Perhaps you are familiar with the words below. They are sung frequently by choirs during Advent, adapted to music of the 16th-century Italian composer Giovanni Perluigi da Palestrina. A “responsory” is a set form, varying in content from one liturgical occasion to the next, from the daily office as it has evolved in the Western Catholic tradition.
I look from afar:
and lo, I see the power of God coming,
and a cloud covering the whole earth.
Go ye out to meet him and say:
Tell us, art thou he that should come
to reign over thy people Israel?
High and low, rich and poor, one with another.
Go ye out …
Hear, O thou shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a sheep.
Tell us …
Stir up thy strength, O Lord, and come.
To reign …
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.
I look …
It was one of the casualties of Archbishop Cranmer’s editing scissors when he assembled the first versions of the Book of Common Prayer, but the Church of England’s new Common Worship resource has restored it. Matins is one of the seven occasions of daily corporate prayer as practiced by Benedictine monastic communities (merged with others to become Morning Prayer in the Anglican inheritance), and this text is the Responsory for Matins on Advent Sunday.
Advent is a season of waiting, hoping, and preparing. But it’s too easy to see this only in terms of “getting ready for Christmas.” The Matin Responsory sounds a much deeper tone. It’s about yearning, desperate yearning. “Tell us, art thou he that should come?” We’ve seen a sign in the distance. We can’t quite make it out clearly, but it looks like something wonderful. It looks like “the power of God coming.” Dare we hope? So we “go out to meet him” and ask, “Is it really you? Are you the One, the One who will reign over us, both ‘high and low, rich and poor?’ The One who will be our Shepherd-King?”
The universal human condition—for both high and low, rich and poor—is that we are mired in brokenness. The insider term Christians use for this reality is a short three-letter word: sin. More appropriately, perhaps: Sin. Not “sins”—individual acts of omission or commission that run afoul of a rule, a statute, a commandment, but something on a more cosmic scale. The upper-case S evokes this cosmic dimension—something, a force, that holds all of us in sway, and is larger than any of us.
We are all, each of us, both victims and perpetrators of Sin. Tyranny and exploitation are virtually hard-wired into the large patterns of human social interaction. Injustice and cruelty are endemic, systemic, baked in, even without the overtly malicious intent of any single individual. None of us can escape being victimized by these forces. But neither can we escape complicity with them, as victims who are also perpetrators.
For example, it is widely claimed that a competitive free-market economy benefits the great majority of its members – most that is, but not all. When the music stops, some, through no fault of their own, will not make it back to an empty chair. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Those who thereby “lose,” with their contribution to the whole process, make it possible, in effect, for everyone else to “win.” Among the “winners,” those who are attentive will understand that, however hard they may have worked, they have not borne the full cost of their status. One of an informed conscience, then, will be aware that justice requires society to make whole those whose “loss” enabled the collective wealth. Even in our individual safety and security, we cannot plausibly deny our solidarity with everyone else—solidarity as both victims and perpetrators of the cosmic force of Sin.
Complicating matters further, we have “no power in ourselves to help ourselves” (Collect for the Third Sunday in Lent). Left to our own devices, and to the natural course of events, we are doomed, both in this world and in the world to come. Cosmic Sin divides us from one another. It underwrites racial prejudice, discrimination based on social class or economic or educational status—or, for that matter, tastes in music or clothing. Such things maintain walls of separation between human beings who are created in and bear the image of God.
We have Cosmic Sin to thank for whatever conflicts there are between the generations in our society. At the same time, individual sins, the specific bad things we do and good things we don’t do, enslave and enfeeble us. We surrender daily to our basest fears and our most elemental appetites. We are, in concrete terms, “divided and enslaved by sin” and we understandably yearn for the One who will free us and bring us together “under his most gracious rule” (Collect for the Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King). “Stir up thy strength, O Lord, and come.” This is the cry of the collective human heart, and Advent is its native habitat. The Matin responsory for Advent pushes all the right buttons. It pulls us into the primordial recesses of the human desire for wholeness and deliverance, for health and salvation.
As Anglicans and others experience this text, set to exquisite choral music, it is a thing of surpassing beauty, and, by repeated association over many years, an effective harbinger of the Advent season. In me, it incites a virtually Pavlovian response. It meets us at a much deeper level than opening doors on an Advent calendar or counting down the days until Christmas.
Rather, it is something earthier, grittier, more visceral. It gives voice to the most profound longings of every human heart, that maybe Someone will do something about this mess we call human existence. Maybe there will be an opportunity for us to lay aside both our victimhood and our perpetrator guilt. Maybe the realization of our solidarity with all “winners” and all “losers” will descend on us as “a cloud covering the whole earth.” In this marvelous Advent text are the seeds of true hope.
The Rt. Rev. Daniel Martins is retired Bishop of the Diocese of Springfield in the Episcopal Church.
