Finding God in our needy neighbor
Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself, &c.
-The Collect for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
Dear Friends,
Two questions:
1. What does God’s “daily visitation” look like?
2. In what way does God “purify our conscience?”
My initial answer to the first question was to equate God’s “daily visitation” with our “quiet times:” those moments when we are alone with God in prayer and Scripture reading. Meeting God in his Word and in prayer is very important. It helps to shape who we are, how we feel, and what we think — so much is being thrown at us and fashioning us each day that countering this “liturgy of the world” with a “liturgy of the Word” is a very useful and formative activity.
But I don’t think that daily quiet times are what this Collect is all about — otherwise our relationship with God might be exclusively individualistic. I think the “daily visitation” of God includes what Jesus talks about in the parable of “The Sheep and the Goats.” We read that passage a few weeks ago on “Christ the King” Sunday. In it, we were told that in welcoming the hungry, the sick, the naked, the stranger, and the imprisoned we are welcoming God. So more than just encountering God in our daily quiet times, we also meet him in our needy neighbor. And if God’s “daily visitation” is often in the form of our neighbor, God also “purifies our conscience” not simply in meeting us in prayer and Bible reading, but in and through the other.
In her work Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, Fleming Ruteldge says that years ago in Grand Central Station she decided to be altruistic. She felt good about herself for buying a sandwich for one of the many homeless folks who, in former days, lined the terminal. She asked the first person she saw if they’d take the sandwich, the man declined. She asked a second, third, and fourth and they all refused too. At this point, Fleming was feeling foolish and angry. “To hell with them,” she thought, and began to leave the station, until a random homeless woman walked up to her and said, “I’ll take the sandwich.”
When she got home to her apartment that night, Fleming realized that she had been given a gift that day. Ironically, in the end it wasn’t she who had been generous, but a “helpless” homeless person had been altruistic to her. Fleming’s heart had almost completely closed — her generosity very nearly hardened — until she was saved by God’s visitation in the form of this “needy neighbor.” She was purified by a person she’d regularly ignore.
Fleming’s story, my friends, is an illustration of God meeting us by his “daily visitation,” “purifying our conscience” to create a “mansion” within us. Not closing us off to the world and our neighbor, but opening us up so that God might make a home for himself within us.
My friends, this openness to our neighbor is “the abundant life” that Jesus came to bring. Only we can’t manufacture it on our own. (It’s why we ask for it in this prayer!) We need the one “who raises the dead, and calls into existence the things that do not exist” to bring it about in us. May the Lord have his way in us, so that we might no longer be turned in on ourselves, but opened up to the world.
Grace and Peace,
Ben
