Imagine a World without God
2nd Sunday of Advent
There are these two young fish swimming along and an older fish comes up and says to them: good morning, boys, how is the water? and he swims off. A moment later, one of the young fish looks to the other and asks: what the heck is water?
That little anecdote is used to demonstrate that sometimes the most important, life-defining realities go unnoticed by us, or are taken completely for granted. To be a fish means to live in water, and perhaps you can imagine a world with intelligent, talking fish who go along each day paying no attention to the reality that makes being a fish possible; a world in which fish take water almost completely for granted.
I want to say with my homily today that God is the important, life-defining reality for us who often goes unnoticed, us taking for granted the fact that God is out there in the world, alive, accessible, doing things, giving himself to us. And Advent is a season given to us so that we might remember the gift that is Christ, who makes the presence of God in the world possible. Let me explain.
The people of Israel, from Abraham to John the Baptist (about 18 centuries), only knew God as a promise. God talked to Abraham, sure, as well as Isaac and Jacob; the patriarchs. God also talked to various judges and prophets; he talked to kings like Saul and David and Solomon; he talked to Moses and Joshua. The Old Testament even gives examples of God intervening in the lives of select non-Israelites like Naaman the Syrian or the people of Ninevah. The Old Testament is a recorded history of God talking to and entering relationship—available, accessible—to some people, but not to most people.
How about the experience of God in the world for the average Israelite not selected for a special divine mission? Well, for about 18 centuries your options for finding God in the world were pretty limited: (1) you could spend your time hanging around someone to whom God was talking, like Joseph or Jeremiah; (2) after Moses, you could follow the law with its ritual prescriptions for almost every aspect of life; (3) for a few centuries you could go to the temple and worship the ark of the covenant containing the broken stone of the ten commandments; (4) you could immerse yourself in the history of God’s covenantal promise to Israel and identify in history the presence of God protecting and establishing the people of Israel for a future time when all nations would know Yahweh and worship him.
The fact that matters is that neither knowing someone who knows God, nor following the ritual prescriptions of the law, nor worshipping stone tablets in a temple, nor finding God in history are the same reality as knowing God and loving God and living in a relationship with God in which you give yourself to him and he gives himself to you. The ordinary experience for the people of Israel was not-having God; relationship with God existed as a promise, the upside of covenants not-yet-fulfilled.
Imagine the experience of 18 centuries of not-having God but waiting for him to come and give himself to you. 18 centuries of not-having God defined by war and violence and poverty and the rise and fall of empires and the destruction of your nation and the raising of your temple and the captivity of your people while you wait generation after generation for God to come and give himself to you because that is the promise he made. Imagine the desperation and extreme longing-for-God that came from almost 2,000 years of not-having God but waiting for him. You can see the desperation and longing in our first reading today:
Jerusalem, take off your robe of mourning and misery;
put on the splendor of glory from God forever:
wrapped in the cloak of justice from God,
bear on your head the mitre
that displays the glory of the eternal name.
For God will show all the earth your splendor:
you will be named by God forever
the peace of justice, the glory of God’s worship.
We do not know much about the origins of the Book of Baruch, but most scholars think the verses we hear today were recorded in exile, about halfway through a century of captivity in Babylon. Take note of the verb tenses of the prophecy today: God will show, you will be named, God will bring; will, will, will; future, future future; later, later, later. These verses reveal a desperate longing for a new exodus that is different from the old exodus. The first exodus found the people of Israel yearning for freedom from slavery and a land to call their own; 800 years later and again held captive, the people of Israel simply want God. The prophecy of Baruch reveals a yearning for a new exodus, a spiritual exodus, that will free Israel from the life-defining reality of not-having God.
The experience of Israel not-having God for 18 centuries and waiting on a promise is why I say that God goes unnoticed by us today, us taking for granted the fact that God is out there in the world, alive, accessible, doing things, giving himself to us. There is a way in which a fish will never fully appreciate water until there is no water to have, and likewise for us there is a way in which we will never fully appreciate God because the experience of not-having God is a reality we will never know. The birth of Christ is the incarnation of God in our world. Because of Christ, God is now present in our world. You can know God and love God, give yourself to God in a relationship and let him give himself to you. The birth of Christ makes grace possible for us, and grace is the life of God given to us, shared with us, for us to become like God. The people of Israel lived on a promise under the law; the birth of Christ fulfills the promise and gives us grace, the new law inscribed upon our hearts.
The tough part about life is that the only reality you know is the reality you experience; you have to go a long way to experience a different kind of world to really appreciate the world in which you live. I remember a story about a young man from South America about to be ordained a priest in Baltimore some years ago. His parents came up for the ordination and were shocked—scandalized, really, he told me—by our roads and highways; they never knew it was possible to build the kind of infrastructure we have in the United States. Most of us, I am almost positive, spend enough time each week complaining about bad road conditions and traffic because we only know what we experience and having roads that get you easily from A to B is just what life looks like when you live in America; the most basic realities go unnoticed, get taken for granted.
I want to give you an Advent project. Take some time in prayer these next few weeks to imagine a world without God. I mean it: sit down in a chapel or church somewhere and go through the mental exercise of stripping away whatever experiences of God are out there in the world today: imagine a world without the Church; imagine a world without sacraments; imagine a world without church buildings or places of worship; imagine a world without the spirit of God at work changing lives and converting hearts; imagine a world in which God only talks to a few select people and you get to hear about it, maybe, and usually much later; imagine a world in which your best experience of God comes not from real relationship but from following a list of rules; imagine needing to travel to one place and only one place in the world to find God and worship him; imagine telling the history of your family or nation looking for the moments when God did intervene and wondering when the time will come for God to once again come into the world and save his chosen people.
Imagine living surrounded by the violence and poverty and addiction of the world and not-having God is the life-defining reality for you and your family; no grace, no real relationship with God, finding consolation mostly in a future world that you and your children may never know. Imagine only knowing God as a promise.
The most important, life-defining realities often go unnoticed by us, taken almost completely for granted. A wise fish would swim along saying to itself again and again: this is water, this is water, this is water, never taking for granted the very thing that makes life possible. I want to say that wise Christ-followers will perform a similar act, going through life, looking out into the world with its violence and poverty and addiction and saying to themselves again and again: here is God, here is God, here is God.
Homily preached on Sunday, December 8th 2024 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary