Advent 1B
Texts: Isaiah 64:1-9
Sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
November 29, 2020
Stirring
There is something about the violence of Isaiah’s cry to God this morning that, during this pandemic time, just rings right. “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens, oh, Lord, and come down, so that the very mountains would quake at your presence!”
Isaiah had every right to resort to violent expression. The lesson this morning was written when the first of the people of God came back to Jerusalem after years in the Babylonian exile. You can imagine that many of those returning were the children of those taken from their homeland some 50 years before. The young people had grown up hearing stories of the land of Judah and how wonderful it was gonna be to get back to it.
But when they arrived they were shocked, they were betrayed!, by what they found. More deaths, more new graves, then they could imagine, perhaps something like our own experience of 260,000 dead from Covid. They found fields and vineyards destroyed by the conquering army, an economy in ruins, perhaps something like our own experience of millions now out of work.
And it’s at this point, when the people feel a million miles away from God, that the prophet Isaiah speaks for his people and demands that God show up. Not for something so simple and vain as to give proof of God’s existence; nah, that’s a 21st-century rich person’s luxury, to worry about that. Isaiah demands that God show up, because life is a mess, the land has been laid waste, people are suffering and dying, and they need God.
“Tear open the heavens and come down;” let your presence among us burn so hot that you bring fire to the land; make the mountains quake! Isaiah shouts to the heavens, “Don’t just stand there silently, God. Do something!”
Have you ever felt like Isaiah or the people of his day, wondering where in heaven or on earth God is? Ever tried to pray and felt nothing, seen nothing, sensed nothing for a long time? Ever been ready to throw in the towel on God? Comes to my mind the old Bob Dylan song, “Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door,” the line repeated again and again, knock, knock, knockin’ with never an answer.
If you have ever felt like that – if you are feeling like that in these pandemic days – then you have entered the season of Advent, when we find ourselves waiting, waiting, for our God to appear, sometimes patiently, but often enough desperately. The Prayer of the Day appointed for this first Sunday of Advent always opens with the words “Stir up your power, O Lord, and come.” We urge on the God who seems so slow. Faithfully, like those for centuries before us, people of faith who knew times of exile and war and persecution and plague, we enter once again into the drama of yearning and waiting.
But as frustrated as we get with the Deus absconditus, the God who hides from us, I am going to argue that there is something important and right in the yearning, and in the waiting. I have said that the frustrated and violent cry of Isaiah at a time like this just rings right; so also in this moment: for the people of God, yearning and waiting, they just ring right, too.
For one thing, as we wait in darkness, it gives us a chance to note the shape of the darkness in which our Advent candles burn. What is the need for which I need Jesus to come?; and the hurt, that I want him to heal? Where in the world is the light most needed? If God does indeed tear open the heavens and come down this Christmas, where in this world, and with whom in this world, will we be hearing the angels sing? Even before the Light ever comes, you get the Advent chance to think about the places in our darkness.
And so it is, too, secondly, that Advent gives us the chance to know the mighty human solidarity that is at stake here in the darkness as well. Isaiah cried out on behalf of ancient Israel; Jesus cried out from the cross to a hidden God; St. Paul in the early Church wrote of a whole creation groaning in travail, craving redemption. Our cry here in pandemic identifies us with them, and with all the saints of every time and every place, waiting, yearning, longing:
• For the heavens to open;
• For justice to come for the living and the dead;
• For mercy to make right this beleaguered and beloved world.
There is a mighty human solidarity at stake here in pandemic, and standing as I do in that solidarity, I will not choose indifference or resignation or despair. I want to be among those who watch and hope, even when the hope is a desperate cry torn from my heart. Count me in the company of those who watch and yearn and hope, for it is into exactly that company that God chose to be enfleshed.
For, yes, the fact is that God did hear the cry of ancient Israel, for as Isaiah wrote in another part of his book, unto them a Son was given. And God heard Jesus from the cross, for on the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures. And God has heard the groaning of creation, for that groaning is the pains of labor, St. Paul writes; the new birth of the redemption of our bodies.
Wait for it – wait for it! – in these long dark nights of the end of the year. While you wait, note the shape of the darkness, the shape of our all-too-human need. And then lean in to the solidarity among those who wait, we who yearn together, in the dark. And then sometimes, some blessed times, see if we don’t have worked in us such Advent alchemy that our own hearts tremble, to feel the very stirring of God. Maybe not yet so powerful, not yet quite visible, but nevertheless solid, and real, and promising. Know that these days when the night sky still appears dark, opaque, and silent … seeds are quickening to life, in the dark soil. It would be just about this very time, when the night was darkest, that Mary could feel the baby, stirring in her womb.