This year in Advent, I am using one of the ancient O antiphons each Sunday, to deepen our enderstanding of theseason, and of our readings. All this will culminate on the 4th Sunday of Advent, December 18th, when we sing the great Advent hymn "O Come O Come Emmanuel" which includes all seven antiphons. Like most Episcopalians, I was very familiar with that hymn, but unfamiliar with the original context of the antiphons. In 1984 I happened to be in England for part of Advent and Christmas. I arranged to do my annual retreat at Incarnation Priory in Oxford, a convent of the Sisters of the Love of God.

I arrived in mid-afternoon, and soon discovered that this was a contemplative order which spent most of their time in silence. But it was an intense, lively silence that I felt there: it was as if a wonderful party had just concluded and the air was vibrating with good feel˙ings, OR, as if a choir like ours had just finished singing a festive anthem, and the air was vibrating with beauty. Oxford is much farther north than we are, so it was dark by 4:30 in the afternoon. At 5:00 we went into the Chapel, lit only by candles, for Vespers. When the time came to sing the Song of Mary, the Magnificat, I was surprised by the beautiful antiphon which the sisters sang before and after it: "O Wisdom, who issued from the mouth of the Most High, reaching from end to end, ordering all things mightily and tenderly, come, teach us the way of prudence." I understood in that moment that I had heard one of the ancient prayers of the church, in its original setting. Those ancient prayers were one of the sources of the intense and lively silence I felt.

The words of the antiphon express a longing that is probably universal--a longing to understand why the world is the way it is, and a need to know what is the best way to live. Whenever we find ourselves asking, "what can I do to change this situation?" we are in search of wisdom. When the evening news is full of accidents, political scandals and the suffering of the poor, and we ask, "why is life so hard?" we are in search of wisdom. Most especially when our own lives are turned upside down by a loss, or a death, and we ask God forstrength and guidance, we are in search of wisdom. We are hoping to find better answers than chance, or fate, or the superficial antidote of "don't worry be happy". We desperately hope there is a larger picture in which my small drama is a meaningful part. Our longing for wisdom is a search for purpose, order, and truth.

The reading we heard from Isaiah is a response to this longing, given to the Jews in exile in Babylon. God states the message, which is then carried to the prophet by "a voice". On God's behalf, the voice has a message of comfort and consolation, saying that the time of punishment is finished, the penalty is paid twice over, and now God will make a highway in the desert to bring his people home to their own country. The voice called them out into the desert, which God has made a highway for their return home to Judaea.

This is one of the passages in the Bible where we can see three distinct layers of meaning. The first layer is the original historical meaning of the prophecy, given to the exiles in Babylon around 530 B.C. The second layer is the embodiment of the prophecy by John the baptizer: he stood out in the wilderness, preparing the way of the Lord, by calling people to repentance, and baptizing those who did repent. He was explicitly using Isaiah's highway in the desert as a metaphor, so that people would understand that he was a new fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy. And he was also calling them into the desert as a place of renewal and transformation. In the desert, they would be far enough away from Jerusalem, and from the Temple, that they could change their way of thinking. The word repent did not originally mean "confess your sins"; it meant "change your mind" and "see things differently".

The third layer of meaning is the one we may experience when we hear the words of Isaiah and the words of John the baptizer, and take them to heart. When we begin to change our way of thinking, when we turn our backs on the consumer values of our day, and on those internal voices which tell us we are worthless, then we are ready for a new experience of God's presence and guidance. Today we would use the language of spiritual awakening and seeking, or the language of having my heart opened, to describe this experience.

During the first century before the birth of Christ, and the first century after the birth of Christ, there was a great mingling and mixing of peoples, cultures and religions going on in the countries around the Mediterranean. Jews had emigrated to Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece and Rome, and established small Jewish communities in many cities. In their encounter with other philosophies and religions, the Jews sought to explain their own beliefs in ways that would make sense to these Gentiles, and yet be clearly superior. Over against the philosophy of the Greeks, they talked and wrote about the Wisdom of God, through whom the world was created. This was the period when the books of the Apocrypha were written. In the Aprocryphal Book of Sirach, Wisdom says, "I come forth from the mouth of the Most High" (24:3), and in the book of Wisdom, "she reaches mightily from one end of the earth to another, and she orders all things well" (8:1). So Wisdom is the principle of order in creation, coming direclty from the Most High to organize the whole world from one end to another.

Over against the goddess religions of Egypt and Greece, the Jews said, our God has a feminine aspect or manifestation, which we call "Hokmah", Wisdom. In Greek, Hokmah is Sophia, and in Latin, it is Sapientia. The Jews proposed a different role for Wisdom, that of "passing into holy souls, and making them friends of God" (7:27) This means that human beings who are searching for a deeper understanding of life, for wisdom with a lower case w, may actualy find, or be found by, the Wisdom of God, with a capital W, who is searching for those holy souls to receive her teaching. Wisdom asks her disciples to serve as messengers or ambassadors to others. One of those ambassadors was Jesus son of Sirach, who wrote his book about 180 BC; today this book is usually called Sirach, but in older Bibles it is called Ecclesiasticus. I t hink it is quite likely that John the baptizer was another ambassador of Wisdom, sent as the voice of Wisdom calling people to prepare their hearts. Although John was a strange character, a homeless fellow living off locusts and wild honey, his preaching drew people from miles away. When they heard his message, they wanted to be reconciled to God, and stepped forward to receive his baptism for repentance. Or to use the language of wisdom, John made many friends of God out in the desert.

The question for you and me today, is whether the voice of wisdom which caused John to preach repentance, has some meaning for us? Both as priest and as psychologist, I say YES: none of us are perfect yet, and from time to time, we all do and say hurtful things. We have a great tendency to ignore our sins, to pretend that we had no choice, and to justify our behavior by reference to the sins of others. So let us accept John's message, recognizing that we need to repent just as much, but for different reasons, as the people of Judaea and Jerusalem did. When we say the general confession later in today's service, let us say in our hearts, "I am sorry, Lord", and name specific things we have done wrong. And then let us hear, loud and clear, God's absolution and forgiveness.

The voice of wisdom calls us to prepare for God's coming, not only by repentance, but also by opening our hearts to God's presence. I think the word prepare, in this context, has the particular meaning of : expect something new, some action of God different from anything you have known. For John's listeners, that specific meaning was pointing toward a different kind of Messiah than they had learned to expect.

What might it mean for us, 2000 years later, to expect some action of God different from anything we have known? It would mean we would have to give up some of the ideas and assumptions we have. For example, we could give up the idea that God's activity in human history ended with the resurrection, or the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost. And we could give up the assumption that God prefers to act in powerful technicolor displays like rainbows and burning bushes. Most especially, we could give up the assumption that God is too great, or too busy, to hear my prayer, or to answer it. If we gave up those ideas, then we would have room, have space in our hearts, for the thought that God may need our cooperation to answer the prayers of some other people. God may need us to be the voice of wisdom that brings hope, or makes peace, or gives love.

Today's O antiphon asks Wisdom to teach us the way of prudence. The word prudence has the connotation of doing the safe traditional thing. The original meaning, I am sure, is to teach us wisdom's way, which invites us to recognize God's presence and action in unexpected situations.   Amen