had issues with disappear. 

That is Caravaggio's The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist.

And Rutledge points out how deep in history this practice is, even foundational in our Christian history.  John the Baptist was “executed without a trial in the dank dungeon of the local strongman, thus becoming truly the precursor of the One whose way he prepared, the One whose death at the hands of the political and religious ruling classes signified the final judgment of God on all the powers and principalities.”  This is certainly something for us to meditate upon.  John the Baptist and Jesus Christ are architypes for all those poor prisoners around the world who have done nothing wrong and are at the mercy of political power.  I am now specifically thinking of those in the underground prisons of China.  They need our prayers.

And Rutledge closes with an exhortation to our personal lives: “This is the right time to root out the cover-ups in our own lives, as we wait with bated breath for the lights to come on and the announcement of the angel that God is not against us but for us.”  What personal sins do we cover up, sins we wish would not be exposed?  I am not advocating we make these open for the world or even our loved ones.  But they become a point for personal reflection.  If we are covering up something from the world, even from ourselves, then it probably is not something wholesome.  This is a time to strive to overcome it, put it to an end.  Advent is here.  Christ is coming.