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We all have our own ideas of what royalty is. When I was about eight, the queen visited the town in the south of England where I lived. Thousands of people packed into a sports stadium and children sang and danced for her. I came away certain that the queen was a special person who liked children. If I say "king" to an American and ask for a definition, most reply, "male ruler," whereas a British person nearly always answers, "monarch." The difference lies in experience—Britain has had female monarchs for most of the past 160 years.

We also know what royalty should look like. Princess Anne’s work with the Save the Children Fund takes her around the world. There was a problem in one place in Africa: the children did not believe she was a princess because she wasn’t dressed properly. Once she put on a tiara and a long dress they were sure they had a proper princess in their midst.

In fact, none of our ideas reflect God’s concept of kingship (human or divine) completely. We are not alone in this. In Jeremiah’s time the people’s understanding of kingship was tainted by human kings who had led them to the point of imminent destruction and deportation. God spoke of the kings as shepherds who had failed to care for their people. Would a nation scattered and destroyed, left uncared for and afraid, even want God to raise up another shepherd or king for it? Could the people welcome a righteous king?

When we come to Christ the King Sunday, we have to acknowledge that we bring cultural baggage with us. But what happens if we lay our preconceptions to one side and let the readings tell us what a king is?

Things begin well. Psalm 46 is not one of the royal psalms that exalt in a human king. Instead, our model for kingship is God. The psalm exhorts us to praise the God who is our refuge and strength, our very present help, our stronghold. God rules creation, and nothing the world, the nations, the warriors or politicians do will unseat or unsettle this Lord of Hosts and God of Jacob—ruler of both heaven and earth. These are kingly words of power and might, authority and action. This is a king as we imagine a king should be.

But this image jars with the scene of shame and powerlessness in Luke, who describes the death of the Son of God, the King of the Jews. Luke gives us a lexicon of abuse and humiliation: criminals, condemnation, crucifixion, nakedness, scoffing, mocking, taunting, deriding, reviling, sneering. . . Hardly the stuff of kingship, and no crowns here except one of thorns. The jubilation of Psalm 46 is gone, and we are face to face with agony and grief, and a cacophony of insults instead of songs and praise.

When George VI died the cry went out, "The King is dead, long live the Queen." With a death, the monarchy passes to another person. It is different with God’s kingship: that cry is "the King is dead, the King is raised from death and reigns." That is what the criminal on the cross with Jesus partly grasped. He asked Jesus to remember him when he came into his kingdom. He was looking to a future reign, but Jesus handed out the royal pardon immediately. Jesus was king even on the cross, welcoming people into his kingdom and not waiting until he was throned in glory. This was simply the culmination of the way Jesus lived: he never dressed as we think a king should, or did things properly by our standards. If we can get over over-shock, we will rejoice in this, because this is where the good news lies for people like those of Jeremiah’s time, who have known the pain of abandonment and betrayal by their rulers. Kingship, when Cod is involved, does not ask people to ignore the failures but embraces those experiences and redeems them.

God’s promise to the people was a king who is righteous, deals wisely, executes justice and righteousness in the land, and enables the people to live securely. In Jesus, God has fulfilled that promise. Justice and righteousness, themes that will recur in Advent, are the hallmarks of God’s king. In the story of Jesus, kingship is recast. The miracle lies in the fact that God shares the potential hopelessness of the human situation, but does so as king, as the source of our hope and life. Jesus took his wounds to heaven, and there is a place in heaven for our wounds because our king bears his in glory.

Ahaz, Paul and Joseph were three men up against the inscrutability of God. One was a king whose rebellion exhausted God and led him to the brink of disaster and whose heart shook like a tree in the wind. One was a zealous Jew whose fidelity to the God of his ancestors made him a murderer and blinded him to the possibility that God’s coming might not be as he anticipated. One was a righteous man, soon to be married, whose carpentry business was all the excitement he expected in life,

These were three men whose lives were thrown into turmoil when God came to them.

Ahaz’s story, as told in Kings and Chronicles, has no moment of potential redemption. There is just the downward spiral of Ahaz’s rebellious disobedience and God’s anger. Simple cause and effect, it seems. But Isaiah’s account throws a wrench into the works: God offers Ahaz the opportunity to ask for a sign—a down payment on God’s intervention in the situation. Ahaz’s refusal sounds wise, given the number of times the people of Israel have already been rebuked for testing God, but it masks a failure to distinguish between faithful and rebellious testing of God. Faithful testing is prepared to act on the outcome, whereas Ahaz’s pious answer is a refusal to risk belief in God, a refusal to experience the love God longs to lavish on the king.

