Texts:
Isaiah 64: 1-9
Psalm
80: 1-7, 17-19
1
Corinthians 1: 3-9
Mark 13: 24-37
Advent begins in the darkness.
Before the first candles are lit, before
the angel of the Lord appears, before the star emerges in the sky over Bethlehem,
before the life that was the light of all mankind enters into the world, there
is darkness.
As much as we prefer the light, we need this
time in the darkness to prepare ourselves to appreciate the light’s coming. Our
Christmas light displays wouldn’t be quite the same without our long, dark
Manitoba winter evenings to enhance their beauty. A candlelit dinner loses its
impact in a room of brightly lit fluorescents. If fireflies appear before dusk,
their display of dancing, twinkling lights goes virtually unnoticed.
In the same way, as we begin this season of
Advent and anticipate the coming of the Light of the World, we read these texts
from Isaiah and Mark that invite us to pause a moment, to acknowledge the
darkness, to recognize this season as a time of waiting and longing, of
acknowledging how deeply we need the light and how much we long for its
presence among us.
“Oh, that you would…” the prophet Isaiah
writes.
“Oh, that you would…” Can’t we all relate, in some way, to those
moments when we have found ourselves praying this prayer? Aren’t there moments
when we resonate with this prayer that has been shared by God’s people throughout
history? It’s a prayer that gives voice to our deepest longings, to our most
heartfelt aches, to those things that leave us so keenly aware of the void
within us that sits there empty, reminding us of what’s just deeply not right with the world, with our
world.
“Oh God, that you would rend the heavens
and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you!”
It’s felt like a long year—health
challenges, job losses, the loss of relationships, the loss of a community that
you’ve loved—until, looking back, all you can see is one loss after another.
You’re not sure how much more of this you can take. You need something hopeful
to happen, the sooner the better.
Your child may be an adult, but that
doesn’t make him or her any less your child, and you ache as you watch him deal
with the pain of a marriage that is coming apart, or a long season of
unemployment, or a painful struggle with addictions. You wish you could make it
better with a hug and a kiss, like you could when she was little, but it’s not
so easy anymore.
Or maybe you remember vividly the pictures
of asylum seekers and wonder at the risks they are willing to take to find
safety and a new home, and as the mercury drops again and winter descends, you
wonder about a world where this can happen so close to home. A longing within
you reflects the aches and pains of the world in which we live.
Where are the places where you most
recognize the brokenness of the world? What are those things that leave you
aching, that settle within you as a deep sense of longing? What is it that
makes you whisper the prayer, together with the prophet, “Oh God, that you
would…”?
Isaiah writes to a people who also know
deep longing, who have experienced hard waiting. The portion of Isaiah known as
Third Isaiah, from which today’s Scripture reading is taken, speaks to a
post-exilic Israel. Around 538 BC, King Cyrus the Persian issued a decree to
end the Babylonian Exile, permitting some Israelites to return to their home in
Jerusalem under Persian sponsorship to begin the rebuilding process.
Homecomings, it turns out, aren’t always as
beautiful and picture-perfect as Hollywood might make them seem. Mixed with the
people’s relief to be returning to their homeland, to the holy city of
Jerusalem, was the fact that they were still under the foreign rule of Persia
as the overriding colonial power. What’s more, the experiences of the returning
exiles, with the trauma they had experienced, often put them at odds with their
fellow Israelites who had not been displaced. All of this left them with many
more questions than answers—what would the rebuilt Israel look like? If the
Temple was rebuilt, who should assume leadership? Who would serve as priests?
Where was God in all of this? This is not what living as God’s people in the
world is supposed to look like, to feel like!
Knowing this, we can understand the longing
behind the prophet’s words: “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
that the mountains would tremble before you!”
