If God Would Come

Isaiah 64:1-9

Advent 1

December 3, 2017
William G. Carter

    O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,

       so that the mountains would quake at your presence—

     as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—

     to make your name known to your adversaries,

       so that the nations might tremble at your presence!

    When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect,

       you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.

    From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived,

     no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him.

   You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways.

     But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.

   We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.

     We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

   There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you;

     for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.

   Yet (“nevertheless”), O LORD, you are our Father;

       we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.

   Do not be exceedingly angry, O LORD, and do not remember iniquity forever.

       Now consider, we are all your people.

One of my favorite Christmas carols is a song that we don’t sing much anymore. The opening stanza goes this way:

     God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.

     Remember Christ our savior was born on Christmas Day

     To save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray…

I’m sure the hymnal editors have good reasons for leaving this one out of our hymnal. For one thing, it’s an invitation for gentlemen to rest in God’s merriment, and maybe the gentle women feel like they are left out. For another thing, the Christmas carol also mentions Satan, who is an unpopular figure for all kinds of reasons. Nobody wants to give the devil his due, especially in December.

But I wonder if there’s a deeper reason why the song has fallen out of favor. This is a song that declares that gentlemen have gone astray. If you’ve been paying attention to the news, a lot of gentlemen have been going astray. And it’s awkward and uncomfortable, to say the least.

An early edition of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” was published in 1833, about ten years before Charles Dickens quoted the first line in his famous story, “A Christmas Carol.” In some ways, that favorite holiday tale is rooted in the words of this holiday song: Ebenezer Scrooge is full of dismay. He despises the merry gentleman in their tall top hats, and chases away a scruffy kid who sings the tune at his keyhole.

And if you  watch or read “A Christmas Carol” this holiday season, ponder it as an exploration of how far the world has gone astray – not just Scrooge, but all the rest of us, too.

That’s how the song describes it: “to save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray.” The carol doesn’t distinguish: English gentlemen in top hats, properly dressed women in church, scruffy carolers – all have gone astray.

Look – I bring this up because of Isaiah’s song in chapter 64. It’s one of the traditional scripture texts for this First Sunday of Advent. Isaiah has every reason to sing tidings of comfort and joy. He has watched as his people returned from exile in a foreign land. God has brought his children back to the Promised Land. They’ve been in Babylon for forty long years, and now they are home.

Yet even though they have returned home, it doesn’t feel like home. God had promised to gather them from east and west, north and south, but the homecoming has felt empty. And Isaiah the prophet dares to name what a lot of people were feeling. What all of us are capable of feeling.

He shakes his fist at heaven and yells, “If only you would rip open the heavens and come down…” That’s the prayer – and it is met with complete silence. Do you ever experience that silence?

This is where Advent begins: a shaking fist, a silent heaven, a feeling of homelessness right in the middle of familiar surroundings. Advent begins where our spiritual lives begin: with our own longing, with our own spiritual hunger, with the recognition of our own need, with a foreboding sense that life can go off the rails.

Now, unless we are drowning ourselves in eggnog, many of us know how this is. Somebody was talking about pulling out the box of Christmas decorations. “I’m dreading it,” he admitted. “It’s a lot of work, the kids are gone, and frankly, bright lights and tinsel aren’t going to improve my mood.”

You can call him Ebenezer, I suppose, but I think he’s on to something. If this is going to be a spiritually rich Christmas, it’s got to come from something more than a dusty box of manufactured lights. Joy and wonder don’t come out of a faucet; they are gifts from a heaven that normally seems closed.

Isaiah takes the opportunity to think about the mess we’ve made of things. Maybe that’s why God is so quiet. The prophet says, “We have all become like one who is unclean. Even our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.” That is, even when things were going well, there was also something terribly wrong. “We all fade like a leaf,” he says, “and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”

It sounds like that bumper sticker that Kathleen Norris describes. She saw a rusty beat-up car in Williston, North Dakota. On the bumper it said, “O Lord, Give Us Just One More Oil Boom. We Promise Not to (Leak) It Away This Time.”