The invitation to Ahaz is actually double-edged; he thinks he is being invited to test God, to prove God true, but he himself is being tested by God’s word (Ps. 105:19). So God asks Ahaz to pay attention to the names of children and sets up a contrast between Ahaz’s lack of faith and the woman’s great faith in naming her child "Emmanuel." If Ahaz cannot hear the sub-text of Isaiah’s son’s name, "A remnant shall return," God will spell it out more clearly: "God is with us." The king’s actions tell us he does not believe this, but a young woman can and does. In a good mystery novel, clues are scattered throughout the book. Seemingly inconsequential details are deliberately added by the author, who makes sense ofthem all at the end. That is what God is doing with Ahaz. A clue here, "ask me for a sign"; a clue there, "a child’s name." But Ahaz, conditioned by a lifetime of ignoring God, cannot or will not seize this moment of grace.

Ahaz’s whole life has been based on the assumption that God won’t come to him. So, given his refractory history, why is Ahaz offered a sign of God’s presence and power while righteous Joseph is not? It would seem to be so easy for the angels, already working overtime in the Nazareth and Bethlehem area, to put in an appearance to Joseph and make it all clear from the beginning. It would spare him, as well as Mary and her parents, a lot of agony. Instead, God leaves Joseph with the dilemma of what to do when a lifetime of fidelity to God is suddenly rewarded with seeming disaster. And, to make matters worse, God appears to be silent. How is Joseph going to risk belief in God and act faithfully? How will Joseph put God to the test?

Being a righteous man, Joseph tries to put the pieces of his jigsaw puzzle together using the template of the law of God and his own compassion for Mary. But he is working with the wrong picture, because God is at this very minute putting the finishing touches on a new one. The God who last week was a highway engineer making new ways through the wilderness, a gardener turning deserts into flower gardens, is now the artist painting a new perspective of the age-old promise of the messiah. Hope in God cannot stand still, because—as Isaiah reminds us elsewhere—we hope in a God who is constantly doing a new thing.

The initial silence of God to Joseph was just as demanding for him as the clarity of God’s words was for Ahaz. In both situations God was testing the men: Are you going to act faithfully? Does your hope in God hold fast in the face of chaos and confusion in your life? Ahaz, can you live with the clear word of God? Righteous Joseph, can you live with the silence of God?

Paul brings it all together. Once intransigent on God’s behalf, Paul knows himself to be a servant of Jesus Christ and writes of the obedience of faith. That was Joseph’s response too. Faith knows in whom it has believed, and orders life accordingly, despite unanswered questions. In contrast to Paul and Joseph, Ahaz’s knowledge of himself as king precludes knowing himself as God’s obedient servant.

Joseph’s fidelity should remind us that often the times of silence or awkward questions are the prelude to new works of God in our lives. Advent is a time of preparation for the coming of God, a time to pay attention to the clues that God is active, a time to practice the scales of fidelity that will enable us to play the new music when God puts it in front of us. Sometimes it is only those who have learned to maintain their hope during God’s silences who can be trusted with hearing God’s word spoken to their situation; only those who have been tested by God’s word can embrace without hesitation the unanticipated presence of God.

Oh, the majesty and magnificence of God’s presence! Oh, the power and splendor of his sanctuary!. . Alanj wrapped him in swaddling clothes and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

After Advent’s four weeks of preparation for God’s coming, of learning again what it means to live lives predicated on hope in God, the time has come. We are expecting the arrival of our Savior. As always, God takes us by surprise. Majesty and magnificence are encompassed in swaddling clothes; God’s splendid sanctuary is a manger-of-last-resort.

God who risked all

and as a child

in Bethlehem cried in the dark and cold.

Emmanuel:

God is with us, from heaven to earth see the story

unfold.

The Word made flesh in a manger is laid,

see, in a baby, God’s glory.⁰

Do not be afraid, I am bringing you good news of greatfoyforall the people.

The angels provoke fear. Jesus was just about the only person to be comforted by an angel. Everyone else is confronted by God and usually called to some action when an angel shows up. No wonder the standard opening line in the nativity story ~~‘~Fear not." Even if an angel were to glide quietly into our presence, we would be startled. To have the night sky suddenly lit with the glory of the Lord would be little short of ternfying. The domestic scale of the manger is not the only truth about Jesus’ birth: could the psalmist ever have envisaged the heavens declaring the glory of God in quite this way?

The shepherds glorified and praised God for what they had heard and seen.

I collect pictures of the annunciation and the Christmas story as painted by the old masters. It is fascinating to reflect on the different understandings of the incarnation that the artists have expressed. One of my favorite pictures of the shepherds is a detail from a 15th-century Dutch Book of Hours. Eight solid and solemn shepherds hold hands and are obviously doing a circle dance, although two are going in opposite directions and one seems to be standing still. Another shepherd points to heaven, where the words of the angel appear in large letters. Their expressions do not suggest even a glimmer of excitement—these are sturdy, no-nonsense shepherds—but as joy seeps into their souls, their feet cannot help dancing.

