This Sunday will mark the beginning of a new liturgical year as we celebrate the First Sunday of Advent. The readings appointed for this Sunday can be found here.
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The first words of this Advent season and a new liturgical year come from the prophet Isaiah, a desperate cry for help addressed to God: O that you would tear open the heavens and come down…
Have you ever prayed such a prayer or stood with someone who has? Perhaps it was at the grave of a loved one who died before their time. Or maybe you have gone through a rough divorce or lost your job right before the holidays. Perhaps you have just been watching the news.
When I served as as Associate Rector at Christ and Holy Trinity Church in Westport, Connecticut, I developed my own confirmation curriculum. My work focused on youth and formation work and at the time I found the materials that were available to be dismal. I ended up keeping and annually revising those materials which paired confirmands with adult mentors throughout my tenure as Rector of St. Francis Church. (Ask any kid who was confirmed at St. Francis between 1998-2013 and they will tell you about the red binders!)
In those materials, there was an assignment intended to expand the confirmands' repertoire of Biblical metaphors
for God. The Bible has far more metaphors than our liturgies tend to avail
themselves of, and I wanted them to explore that a bit. It was also a chance to channel my inner Baptist grandmother by having them find their way around an actual Bible rather than those fancy little Scripture inserts we Episcopalians are so fond of. (And this was in the days before Google!)
One of the texts that I
had them look up comes from the tenth chapter of the Book of Job, where Job
suggests that God is a lion. (Job 10:16) But Job isn’t using that image in the flattering way that
C.S. Lewis does with his great Christ-figure, Aslan. You will remember that Job
is suffering from incredible loss and is in incredible emotional turmoil. But worse
than all of his spiritual pain is that he has come to see God as the cause of all of his suffering. When he
says that God is a lion, it’s because he feels like a wildebeest that God has
hunted down and chewed up and spit out. He is asking a haunting question: why
are you doing this to me, God?
It’s hard enough when your life is coming unglued. But you can pretty much get through anything if you feel that God is with you, if you feel that God is your rock or the good shepherd who walks with you through the valley of the shadow of death. Even if we know it will be another six months or a year that we have to face chemotherapy or until we find new employment or love again, or until this pandemic ends, we can make it if we have hope. We can make it if we feel that God is on our side and working through it all to bring about something good.
Our deepest fear comes when we are no longer certain that
God is with us. But if you believe
God has abandoned you, or worse still that God is the source of your pain (a lion who has hunted you down) it is too much
to bear. Like Isaiah, Job prays for God to tear open the heavens and come down.
He is a desperate man who wants his day in court; he wants to be heard. (Actually,
what he wants is to make his case against God.) If only God would tear open the
heavens and show His face…
For Isaiah, it isn’t personal suffering like Job’s, but a
national tragedy that gives us these first words of Advent. He speaks on behalf
of an entire nation, out of the pain of the Babylonian exile and a feeling of having been betrayed by God. Isaiah poses a profound theological question, perhaps
the most serious theological question any of us will ever ask. Given God’s past
marvelous deeds, where is God now? If God could do all those wonderful things “back
in the day” (like bring the slaves out of
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down…
It may seem like an odd way to begin Advent, but maybe less odd in 2020 than in previous years, as we sort through the many messes we are in on this fragile earth, our island home. It is so tempting to replace authentic hope with cheap grace and wishful thinking. People want easy answers to hard questions, at least some days.
Yet, if you are in a place where you can identify with where Isaiah or Job are and find yourself yelling at the heavens, and your friend says, “there, there” or "there is some reason for this" they are not much of a friend. This prayer expresses extraordinary grief and loss and a sense of betrayal that grow out of Isaiah’s first-hand experience and he needs to take that to God, whom he feels has been M.I.A. He needs to be heard and acknowledged before he can get to hope.
So the question before us as we light that first candle of hope this Sunday is simply this: what do we do with that? One commentator on this Isaiah text says that “God hides in order to deconstruct a distorted faith.” Now that sounds like the kind of thing a theologian would say, doesn’t it? But I want to suggest that leads to very good theology. God hides in order to deconstruct a distorted faith.
