4th Sunday of Advent Year B

The 4th Sunday of Advent Year B December 20, 2020 This week, I learned of a spiritual construct that I’ve never heard of before. I am now calling it Holy Indifference. I was listening to a podcast with a spiritual director and writer named Ruth Haley Barton, and she was talking about this spiritual gift of indifference and the importance of indifference in personal and communal discernment and in accepting God’s will for your life. But here’s the thing. Often when we talk about indifference, we mean apathy; not being too hot or cold about particular issues. Indifference often has the suggestion of a coldness or an uncaring. But Ruth Haley Barton’s definition of indifference is not apathy; it’s actually very different. She says, “In the language of spiritual formation [this holy indifference] speaks to being indifferent [or not attached] to anything but the will of God, so it means that we’re indifferent [or not attached] to matters of our own comfort or safety; we’re not thinking so much about ego gratification; we’re giving up appearances. We’re indifferent to that. We’re indifferent [or not attached] to our own pleasure, and we’re even indifferent [or not attached] to what our own personal preferences are, and what it is we think we want. It is a state of wide-openness to God in which we are free from undue attachment to outcomes, and we have the capacity to relinquish anything that might keep us from choosing for God and God’s will and God’s loving plan. Outside of Jesus himself, Mary is the clearest expression of this spiritual indifference.”i So, let’s look at our readings for today because they give us two different glimpses, one of someone who is not practicing holy indifference and one who is. First, we have King David in our Old Testament reading for today. David has this great idea that now that he is established as king in Israel, he is going to build a house for the Lord. He gets buy in for his plan from the prophet Nathan, but then God lets them know God’s indifference to this plan in a lovely, playful way. “Thus says the Lord: Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, "Why have you not built me a house of cedar?" David’s plan is somewhat self-serving (but cloaked in piety, which is a temptation we all face) because if he builds God a house, then that will not only confer some status on the king who houses the Lord, but it also means that David can always know exactly where to find God when David gets in a pinch. But God reminds David that up until this point, God has been at large, loose and wild and free, working in the world. God does not want to inhabit a temple or a building but rather God wants to inhabit a people. And we get this, don’t we? We who have had to struggle with not being able to come into this space, this building, where we are accustomed to connecting with God. But this is an important reminder for all of us that God is not and will not be bound to this building or any building. One of my colleagues was talking about this and about how she has grown and changed in her faith over the years. “For many years,” she said, “the church and the liturgy were the container for my faith. It was like going to the gym. I would go to the gym to work out. I would go to church to pray and to work on my faith.” Now, she quotes another writer who says that “faith is in the mutable and messy processes of our lives.”ii My friend is learning to look for God in the change, in the mess of her life, and that has shaped her faith in ways she could not have imagined before. And then there’s Mary. She offers the model of holy indifference for us in her response to the angel’s perplexing news: “let it be unto me according to your word.” In that one prayer of indifference, Mary shows that she is willing to embrace the invitation of God, even though it is going to completely blow up the plans that she and her parents have for her life—marriage to a good man who will take care of her. In embracing God’s invitation, in living into that holy indifference, Mary sacrifices her own vision of her life and gives it up with complete trust of God and God’s work in the world. In and through her indifference, she puts herself completely at God’s mercy, and she seems completely composed about that. One of my other friends talked about how normally this week, she would be preparing her guest room for her mom to come and stay. But because her mom isn’t traveling this year, her guestroom is full of so many things: her husband’s guitars, all of her supplies for her knitting, so many other aspects of the detritus of their lives that have accumulated in that room over the year. She noticed that our collect for the day has us praying that God will purify our consciences by God’s daily visitation so that when Christ comes, he may find in us “a mansion prepared for himself…” and my friend confessed that she would most frequently maybe invite Christ into the cluttered guest room of her heart to stay when it was convenient but that she didn’t think that she had made the room of a spacious and lovely mansion for him where he could stay always. And I resonate with that, too. For me, I think it is because I am nowhere near where Mary was. Most of the time, I do not practice holy indifference. I struggle to hand my life over to God and to relinquish my attachment to my preferences, my comfort, my ego, and what I think I want. But fortunately, Ruth Haley Barton reminded me in her podcast that coming to indifference isn’t like flipping a switch. There is a process to coming to indifference to anything but the will of God, and we are not alone in that process; for Mary it was the angel who accompanied her; for us it is the Holy Spirit and, I would say, the communion of the saints and all believers—the Church that isn’t the building. The first step in this process is to pray the prayer for indifference; this means acknowledging our attachments, our preferences, our commitment to keeping up appearances and our egos and asking God to free us from all that. It has been eye opening for me this week to realize that I really need to do that work around Christmas and what that experience is going to be and feel like for us this year. So, your invitation this week is to join me in praying the prayer for holy indifference, for an openness to God’s will and the willingness to embrace God’s invitation. If you find that you have attained indifference at some point, then your prayer may shift to a prayer of indifference: “let it be unto me according to your word.” If you are struggling with the connection of your faith with this building or in gathering together, then I invite you to not only pray for holy indifference but also to begin looking for God who will never be contained to this building but who is found out loose and wild and at work in the world and in the “mutable and messy process of our lives.” i. From the podcast Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership. The Fourth Sunday of Advent Year B ii. Wiman, Christian. My Bright Abyss: Meditations on a Modern Believer.