Contrast this with a card by a contemporary five-year-old artist. In the stable scene, a red-cheeked Jesus beams cheerfully from his manger. Mary grins like a Cheshire cat and has her arms raised in triumph as though her team has just scored, and two shepherds in multicolored, almost gaudy clothes stand happily at either side. At everyone’s feet are seven of the woolliest sheep you could wish to meet, all falling around laughing for joy; one even seems to be holding its sides as it laughs. A lantern swings from the ceiling of the stable as if it has beenrocked by an earthquake, and it fills the stable with bright yellow light.

I wonder if the shepherds, those religious outcasts from the hillside, ever anticipated the depths of the joy they suddenly found released in their hearts. When they heard the news they hurried off to Bethlehem. "They caine in haste" is a wonderfully evocative phrase. If they fell over themselves to get there, what was the journey back like? Perhaps the joy really did hit their feet and they surprised themselves by dancing. After four weeks of waiting for the coming of Christ, we too should be prepared to be overtaken by joy at his arrival. If we have domesticated the announcement of his birth so that we are no longer stirred by the news, something is amiss.

Mary treasured up these things, and pondered them in her heart.

Mary had nine months to prepare for this birth, three of them spent with Elizabeth, whose own story was as surp rising and full of God’s mercy as her own. She already had enough experiences for a lifetime of meditation. Yet even she was taken by surprise at the arrival of the shepherds and their story of angels—angels who had been notably absent when she and Joseph were looking for somewhere to stay. So she added all this to the store of things to treasure and ponder, things that might one day yield their deeper meanings.

This Christmas, what do we treasure, what will we ponder in our hearts?

The grace of God has appeared bringing salvation to all.

Yes, Advent is a season to make our longing conscious. But primarily it is a season to become more aware of the God who creates that longing in us. A phrase from the Collect for the Presence of Christ in the Episcopal service of evening prayer expresses the Advent theme well. "Kindle our hearts and awaken hope.. ."Advent is the season of hope awakened not by our changing circumstances and fickle emotions but by the action of God in our lives, igniting the dying embers, setting fire to our passion and searing us in a way that means we are forever changed and bear the scorch marks of that flame. We shouldn’t get through Advent unscathed by Cod.

Advent hope is about Cod coming, and thus Advent asks us to rediscover hope as a sure and certain foundation for our lives. Unfortunately for our culture of instant gratification, hope requires incompleteness. To hope, in the true sense of the word, is to live with the certainty of unfulfilled desire. The joy— and the challenge—of Advent is that in Jesus Christ our Cod is coming, and our aching and longing for God will be met.

But this God who comes is disturbing. We see it in the proclamation of John, who shatters the silence of’ the wilderness with the cry, "Repent, for the kingdom of’ heaven has come near." Not just "repent," change the way you live, but repent and prepare for the coming of the kingdom of heaven which will ruffle all your securities and overturn anything you try to leave in place.

The incarnation is about God taking an unprepared world by storm, gate-crashing our human party and living out among us the vision and model of a new kingdom. As Odo Casel once wrote. "The Spirit of God is something disturbing, driving . . . for he desires to turf us out of our everydayness," Do we have the commitment to stay in the place of disturbance, the uncomfortable place where the Advent God is? It is rarely safe to long for God, and impossible if we are unwilling to be changed.

A few years a newspaper obituary said of a British radio news program host, "You didn’t exactly meet Brian Redhead, or work with him: he happened to you. You were drawn in by his energy and inner passion for a sharp, clean, balanced, better world free of humbug, cliques and pretension," That’s not unlike what happens when God comes.

John greeted those who came to him with the demand for repentance and baptism, or rebuffed them as a brood of vipers—hardly a gentle welcome from Cod. Why these demands? Because so much has gone so very wrong. Our world is full of injustice, oppression and unrighteousness, so something has to give when God enters this world, and it is not going to be God.

God draws us into another scenario, The Advent scriptures are full of promises of’ righteousness, justice and rescue for the poor and oppressed. That was what the king was to provide for his people, and it ‘is no coincidence that in Psalm 72, a prayer for the king. the poor get four mentions and the pm’ayer is that the king will rule righteously and bring justice. Because the blessing on the king is a blessing on the people, our Advent hope is assured. The coming king is a king after God’s, heart. If our hope excludes the possibility of righteousness and justice, we will be disappointed.

Righteousness is a theme in Isaiah which dates from a time of’ despair. failed kings and impending doom from the Assyrians. Hope is at its most stark when the circumstances are at their worst, and if we read Isaiah 11 without reading the earlier chapters we miss the outrageousness of this hope. God’s passion is salvation, Cod’s hope sees beyond the human mess and calls out, "Repent," whereas we would write the situation off as hopeless.

