Advent 1
11/29/20
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, 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.
On our way to Christmas, we will have four conversations with the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah is one of the great truth-tellers in the scriptures. He declares what it obvious to those who haven’t been paying attention. He speaks through the despair to those who have all but given up hope. And in the portion of his long sermon that we hear today, the prophet shakes his fist at heaven.
God is nowhere to be seen. The absence has become the norm. Isaiah’s people go about their business as if God doesn’t matter, as if God isn’t watching, as if God is not the least bit concerned about how they live or what they do. By all appearances, they don’t really care about God. And they live with a good deal of pain in the process.
That comes as no surprise. Like so many contemporary stories, God isn’t part of the scene. Some people may claim that God is the screenwriter of every human story. Well, even if that is the case, the Divine Author is offstage. In God’s absence, people get themselves into all kinds of sloppy messes.
This is how the prophet Isaiah would diagnose our human situation. In the poem we heard today, he cries out toward the sky. He wants to know where God is hiding. Just a few minutes before, he was praising God’s mercy. “It’s been nothing but steadfast love for centuries,” he sings. “God has been present, and his presence saved us.”
But then his tone changes suddenly – maybe he clicked on the television remote or glanced at the headlines. Maybe he is wheezing from a cough he cannot shake. So Isaiah says, “Where is the One who brought them up out of the sea? Where is the One who put his Holy Spirit within them? If only You would rip open the heavens and come down!”
It’s a striking poem to begin the season of Advent. We are waiting for God – that is the primary theme of the season. We wait for a God who spends centuries getting his work accomplished. Nothing in God’s time ever happens quickly or on our schedule. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to happen, but it serves as a reminder that we are not in charge. In the grand scheme of things, we are not in charge of very much at all. I have yet to meet a person who can spin a planet at the correct speed, invent gravity, or cause the grass to grow. To wait for God is to honor God, and to regard what God alone can do.
The problem is, the longer we wait, the more creative we become. We scan the horizon, don’t catch so much as a glimpse of the Lord Almighty, and then the wheels start turning. Here is how Isaiah puts it in the poem for today. He points a bony finger at God and declares, “Because you hid yourself, we transgressed.” It is that simple, and that profound. “Because you hid yourself, we transgressed.”
This shared trait of ours began rather early. God created a Garden and put two people in the middle of it. God said everything in the Garden is yours, except from that tree over there. Then God went off to manage the planet Saturn and polish up the rings. Just as soon as he was out of sight, those two human children said, “Let’s go check out the tree.”
Centuries later, Isaiah knows it hasn’t gotten any better. The human race has not improved in any way. Oh, we have our fancy toys and our wonderful new medications. We have our nice homes and closets full of clothes – there were none of these things in the Garden. But that doesn’t mean that we have progressed or advanced in the things that matter. God was out of sight, and we transgressed.
“Lord, if only you had been here,” says the prophet.
Isaiah seems to believe we would be better behaved if we knew the Lord was present. Do you think that’s true? If God stood over my right shoulder, would I make better decisions? Be a better steward of my words? Eat a few less slices of pumpkin pie? Would I live in the joy and peace that he invites for us all?
Yesterday, I realized this may be the first year in recent memory when we didn’t hear about some horrific accident on Black Friday. You know the kind I mean: a line forms outside of the MegaMart SuperStore before the turkey is cold. Normally same people camp out on a frosty Thursday night so they can bust down the doors and be one of the fifty lucky shoppers to get that $200 flat screen TV. Anybody in their way may get trampled.
We didn’t hear any stories like that. Not yet. In a pandemic year, only the brave and the foolish are pushing their way into the shopping malls. Others want nothing to do with it.