Or maybe it wasn’t merely that we were a disappointment to God; God has remained hidden to us. Twice Isaiah says, “God, we’ll tell you why we sinned. It’s because you were hiding.” You weren’t around. You weren’t clear and obvious. “Because you hid yourself, that’s why we transgressed.” (64:5, 7)  In other words, “Lord, you were nowhere to be seen. What did you expect?”

“If only you would rip open the heavens and come down.” If only. I wonder how the politicians would have voted this week if God was standing in their chamber. I wonder how any of us would behave if God were clear and obvious all the time.

“If only you would rip open the heavens and come down.”

This is where Advent begins – with this ancient song of Isaiah, a song of dismay. The song is troubling because it’s so honest. One of the reasons why we go to church, I think, is because God is so quiet out there in the world. We go about our days, listening for a Voice, but there is no speech. We hear a lot of noise out there, a lot of commotion and confusion, and if God is speaking, the Voice is being drowned out. And we come to church, and it isn’t always a deeply spiritual experience. Sometimes, maybe, but not always.

Maybe it’s the mess we’ve made of things, or maybe it’s God’s shyness. You read the Bible, and the words stay stuck on the page. You try to pray, but the words don’t connect. And you try to remember the times when faith gave you joy and excitement and clear understanding – and you start wishing that you felt some of those things right now.

That’s where Advent begins, with recognition of our own incompleteness. That is what Isaiah is talking about.

Isaiah says, “Your holy cities have become a wilderness, Zion has become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and beautiful house, where our ancestors praised you, has been burned by fire, and all our pleasant places have become ruins.” (64:10-11)

If only. If only God would pull open the clouds and come down here. That is the gutsy prayer of a Jewish prophet. And the one thing that makes it a Jewish prayer is the same thing that makes it a Christian prayer: namely, there’s a covenant going on.

In the midst of heavenly silence and earthly dismay, the prophet Isaiah lays it on the line. He wants God to speak, but God won’t speak. He wants God to appear, but God won’t appear. So Isaiah says something that you and I could say. He says, “God, we belong to you, and you belong to us.” That’s the covenant.

He says, “Now consider this: we are your people.” Lord, you claimed us as your own, and now you’re stuck with us. That’s good Jewish theology. That’s good Presbyterian theology: you told us you wouldn’t let go of us, so we’re not going to let go of you.

Here’s how he says it: in the wonderful word “nevertheless” –

     Nevertheless O Lord, you are our Father.

     Nevertheless we are the clay, and you are our potter.

     Nevertheless we are all the work of your hand.

That is the basis of the hope we always have, regardless of how tough it is or how silent heaven might be: we belong to God. God has claimed us as beloved sons and daughters. And nothing can take that relationship away from us. We are claimed in baptism, sealed in bread and cup, nourished by the scriptures, sustained in prayer – nothing can remove the covenant that God has established with all of us.

So the Christmas carol declares: “Let nothing you dismay. Remember Christ our savior was born on Christmas day, to save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray. O, tidings of comfort and joy!”

Somewhere in his writings, C.S. Lewis puts it this way: “The Christian faith is a thing of unspeakable joy. But it does not begin with joy, but rather in despair. And it is no good trying to reach the joy without first going through the despair.”(1) There must be nothing plastic or artificial about our hope. It has to be real hope.

Advent begins with an earnest prayer: God, come down to us. Come to us, for we have wandered in your absence. Speak to us, for we have filled the silence with a lot of our own noise. Come to us, abide with us, and fill the emptiness of our lives with the fullness of your joy. Please, O Lord our God, come as Creator to this, your creation. That is the great Advent prayer.

And the Christmas answer to this prayer will be that God does come. But God does not come as Isaiah expects, in the shaking of mountains and the burning of fire. Rather, God comes in the humility of a Child. In all of scripture, that is the clearest display of his awesome power: a great and powerful Savior is revealed in the vulnerability of a little human child. This is a mystery, and it is best revealed in patience, in prayer, in never-ending anticipation.

“Rip open the heavens and come down, Lord.” Come down…like Jesus.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

Notes:

(1) Willimon, William. “Going Against the Stream” The Christian Century, Dec. 19-26, 1984, p.1192.