Repentance allows for the possibility of change. The God who calls us to repent was once called on by Moses to repent and did so. God is a God who doggedly pursues wayward people, holding out the possibility of’ life when situations point to death. So we have a shoot growing from a stump. fruit from the roots of a felled tree. and a return to paradise where animals live at peace. The wolf dwells with the lamb. The dangerous, predatory animal is invited to sojourn with its prey. The enemy is made the guest. The poor and vulnerable need not fear, but can welcome their oppressors. That is the undreamed-of result of Cod’s righteousness and justice.

There are no boundaries to Advent hope, because there are no boundaries to God. God keeps pushing hack the boundaries we try to set, and filling us with joy and peace so that we are supplied with hope.

There's a phrase tucked away in Psalm 146 that provides the basis for our Advent hope: God "keeps his promise for ever." Without that assurance there is no hope and no sense in Advent. Our hope is in God. The psalm underlines that conviction, as the confident prayer for the king of last week’s psalm suddenly gives way to the disappointed voice of bitter experience: "Put not your trust in rulers, not in any child of earth, for there is no hope in them."

The psalmist’s words probably test John as he languishes in prison at Herod’s behest. He knows there is no hope in. Herod. But is God keeping his promise? What has happened to the glorious vision of Isaiah, where the eyes of the blind are opened, the deaf are unstopped, the lame leap and the tongue of the dumb sings for joy? What about his own bold proclamation of the coming of the messiah? We don’t know exactly what provokes John’s question to Jesus, but this faithful prophet, who once recognized that he needed to be baptized by Jesus, is now face-to-face with his doubts and disappointments. Jesus is apparently not the messiah he anticipated. John is forced to reexamine the basis of his hope.

When Jesus responds to John by asking his disciples to tell what they see and hear, and to dare to hold that alongside the promises of Isaiah, he leaves out the part of Isaiah 61 that refers to the prisoners being freed. Can John recognize in what his disciples see and hear that this is indeed the messiah, even if he does not set this particular prisoner free? Can John be trusted not to take offense at this messiah? After all, Jeremiah was rescued from a well. Why not John from a prison?

John’s story challenges us to live with hope in the face of disappointment and disorientation. Is our fidelity intentional or situational? How do we understand our stories in the light of God’s story when the two don’t seem to touch. when there is an elusiveness to God’s ways with us? Can we step outside the parameters we put on our expectations, letting God strengthen our weak hands and feeble knees, hearing in our fearful hearts the call to be strong. not to be afraid, because our God is coming?

God seems to specialize in turning things upside down. In Isaiah 34 God ruins the glory of the nations, turning fertile places into deserts inhabited b a zoo of wild animals who fill the air with a cacophony of noise. Their stench and the raucous noise are almost tangible, and the awful isolation should shock our senses and appall us. But no sooner is this doom pronounced than Isaial1 speaks of the wilderness not simply in bloom but singing for joy. Almost phrase by phrase, Isaiah 35 undoes the devastation of the previous chapter: the place that no one passes through becomes a well-trodden highway Burning sand becomes a pool, and fertile vegetation replaces the sterility of sulfur-ridden soil.

God is the God of both situations, The abundance is no more a sign of God’s presence than the desolation, since God can switch them at will. We tend to measure God’s presence in any situation by our sense of well-being, and fail to recognize that disturbance in our lives is often a sign of God’s activity. Can we manage to stay put in the place of ambiguity or paradox long enough to discover that God is indeed there also, so that we echo Jacob’s awed words, "God was in this place and I, I did not know it"?

My Sierra Club calendar reminds me that "nowhere else on earth is geologic time so exposed as in a desert." Nowhere else is God’s time so exposed in our lives as in a desert experience: out of control of all that shapes our lives, we are open to God’s time scale, God’s ways. Like John in prison, we discover -- willingly or not -- how to be patient until the coining of the Lord, As Welsh poet and priest R. S. Thomas writes (in "Waiting for It"):

Now

in the small hours

of belief the one eloquence



to master is that

of the bowed head, the bent

knee, waiting, as at the end



of a hard winter

for one flower to open

on the mind’s tree of thorns.

If we can be quiet in our hearts long enough, we will discover that God still carves out highways and turns the wilderness into a place of wonder, life and beauty even though nothing is as we expected.

But any transformation of the wilderness depends on water. Throughout the Old Testament God is spoken of as the one who gives or withholds water—an image easily understood by people for whom water is a precious and uncontrolled commodity. Today, piped water deprives us of an image of Cod as the one on whom our very existence depends; similarly, electricity deludes us into thinking we have the dark under our control, Together they rob us of daily experiences that could add vibrancy to the Advent invitation to revisit our dependence on God, to revisit our desire for God and to discover through the night of waiting that God does indeed come.

Could John, despite his disappointments, hold on to the longing and the waiting that are at the heart of Advent’s ,disturbing message and discover in their midst the mystery of God’s presence— mystery to be lived into, not explained? Mystery that transforms rather than simply informs? Advent faces us with the same question: Dare we risk exploring the meaning of our longing for God?