You can almost picture yourself, an exile
returned to your homeland that just doesn’t quite feel like home anymore,
trying to make sense of your new reality. You can imagine hearing the age-old
stories of the plagues in Egypt, of the Passover and of being led through the
Red Sea on dry land. You can hear echoes of the earth rumbling as the walls
around the city of Jericho collapse. You can picture Elijah calling down fire
from heaven to ignite a water-drenched sacrifice in front of four hundred and
fifty prophets of the god Baal. So many times, God has come in power to rescue
his people—and you find yourself longing for one more dramatic rescue, one more
sign of power that will make God’s name known throughout the earth, that will shatter
the darkness, causing the nations to quake and the mountains to tremble before
the awesome power of the Lord God Almighty.
And yet, alongside the memories passed down
from generation to generation of the Lord’s mighty saving acts is this realization—“You,
God, come to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember your ways. But
when we continued to sin against them, you were angry. How then can we be
saved?”
It isn’t only our relationship with the
nations that needs healing—our politics and our relationships are only part of
what ails us. Even as we voice our prayers for God to come in power, we
recognize, as Isaiah does, that it may not be so simple. Because the truth is
that the God whom we hope will come through once more with mighty deeds of
power is the same God against whom we recognize that we have sinned. All of us
have become like one who is unclean. All of us have shriveled up like a leaf.
We have all failed, at one time or another, to call upon God, and we can all remember
the times when it felt like God had hidden God’s face from us. There is no
clear line to divide ‘good guys’ from ‘bad guys.’ Even as we long for God’s
power, we recognize our own utter powerlessness, and long for our very
relationship with God to be made right.
Even as we bring our deep longings before
God in prayer, holding out to him that which aches and pains us, we recognize a
deeper longing to find ourselves held once again within God’s loving embrace,
to be restored, forgiven, reconciled and made new.
And so the aches within us, the awareness
of our own need for forgiveness and healing and connection, meet the longings
for those we love and the world around us—and we bring all of these things with
us as we enter into this season of Advent, this new year in the Christian
Church’s calendar.
Advent begins in the darkness, as we
recognize once again our deep longing for the light to enter our world, to
dwell among us, to make all things new once again. Advent meets us in that very
place, in the darkness, where we recognize our deep longings and, in faith,
enter into the waiting as we pray for the light and anticipate its dawning
among us.
As it turns out, in the end God does not
show up to rend the heavens and cause mountains to tremble, as the people had
hoped. The rebuilding process is slow, filled with hard work and harder
questions. There will be no miraculous acts of power, not this time.
But, friends, don’t mistake that for God
not showing up.
If anything, the season of Advent reminds
us that God sometimes shows up in the least expected places, in the places that
may not have been the first place we’ve looked.
Instead of the kind of power that makes the
mountains tremble, God shows up as a potter, shaping us into the work of God’s
hands. Hands gently, carefully take a lump of wet mud, working it with slow,
gentle pressure as ever-so gradually it takes the shape of a delicate,
thin-walled vessel. The same hands that created the earth are persistently at
work, molding us into the divine image.
Instead of a fire that turns into a blaze
whose power can set water boiling, God comes to us with the intimacy of One who
knows us even better than we know ourselves, as One who has been there from the
beginning, as One who loves and cares for us with the gentle fierceness of a
Father’s love for His children.
“You, O Lord, are our Father. We are the
clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.”
God’s coming often looks less like a force
that shakes the mountains, and more like a Father tenderly approaching his
child, or a potter carefully and intentionally working her clay into a vessel.
Sometimes, Advent reminds us, our longings are met as God appears in the small
and the quiet. In ways that require us to be watching, to be waiting
attentively, because otherwise we might not notice.
Like a baby, born to a young virgin mother
in an out of the way hamlet like Bethlehem.
Like a man hanging on a cross, between two
criminals, about to breathe his last breath.
God may show up where we least expect it.
God may appear quietly, without fanfare or mighty shows of power.
But don’t mistake it. What may appear small
still has the power to turn nations upside-down.
So, as we wait in the darkness, watching
for the first signs of light to appear on the horizon, let us not lose hope.
Because we know this: God is about to show up, to act on behalf of the people
he dearly loves, to come to our help once again.
Barbara Brown Taylor has said it better
than I can: “New life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a
baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.”
Even in the darkness, we anticipate the
light. This is the good news of the Advent season.
Amen.
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