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November 2001
One Missionary’s Advent in Brazil
Dear Friends,
One preacher says: "Let us pray: Thy Kingdom come!"
Another preacher says: "The Kingdom’s here!"
What are we going to do with this?
Advent as a liturgical season is no great thing among Brazilian
evangelicals, because of a certain indifference to everything
liturgical. But the meaning of Advent is very much with us. The
prayer, "Thy Kingdom Come!" is, for me, at the heart
of Advent, which is all about something or someone coming. That
prayer can be very Brazilian. We sing it, from time to time, in
a musical form
called a "Baião," based on African-Brazilian
traditions from the state of Bahia:
Venha o teu reino, Senhor!
A festa da vida recria!
A nossa esperanza e ardor
Transforma em plena alegria!
Your Kingdom come, Lord!
Create anew the feast which is life!
Our waiting and our burning desire—
Transform them into completed joy!
Then we sing some syllables without meaning—or are they
Alleluias? This is the chorus. The verses refer to signs of the
Kingdom’s absence, such as the distribution of income which
causes some to live in shacks and others in palaces. That’s
Brazilian, all right. There are social conditions that cry out
to high heaven, and we cry out: O God, things need to be different!
I know the United States has social conditions like that, too,
and I don’t know how my brothers and sisters are praying
about them. This song is a joyous prayer, a
looking-forward-to-victory song, a song of joy waiting to be completed.
In the meantime, as the song says, "We have precious seed."
We Christians are always saying that Jesus is the Messiah, but
how Messianic are we? Advent is a time when we try to remember
some
Messianism of the distant past, the time of luminous promises
before Jesus came. It seems to take some imagination on our part.
It takes less imagination in Brazil, because there is a Brazilian
Messianism that is very much a part of the culture. There is a
recent scholarly book about it, entitled When Men Walk Dry, but
much that is in that book is general knowledge among educated
Brazilians. There was Jewish Messianism in medieval Portugal,
which came to influence Christians as well, and then came the
legend of Good King Sebastian, who disappeared on a battlefield
and afterward was expected to return. It got into the spirit of
Catholic Brazil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was
part of the back-country piety that helped to inspire a lay preacher
and his followers who resisted federal
troops in a town named Canudos. The people of Canudos got massacred—and
remembered.
There are Brazilians still working to understand what happened
at Canudos. The Messianism is present today in ways that aren’t
usually spelled out, and don’t need to be, in back-country
political culture, but also in the thinking of some highly sophisticated
theologians. It seems quaint from here to call the Kingdom something
other than "Kingdom," even though I know it makes sense
in the U.S.; some Brazilian Messianists really are monarchists.
In any case, Brazil today is a country where "utopia"
is not a dirty word, where it’s all right to talk about the
way things ought to be, where it’s not silly to dream about
a better world. Subversive, maybe, but not silly.
I hope to be forgiven for writing about this, when there are
others who know a lot more about it than I do. It really is something
that one senses about this country, and I have wanted for a long
time to say something about it, sometime, somehow.
As I write this, Advent of 2001 is around the corner, and I
will give one sermon to poor people, thoroughly non-liturgical
poor people. What shall I do in that sermon? Shall I cry out about
how the world needs to be different? I did that once before and
somehow sensed that this was not what they wanted to hear from
me. It was about that time that some people left that church (where
I had said, "Thy Kingdom Come") for a church where,
for them, the Kingdom comes every Sunday in ecstasy, and praise,
and miracle. Some people
have come back, and I have a second chance with them. I want them
to be Presbyterian, of course, but I can’t ask them to deny
the experience they have had in a neo-Pentecostal church. It seems
to me that I must resist the temptation to say, "Come, Lord
Jesus, we’re desperate!" (even though I feel desperate
enough, sometimes). Something like, "The Lord is come. May
he come again!" is probably closer to the mark. As Jesus
said concerning John the Baptist’s followers, you can’t
fast when the bridegroom is with you.
There’s one more thing, which may be more appropriate in
this letter than it is in the poor people’s pulpit. In the
ministry of Jesus and his disciples, the Kingdom came close to
some people with healing and affirmation (Luke 10:9) and to others
it came as judgment (Luke 10:11). What kind of Kingdom-Coming
are we praying for? Roman Catholics in Brazil pray, "Thy
Kingdom come—to us." This is surely the Kingdom of healing,
affirmation, and utopia. But what about the Kingdom coming to
people who share responsibility for the crying shame of some social
conditions? Not necessarily as eternal punishment but as the kind
of judgment-mirror that tells us what we’re doing? Maybe
that’s already included in our Kingdom-prayer. Right now
I’m praying, "Thy Kingdom come—to all of us."
I welcome responses from my friends about this.
Just a little Aramaic, from my classroom—
Mar – Lord
Marana – Our Lord
Tha – Come!
Maranatha! – Come, Our Lord!
Wishing you a faithful Advent and a blessed Christmas,
Arch Woodruff
The 2001 Mission Yearbook for Prayer and Study, p. 258
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