Just where Lenin Avenue makes a turn, coming out of downtown Moscow and heading out toward the southwest suburbs, stands St. Nicholas's Church.

The first sight of St. Nicholas's is like a friendly ambush by a clown jumping out to surprise you, all dressed up in orange and green and white. Against the gray and tan background of apartment blocks and walled courtyards no one can miss it. It seems ready for a party, its small onion domes golden sparklers, its tepee-shaped tower a big candle.

Some years ago I turned off the busy avenue, parked and, with my camera around my neck, walked to the gate of the St. Nicholas compound. It was midmorning and there were a few women and an old bearded man sitting on benches inside the compound wall. A couple of women were sweeping, bent over, with short straw brooms.

As I pushed the gate open and started lining up my first photo of the church, I saw in the corner of my eye someone rushing toward me. I turned, and there, almost bumping up against me, blocking my way, was an elderly woman in black, who ordered me to go away. They didn't want people like me coming to take snapshots, making fun of their church and their faith.

In bad Russian I protested that I wasn't making fun of them, that I only wanted some pictures so 1 could show others how beautiful the church was. And besides, I was a pastor myself, a believer like them.

Still pushing me back toward the gate, she hissed: "Where is your beard then, priest? And your boots?" -- which any Russian Orthodox priest would be wearing.

I thought my visit was over.

And then from nowhere came another woman, even smaller and older, who bustled in, elbowed the first woman aside, and said, "Welcome! We're glad you came. Isn't our church beautiful? I hope you'll take pictures to show your friends. Please come inside and let me show you some of our precious icons. And I will tell you about our church."

Upon reflection, I understood the sentiments of the first woman. Why shouldn't she be afraid of ridicule, tired of intimidation, and quick to retaliate? Thousands of believers had been put to death, hundreds of churches destroyed -- her generation had endured enormous suffering. I had seen vestiges of that experience of suffering in the gauntlets of jeering spectators outside churches on Easter morning. So it was natural for her to keep the gate shut, and no longer play the fool.

How unaccountably gracious then as the second woman's hospitality. She was of the same generation as the first woman, yet her response was the opposite. "Always be ready to make a defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope at is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence." It was hardly a defense at all. It was just a warm and undeserved welcome, a door opened into her life and faith.

Luke writes that when Paul had finished speaking at the Areopagas, some scoffed. It's amazing that Paul had the nerve to stand up and say anything at all. Why did he feel compelled to look silly and risk ridicule? Why did he go to synagogues and marketplaces, vulnerable to scorn and worse?

The writer of 1 Peter seems to know why: "For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God." Paul, once a specialist in anti-Christian scorn and murder, had now been invited to share in Christ's sufferings. And he welcomed the privilege.

This Eastertide I have not experienced overt ridicule of my faith. No one has scoffed at my Easter sermons. The Easter eggs have been eaten, not thrown. But for the most part I've spoken of my faith only to those who share it. Most of those who've come through the church doors have been there many times before. No one has appeared with a camera to document our quaint Presbyterian rituals; not a single visitor has laughed out loud at our alleluias.

I know it would be different if I ventured "outdoors," if I attended a city council meeting and said a word for the poor, if I stood up at Rotary Club with a petition against capital punishment. Then I might hear a scoff or two. Then I might have the opportunity to give my account of the hope and faith that, untested, I think I hold dear.

Then I might gain some practical understanding of what Paul was saying to the Corinthians: "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong."

Across a quarter-century I have remembered vividly the two women of St. Nicholas's Church. I appeared at their gate, obviously American, obviously well-off and privileged, completely "other." One of them was tired of playing the fool for Christ, and could not see in me a possible brother in Christ. The other woman was alive with a graceful and welcoming spirit, and seemed to count it an honor to be Christ's fool.

And I remember vividly the gaudy facade, so different from the solemn dark red brick building that houses my pulpit. My church has straight lines, it's regular and reasonable -- a very foolproof building. People don't laugh when they see it.

Not long before the onset of the cancer that finally killed him, King Hussein of Jordan undertook a small mission. He paid a personal visit to the families of some Israelis who had been killed in an Arab terrorist bombing. There was no talk of money or reparations; instead, the king quietly sat with the mourners and by his calm demeanor, unhurried manner and undivided attention was able to convey a sense of solidarity with them across the Arab-Israeli divide. The reaction of the relatives was out of proportion to the simplicity of the gesture. By all accounts, they were deeply moved by Hussein's expressions of personal involvement in their loss. Their grief had been acknowledged. More memorably still, it had been acknowledged and shared by a king.

The star of Diana, princess of Wales, has faded since her funeral -- a funeral that was watched by 2 billion people. As we have learned more about her obsessions and failings, many have felt a little embarrassed about their initial reaction to her death. Among media people, there has been a lot of second-guessing about excessive coverage. Still, in all the hundreds of hours of television and the thousands of words written, I never heard anyone specifically identify the factor that I believe accounts for much of the extraordinary public outpouring. The various talking heads spoke of her beauty, accessibility, modernity, vulnerability, compassion and common touch -- but no one identified the combination that made Diana exceptional.