“It just doesn’t seem like Christmas,” somebody said outside of Macy’s flagship store in Manhattan. She was complaining that nobody was sitting on Santa’s lap inside the store. Instead, Macy’s has reimagined the visits by setting up a website where kids can talk online to the jolly old elf,
Meanwhile, at the Bass Pro Shop, purveyor of all things masculine, they have put Santa behind an acrylic shield. Kids can still get their pictures taken with him as long as they stay in front of the plexiglass. Extra elves have been employed as Santa’s Sanitation Squad, squirt bottles of Windex ready at hand.[1]
Believe it or not, some freedom fighters are protesting the changes. One of them said “I have a constitutional right to get the corona virus if I want to.” Oy vey – if only the Lord would come down here. If only we were in the complete unveiled presence of God, maybe people it would never have occurred to anybody to do such a thing.
When God is out of the picture, foolishness happens. Violence happens. When God steps away to tend to other matters, the children he was babysitting begin to act up. When God steps back to allow people some freedom to work out their differences, sometimes - much of the time - they make tough situations even worse.
Biblically speaking, Isaiah offers up a lament. About half of the Bible’s prayers fall into this category. The other half of those prayers celebrate God’s presence – they express awe, they give thanks, they raise the rafters with hallelujahs. But a prayer like the one we hear today takes note of God’s absence. And prayers like these are valid, too. They recognize that we have moved a long way from the Garden of Eden. Nothing short of the presence of God will ever change us or our situations.
If we are honest, you and I, we have plenty to lament about. This is a stressful season. It is a dangerous time of the year. We find ourselves surrounded by so much artificial light, so much manufactured joy, that we are tempted to neglect our own spirits. We worry about getting up the lights, even if we’re not feeling very sparkly. In a normal year, we fret about giving the right number of gifts. And this year, with a pandemic turning everything upside down, we know that nothing less than God can give us consolation.
"Lord, if only you would rip open the heavens and come down!" prays Isaiah.
It's interesting that when the Gospel of Mark tells the story of Jesus, he uses the same exact language. It's there in the first chapter, as we will hear next month. On the day Jesus was baptized, the heavens were ripped open - the Greek verb is schizomai - as in schizophrenic, which is a divided person, or schism, which is a divided organism. The heavens were ripped open from the other side, Mark says, and then . . . a dove came down. Not an eagle. Not a hawk. Not a vulture. But a dove -- in the thick of that violent tear in the seam of the sky, a bird of peace and gentleness descended.
It is a glimpse how God will visit us in the ministry of Jesus. Never domineering, yet determined. Never completely absent, but frequently out of sight. From time to time, either to test us or to invite us into reverence, God hides. And God watches to see how we live as we wait. How will we treat one another? How will we pray? Will we live and pray as if we expect God to come?
There’s a remarkable church leader from Africa named Devison Banda. We’ve never met, but friends have told me about him. He was born in village in Zambia. His family was poor, but somehow by the grace of God, somebody sent him to a boy’s school. He went on to receive a divinity degree, and then a doctorate in New Testament. After that, he became the president of the seminary that trained him, the Justo Mwale Theological College in the capital city of Lusaka.
When Devison began working as a pastor, he and his family were dirt poor, and so was their church. In their first week, they had a little food, and a little money. Both ran out. All there was to eat was something called “mealy meal,” a corn meal from which they make something analogous to southern grits. They had mealy-meal, and that was it.
One morning, at the beginning of the day, as the family sat for prayer, Devison says he prayed, “Lord, you passed us by yesterday; but in your providence don’t pass us by again today, yet in all things may your name be praised.” The day went on, and no food came. So at prayer the next morning, he prayed, “Lord, you passed us by again, but surely you stopped by someone else’s house; but in your providence don’t pass us by again today, yet in all things may your name be praised.” Once again, that day, no food arrived. And then on the third day, food came.
It’s that prayer that attaches itself to my soul, and which I pass along for you. It is a lament, in its own way – poignant, and ultimately expectant. “You passed us by again today, don’t pass by us again; yet in all things may your name be praised.”
On the first day of Advent, that is our prayer. And we take
a cue from Isaiah and pray it again. Maybe this time God will answer. Maybe
this time we will be paying attention.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment