“Avatar,” used here to mean a virtual representation of a computer user online or their player character in a game, has been around since 1979, though it exploded into common usage, at least among geeks like me, with Neal Stephenson’s highly influential 1992 cyberpunk novel “Snow Crash,” the same work in which Stephenson first coined the term “metaverse.”
Avatar would see a second surge in usage with the 2009 film of that name, which has grossed $2.8 billion since release, become the basis for a section of a Disney theme park in Florida, and will be followed with much-delayed sequels beginning this December.
This could lead you to believe that the word avatar is very modern, a neologism. It is, in fact, very ancient, derived from Sanskrit. In the massive and rich mythology of India, an avatar is an incarnation of a god, not exactly the same as Christ as one incarnation of Triune personhood, but with some similarities, the idea of a god who walks among humans and is, in one sense, mortal.
Avatar is most often used in association with a particular Hindu god, Vishnu, and with two important avatars of Vishnu, Krishna, a central figure in the Mahabharata, and Rama, the titular character in the Ramayana, the two great and lengthy epics of Indian literature.
Hindus believe that Vishnu has incarnated nine times, had nine avatars, though in a huge and diverse country like India, there is no unanimity about exactly who those avatars have been, with some sects even including Buddha on the list.
Each avatar has appeared at a point in civilization where things were dire and humankind needed a “reset,” a return to decency and righteousness, at the end of an era, or a “yuga” in Sanskrit. All sects agree that the tenth and final avatar of Vishnu, called Kalki, has not yet come, but that when Kalki comes, it will be the end of the current and somewhat bleak era, the Kali Yuga. In Sanskrit, ten avatars translates as dashavatara.
The idea that Vishnu will come again to set a corrupt and violent world right should sound familiar, for it is not unlike the traditional Christian dogma of the second coming of Christ.
John of Patmos, most certainly not the same John who was a disciple, looked out at a precarious moment for the new religious movement, and offered a violent fever dream of hope he called a revelation, this idea that rather than being annihilated, the Jesus movement would triumph through divine intervention, a new heaven and new earth created that would be rightly ordered, with divine violence against those who opposed Christianity.
The “Day of the Lord,” in the Hebrew prophetic tradition, in the teachings of Jesus, and in the imagination of early Christians like John of Patmos, was not some wimpy vanishing as the righteous disappeared into thin air, their gas-guzzling SUVs left idling on the freeway. The Day of the Lord was dramatic and terrifying, a war between good and evil waged in every town and every household. None of these holy people, prophets and messiahs, thought that aligning humankind to God’s creativity and justice was going to be easy and low-impact.
I certainly get the desire for divine intervention, the desire to be rescued by God. There are situations where we are truly powerless, from the drunk admitting that they cannot get sober alone to the patient facing the final journey.
The psalmist in today’s reading feels besieged, calls out for divine rescue, as is so often the case in the psalms. If we are to take the traditionalist view, that in these very personal psalms we are hearing the voice of King David, then the suffering is clearly deserved, for we should not forget that David was a dirtbag of the highest order, a king who used his power to have a loyal military officer killed so he could steal the man’s wife.
Still, David is the exemplar for Hebrew sovereigns, and his would-be and eternal successor would cry out for divine rescue of his own in the Garden of Gethsemane, “take this cup away from me…” though Jesus, in the story we tell, accepts that victory lies on the other side of what looks like utter defeat.
But are we really asking for magic? Do we expect God to drop manna from the sky? Are we willing to accept a god that heals some while letting others suffer? Because to be honest with you, that sort of arbitrary god doesn’t feel like love to me. It feels more like a monster.
Oh, I believe in miracles. I believe in completely inexplicable outcomes. I just believe they don’t fall out of the sky, are not produced because of the quality or quantity of prayer, don’t believe in a puppet master god.
My theology is best illustrated by the guy who waits on the roof for God to rescue him from the flood, and having ultimately drowned, asks God why he was allowed to die. To which God answers, “Well, I sent a meteorologist to warn you the flood was coming, a deputy sheriff to instruct you to evacuate, and a boat to rescue you after the water got too high. I sent help, you just didn’t take it.”
For just as Christ can be found in the hungry, the poor, the imprisoned, so is Christ found in the firefighter running into the building, and in the lab where a scientist is decoding the inexplicable miracle of life and creating an mRNA vaccine to mitigate a virus that has jumped from one animal species to another and is killing humans.
Christ is found when we act to see that God’s justice is done, justice that is restorative, not retributive, for despite the fever dream of John of Patmos and the hateful Armageddon of men like Pat Robertson and Mike Pompeo, the God we encounter in scripture is the god of second-chances, of victory despite the appearance of defeat, of the elderly woman getting out of the boat clinging to her cat having been rescued from the flood, and despite losing everything, loves and is loved.
Give us this day our daily bread? God gave us sun and rain and grain and enough brain to know how to store it and turn it into useful things like bread and beer.
Maybe your theology requires divine intervention. I get it. We are finite creatures and just self-aware enough to sometimes struggle against our finitude. And there are things we really cannot control, like volcanos exploding under the sea, and a virus jumping species, and that arbitrariness can be scary. There are evils that truly are too big for one person to impact alone, like Putin and Hobby Lobby, those who seek power by scapegoating others, through violence and hatred.
But together, we can make a difference, against hatred and Putin and viruses, can predict floods and evacuate the vulnerable and stop building houses in the path of rising seas and stop pouring carbon into the atmosphere.
We can stop getting in bed with tyrants because it is profitable for corporations and stop pretending that inflation is because of Putin’s war on Ukraine or Covid-related supply chain issues.
We can stop pretending that Florida’s “don’t say gay” law and bans on teaching critical race theory are anything other than what they are, attempts to insure that black-identified people of color, women, and queers lose the place at the table they fought so hard to claim and are once again silenced.
God is not coming to rescue us in a violent “Day of the Lord.” Kalki is not going to create a righteous new age for humankind. This is the only yuga we get. The holy has given us all we need, and repeatedly opened our eyes to see the mysterious and miraculous, moved the hearts of humans so that we might proclaim and celebrate, might discover and love, might dance and weep. Look around you. Creation is a giant flashing neon sign that says “God is good.” The wind in the trees and the silence in the snowfall are sirens calling us to attention. And the Word, the ancient stories we tell, and the one living Word that stands at the center of them all in our religious tradition, are constant reminders that, aligned with the powerful force of love, we can do almost anything. Amen.