Many famous people have engaged in charitable activities. Many have elicited near fanatical devotion because of their beauty talent, personal chemistry, or skill in creating a media image -- Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jacqueline Onassis and Eva Peron come to mind. None of these, however, were able to combine in one person what Diana did.

In the princess of Wales, majesty stooped. That was the key to her power. Even with his skills as empathizer-in-chief, President Clinton cannot convey what Diana or even Hussein could, because a president is not royalty. What Diana symbolized was this: she was seen as one who was willing to lay aside princely prerogatives to be with those who are downtrodden.

It may seem to be trivializing Hussein, a man of great accomplishments, to mention him alongside the unformed and often frivolous Diana; indeed, the two are not really comparable. I bring them together here simply to show that in spite of our democratic instincts, the royal archetype is undimmed in the collective unconscious. It is no denigration of Hussein to observe that Diana, because she bore the aura of the British monarchy along with her own, was uniquely able to match her image as royal princess with readiness to be with those who have no status in the world.

Many who saw the video of her visit to Angola would agree that Diana's ability to communicate her concern for the wretched of the earth took the breath away. I read the testimony of an American physician who had accompanied her on hospital rounds where there were no cameras. He said she did not hesitate to caress and linger beside patients with disfigurements and symptoms that were distressing even to medical personnel. That capacity the doctor emphasized, cannot be faked. When it s offered generously and unstintingly by a beautiful young woman who is the embodiment of everyone's image of a fairy princess, the impact is astonishing.

Much of the grief for the princess was neurotic, like human behavior in general. My point has to do with the power of symbols. Diana was certainly in instinctive media genius. But she also knew how to use her immense candlepower for the good of the ordinary people. This is the right use of royalty.

These thoughts are meant to suggest that the feast day of Christ the King presents us with an extraordinary opportunity. We were speaking of archetypes; something greater than archetypes is here. We were speaking of the strength of symbolism; something stronger than symbolism is here. If it is true that there is unique power in the combination of royalty and stooping, then there has never been anything comparable to the errand of the Son of God. In Jesus Christ we see the one "who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be clutched at, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave" (Phil. 2:6).

The problem with much of our Christology nowadays is that we have concentrated so much on the stooping that we have lost sight of the royalty. More than half of the biblical message is thereby eliminated, for it is the combination that counts. Thus we read in Exodus 3, "Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. Then the Lord said, 'I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them."

The God so terrible that we must hide our faces from his resplendence is the same God who has come down to deliver his people in their extremity. That is the secret. The Son who "sits upon his glorious throne with all the nations gathered before him" (Matt. 25:31-2) is the same one who, at the very apex of his cosmic power, reveals that the universe turns upon a cup of water given to the littlest ones in his name. An outpouring of the love of our hearts toward this king will therefore transcend the merely neurotic. Acts of mercy toward his little ones are vindicated already in the court of heaven, because they are taken up into the divine life of the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us.

Blaise Pascal evokes a sense of existential dread in this famous line: "The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me. " In his poem For the Time Being: A .Christmas Oratorio, W. H. Auden pictures the human being forsaken in a blank, fathomless universe:

The wrath of God is a principal theme of the pre-Advent and Advent seasons. There is no more challenging task in theology than interpreting it. Pascal and Auden both interpret it as silence -- Deus absconditus. C. S. Lewis wrote, after his wife's death, "Where is God?. . . go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slamming in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence."

The wrath of God can be viewed as silence from a quite different perspective. I have a newspaper clipping in my file that dates back to the apartheid era in South Africa. Desmond Tutu, then Anglican bishop of Johannesburg, had just returned from one of his trips abroad where he openly sought support for the fight against the racial policies of his country At an airport news conference in Johannesburg, he declared that he was not at all worried about his passport being confiscated yet again. Having one's passport taken away is not the worst thing that can happen to a Christian, he said. Even being killed is not the worst thing. "For me, one of the worst things would be if I woke up one day and said to people, 'I think apartheid is not so bad.' For me, this would be worse than death."

This is surely a clue to understanding the wrath of God. A god who remained silent in the face of atrocities would not be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob or the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It has been given to Bishop Tutu more than almost anyone else in our time to be the human voice and face of the God who has not remained silent.

Other governments, other voices have chosen silence. The Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification, for example, was so hamstrung by the military that it continued the same policies of cover-up and denial that gave the Guatemalan civil war its sinister character in the first place. In Chile, General Pinochet was allowed to slip away to England to enjoy teas with Baroness Thatcher.

Voices have been heard, however, from the underground. The families of the Chilean "disappeared" are voiceless no longer. A retired Argentine captain confessed to dropping as many as 2,000 political prisoners from airplanes.