God is beyond all of our language, beyond all of our images. I don’t mean only the false idols. Of course God is not a golden calf or a little statue or a 401-K. But I also mean that God is beyond even the most helpful of icons: beyond “father” and “rock” and “light” and “lion.” At the burning bush when Moses wants to know God’s name, God insists, “I am who I am.” At best all of our words and images for God—even our very favorites—can only point us toward the Inscrutable One who is beyond our understanding and comprehension, the One Tillich called “the God beyond God.” We need human words. But we must always be careful about confusing our words for God with God; they are not the same. God is always bigger. This is where I wanted the conversation to go each year after confirmands and mentors had found all those Biblical images and we gathered together, to recognize that God is and is not any and all of those things.
So when someone tells me that they don’t believe in God (which
tends to happen for the first but not last time for almost all kids right
around confirmation age) I never panic. I just ask them to tell me about this
god they no longer believe in. And usually if they are willing to humor me and
talk about it, what I discover is that they are actually beginning to
deconstruct a distorted faith. Or to say it another way, I don’t believe in the
god they don’t believe in either! They need to let go of an old image that is
keeping them from encountering the more mysterious but living and real God. Their
crisis of faith is real, to be sure. But every crisis represents
not only danger but an opportunity and in this kind of experience there is a
very real opportunity to discover God anew. And I think that is why these words
of Isaiah may be a very good place to start our Advent journey.
Let me be specific. We talk of “father God” so much we may actually begin to think that God is an old man with a gray beard sitting up in space. We go along, often unquestioning, because as long as life is good it’s just fine for God to be “the big guy up there,” not all that different from Santa Clause or a kindly old grandfather. Until one day chaos breaks in and we find ourselves really hurting. Sometimes it takes an exile, or a crisis in faith, or a pandemic to bring us to our knees: we find ourselves vulnerable and frightened and we cry out for God to make it all better by putting a band-aid on our boo-boos or to fix the ozone layer or clean up the oceans or to zap away weapons of mass destruction or to bring about peace on earth or to end this pandemic. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down…”
And when nothing happens, we start to convince ourselves that we are atheists, since God clearly hasn’t done what we asked. We stand with Isaiah and Job at a crossroads in that moment however, and what in fact needs to go is not our faith but those old images we’ve been carrying around that are now keeping us from encountering the true and living God. That can be very hard work. And most of us don’t like that place of unknowing, that place of painful uncertainty and anxiety. We just want God to fix it.
If we are willing to work though all of that, however, we may find that out of a deconstructed distorted faith, something new is born. Here is the thing though: the process of giving birth is always painful, isn’t it? (Or so I am told anyway!) If it is about nothing else this season is about birth. Certainly the child whose birth we are preparing to celebrate but also the new birth that each of us must go through to discover authentic faith. We prepare ourselves for a king of kings and a lord of lords, a messiah who would rule the world. And what we get is a tiny little baby who needs his diaper changed. We find ourselves kneeling before a manger and a child who needs to be fed and cared for and loved.
What if, as my scholarly friend says, such moments represent an opportunity rather than an obstacle to faith: an invitation to deconstruct a distorted faith in order to become free to reconstruct a more Incarnational faith? So that Immanuel can meet us where we are. Or more accurately, what if Christmas invites us to stop looking up to the heavens for a magical God who fixes things and to open our eyes to see God-with-us redeeming and healing things? A God who says, “I’m right here, now …wherever and whenever two or three gather together.”
The irony of this prayer is that it has been answered: the heavens have been torn asunder and God has come down to dwell among us, very God of very God, begotten not made. The Word that was with God and was God has become flesh to dwell among us and we have beheld his glory, full of grace and truth. But not as we expected. The God we get comes to us as a little child who grows up and dies on a cross. Easter life emerges only out of risk and loss and death. Christ’s initial appearance will lead to new and more profound questions before it offers us easy answers, questions like the ones Brian Wren raises in one of his provocative hymns:
Can this newborn mystery, an infant learning to feed, defeat the grim and chilling powers of domination, death and sin?
Well, can he? Is this little baby the best God can do? This One with the tiny little hands and fingers—He is going to defeat the powers of domination, death, and sin? Wren’s poem is (as the Church has come to expect of him) very good theology. But let me give away the ending: yes. The mystery of this newborn child, this infant learning to feed, is that he is the Way and the Truth and the Life, and that he is victorious over the chilling powers of domination, death, and sin. No matter how bad this week was for any of us, that is good news. Christ before us, Christ behind us, Christ beside us, Christ beneath us, Christ above us. Christ here and now, among us. Don’t look for the skies to be opened up. Just look around you.
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