Argentine President Menem, afraid of more revelations, has urged former military executioners and torturers to confess in private to priests so that the country can move forward.

It is not enough. Bishop Tutu has shown the world that the only way forward is the way through. With all its faults and limitations, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was able to demonstrate that although they were determined to seek reconciliation and move into the future, justice had not been abrogated. As Tutu has said to the victims, "Something seriously evil happened to you, and the nation believes you." Thus the wrath of God against injustice broke a terrible silence.

The lectionary designers omitted the vital center of Psalm 85:

A failure of imagination was at work in this excision. Jettisoning the references to God's wrath deprives us of the good news that his wrath has been turned away. The omissions have robbed us of an opportunity to understand that righteousness and peace cannot kiss until "the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against. . . those who by their wickedness suppress the truth" (Rom. 1:19). Ask Bishop Tutu.

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 and other sordid "-gates," he came proclaiming God's imminent judgment on the venality of governments, the corruption of police departments, the selfishness of the rich, the self-righteousness of the religious establishment. In the end, he himself was executed without a trial, thus becoming the precursor of the One whose death signified the final judgment of God on all the powers and principalities.

There are cover-ups of all sorts: families that will not acknowledge the alcoholism that is destroying them, people who are making their loved ones miserable but will not go to a therapist, business partners who cover up for each other. 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.

How strange that in the space of just one week a book reviewer in the New York Times mentions the "frisson-inducing" discovery only nine years ago of a ninth century B.C. stele referring to the "House of David," thus issuing "a stony rebuff to those who think that David is a mythical figure," while another reviewer, writing about Thomas Cahill's new book, raised seriously the question of whether the historical person called Jesus of Nazareth ever existed. These are the challenges that Christian interpreters and believers must meet every day now. Which of our scriptures are to be regarded as "historical" and which as "mythical"? Raymond Brown wrote amusingly in a footnote of being called on the phone every Christmas by reporters who wanted to know "what really happened." Brown would reply, one imagines with some asperity, that they would do well to ask instead what the real message of the stories was.

Yet another reviewer (same week!), this time assessing a TV movie about Jesus, complains of the "greeting-card sentiment" that permeates the script. She writes that the movie is a lot "better when it sticks to scripture." She cites the scene when John the Baptist "announces convincingly, 'Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world." It's encouraging to get this kind of support for the unique simplicity and grandeur of the Bible. Even as the reviewer urges the writer of the teleplay to stick to The Script, however, the point is again being made: John and Jesus are purely literary presences. This could be worse -- they could be ignored as having no presences at all -- but it makes the job of believing interpreter more difficult. How to distinguish between what the church says and what the literary critics say?

What really happened? Did the prophet Nathan really say to the "historical David" that his throne would be established forever? Shall we settle on David as a historical presence and Jesus as a purely literary one? Surely it would make more sense to have it the other way round. Isn't it easier by far to conclude that David is a mythical King Arthur type than it is to believe that the human religious imagination would dream up a crucified Messiah?

That is not a rhetorical question. Perhaps one of the problems is that many people who are tossing off opinions about these matters do not realize what crucifixion was as a mode of execution. It is flatly inconceivable that anyone would invent a Son of God who was consigned by church and state alike to die the most extreme form of death by degradation and dehumanization known to the ancient world. We need not waste time on debating Jesus' actual existence. The question that is up for grabs is: Who was "crucified under Pontius Pilate"? Everybody who speaks of Jesus of Nazareth, thinks of him, prays in his name or (increasingly) uses his name as an expletive, will be taking a position with regard to this, whether they consciously realize it or not.

The angel Gabriel, according to St. Luke, burst into the life of an ordinary young woman without permission, terrifying her. Every angelic appearance in scripture causes fear, because the angel mediates the searing intrusion of the living God. But the angel said, "Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He... shall be called the Son of the Highest, and the Lord God shall give him the throne of his father David. . . and of his kingdom there shall be no end." Is this literary truth? mythological truth? historical truth? or no truth at all? What really happened, and does that matter?

The one thing that matters, I think, is that we ask ourselves about the single most fundamental affirmation in the story. Did God act? That question has two facets: Did God act? and did God act? Do we see here an event set in motion by spiritually precocious human beings with divine aspirations, or do we see the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? And second, do we see a God at a remove, watching over events as they transpire, or do we see here the definitive entrance of God upon the world stage as he reclaims lost human nature for himself? If a stele were to be found in Bethlehem saying, "Here was born Jesus bar-Joseph ...," would that make a difference? Wouldn't most of us still want to convert the story into a pretty, painterly scene of an angel and a maiden, suitable for ornament?

Karl Barth wrote that the church's creedal affirmation of the virginal conception is "the doctrine on guard at the door of the mystery of Christmas." Matthew and Luke have both posted guards at the entrances to their Gospels: "Danger, God at work." Are these purely literary devices? Did it "really happen"? If not, what do we need to know?

And the angel said, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, your kinswoman Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son. . . For with God nothing will be impossible." As the millennium turns, this Christmastide will be another blessed opportunity for bearing witness unashamedly to the church's ancient faith that very God of very God really happened here. "The Incarnation is like a dagger thrust into the weft of human history" (Edwyn Hoskyns). Let not the celebrated literary power of the stories themselves obscure this truth: "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."

The first three Sundays of Advent speak of an adult Christ and the future reign of God not of an infant born in the past. Only on the fourth Sunday of Advent do we turn back to the event of annunciation, and then on Christmas Eve to the birth of the Christ child.

It must have been like that for the earliest Christians: at first they were entirely focused on the resurrection, the gift of the Spirit and the eagerly expected Second Coming; then, as the time lengthened, they began to reflect with wonder and no little curiosity about the divine origin and human beginnings of their Lord. It may be helpful for us to remember this sequence as we try to make sense of Christmas in view of the multicultural "holiday" that now threatens to swallow up the Christian holy day. The lectionaries for Advent and Christmas reveal that the adult Messiah is primary. The climactic reading for the three services of Christmas is not the nativity from Luke but the prologue of John: "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." The numinous quality of this text will not be lost on children as they grow, but it clearly does not fit our idea of a reading designed for them.

Many Christians, especially those from a tradition like mine that observes Advent scrupulously, not decorating the church or singing carols until Christmas Eve, find themselves playing two games at once during this season. On the one hand there is the usual frantic shopping, wreath hanging, tree trimming, partygoing and overeating. On the other hand there is the deepening mood of Advent, which calls us to a mature, clear-sighted and steadfast faith. A similar split in our sensibility is apparent in Christian bookstores and church gift shops where an austere Byzantine icon will be displayed next to an angel that looks like a Barbie doll. Christmas cards with medieval illustrations sit cheek-by-jowl with designs of Santas playing golf:

It seems to me that this aesthetic confusion contributes to theological immaturity. Grown-up people seem to become addled at this season as they try to recapture their lost childhoods. One of our leading mail-order companies put this verse on its Christmas shipping boxes a couple of years ago:

"May you find among the gifts / Spread beneath your tree / The most welcome gift of all / The child you used to be." A typical greeting card says, "Backward, turn backward, 0 Time, in your flight / Make me a child again, just for tonight!"

Harmless, you say. But in a culture like ours, where parents have very little time to spend with their children, and where an obsessive pursuit of youth has caused an 800 percent increase in cosmetic surgical procedures in ten years, a focus on becoming childlike at Christmas seems guaranteed to skew the message of the incarnation.

One of the most dramatic changes in my own denomination is the shift away from the adult midnight service on Christmas Eve to a wildly popular "family" service at an earlier hour, which by its very nature cannot offer much in the way of a sermon or more challenging music. I do not want to be misunderstood here; Christmas ritual can indeed be beneficial for the developing faith of children. However, if the children get the idea that Christmas is entirely for them, that there are no privileges reserved for their maturity it does not seem likely that their faith will unfold in the direction of Good Friday.

A famous painting of the annunciation in the Cloisters in New York shows the embryonic Jesus slipping down a shaft of sunlight toward Mary -- and he is already carrying his cross. This is the hidden message of the manger. A Christmas card that I have cherished for many years features a black-and-white woodcut showing Mary and the baby in the stable -- and in the background the silhouette of a devastated city with the shell of a burned window, twisted and bent, but unmistakably shaped like a cross.

Reading familiar biblical passages in their context is sometimes startling. Such is the case with one of the three Isaiah texts appointed for Christmas:

"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the one who brings glad tidings. . . Break forth together into singing, you waste places of Jerusalem; for the Lord has comforted his people. . ." This rhapsodic passage moves directly without a break into the Suffering Servant text associated with Good Friday: "His appearance was marred beyond human semblance. . . he was despised and rejected." We may not linger at the crib.

In these stress-filled times, virtually all of us, as we get older, will seek relief by visiting, in our imaginations, a childhood Christmas of impossible perfection. These longings are powerful and can easily deceive us into grasping for a new toy, new car, new house, new spouse to fill up the empty spaces where unconventional love belongs. Our longings are powerful, our needs bottomless, our cravings insatiable, our follies numberless. For those who cannot or will not look deeply into the human condition, sentiment and nostalgia can masquerade as strategies for coping quite successfully for a while -- but because it is all based on illusion and unreality, it cannot be a lasting foundation for generations to come.

Christmas, someone said, is "the feast of Nicene dogma." That concept is not easy to teach or warm one's hands over without considerable effort, but it is not impossible to convey even to young children the sense that the real meaning of Christmas lies precisely in the combination of magical ceremonies and the grown-up message that in the very midst of our human selfishness, the waylaying love of God has broken through to us unconditionally.