A Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent

The readings for this day, including the text from the sixty-fourth chapter of Isaiah, can be found here. This sermon was preached at All Saints, Worcester. 

The first words of this Advent season and of this very first day in a new liturgical year come from the prophet Isaiah. They are a desperate plea addressed to God, words with great pathos: O that you would tear open the heavens and come down…

Have you ever prayed such a prayer? Or perhaps knelt next to someone who has? Perhaps you were at the grave of a loved one who died before her time? Or maybe you have gone through a rough divorce or lost your job right before the holidays? Or maybe you are still having a hard time sorting through the range of emotions you feel even here, even now, at All Saints? After all, you come here to get your bearings, to get centered, and it may not feel like that right now. What do you do with all that emotional energy? Push it down? Rage against the machine?

One of the exercises I used as a parish priest to ask of the kids whom I was preparing for confirmation was intended to expand their 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. 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 as we unpacked that image, it became clear that Job wasn’t using it in the flattering way that C.S. Lewis does with his great Christ-figure, Aslan. You will remember that Job was suffering from incredible loss and was in the midst of incredible turmoil. But worse than all of his spiritual pain is that he has come to see God as the cause of all of that suffering, which was almost too much to bear. So when Job says that God is a lion, it’s because he feels like he is 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…You, You…LION!”

It’s hard enough when your life is coming unglued. But you can pretty much get through just about anything if you feel that God is with you, that God is your Rock or the Good Shepherd who will lead you through the valley of the shadow of death to still waters. 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, 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. The good news is that we light that first candle today, the candle of hope, because even if we need to “fake it ‘til we make it” we are a people who hope that the end of this story is in fact heavens torn open so that the Word might be made flesh, and dwell among us.

But I’m getting ahead of myself because we aren’t there yet, and because we live “in the meantime.” And in the meantime, life is complicated. I think our deepest fear comes when, in the short-run – in the present tense—we are no longer certain that God is with us. Sometimes we experience a sense of abandonment, and we feel, as Job did, that God is the source of our pain (like a lion who has hunted us down.) And that may be too much to bear.

And yet these first words of Advent from the Prophet Isaiah are much the same. Isaiah is asking God to open up the heavens and come down because he wants answers. He wants to be heard. 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 out of that 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: where’ve you been, God? Isaiah wants to know, given God’s past marvelous deeds, where God is right now? If God could do all those wonderful things “back in the day” (like bring slaves out of Egypt) then why isn’t God doing something now? O that you would tear open the heavens and come down…

It may seem like an odd way to begin Advent. Sorry, I hope you didn’t come here today “dreaming of a white Christmas!” But Advent is about getting real and telling the truth even when it’s hard. It’s about preparing the way with John the Baptizer and about saying yes to God, as Mary did. Let it be with me according to your Word. This is the work of Advent, this season of preparation and of hope, peace, joy, and love.

Maybe some of us here today have prayed this way after hearing yet another report about glaciers melting or when we meet people experiencing homelessness on a Thursday afternoon right in this building, or when we see a family member who cannot afford the healthcare they need. We come here in this month especially when it is all too easy to feel off-kilter. I suspect that your hope, like mine, is to leave here feeling a little more grounded and centered than when we came in. Otherwise why get out of bed to come to church, if it’s going to be so de-centering? One of my former parishioners in Holden used to say this to me frequently. He had a job he didn’t like much and a boss who was not very fair. “The world can be pretty tough, he’d tell me, and I come to church on Sunday to hear some good news. I need good news!” And for what it’s worth I sympathized completely. And for what it’s worth, sometimes my week in the church ain’t no picnic either. It’s not all holding hands and singing kumbaya! But I hope you’ll stay with me because I do think we’ll get to good news, even today, and even in this sermon. It’s just that sometimes it doesn’t come as fast as our chicken McNuggets at a drive-through window…

Advent is about waiting. Not passive waiting, but active, expectant, urgent hopeful waiting. My experience as a pastor and preacher and above all as a fellow traveler is that sometimes the good news just isn’t immediately accessible. These opening words of Advent express 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. But we should never confuse hope with denial nor with wishful thinking.

I read one commentator on this text who says that “God hides in order to deconstruct a distorted faith.” Now that sounds like the kind of thing a Biblical scholar would say, doesn’t it? But I want to ask you to hang in there with that statement for a couple of minutes because I think it evokes good theology and eventually some good news. And it’s how we are going to get there in this sermon, so please hear me out: God hides in order to deconstruct a distorted faith.

God is beyond all of our language and 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, but God insists, “I am who I am.” And “I’ll also be who I’ll be, Moses.”

At best, all of our words and images for God, even our very favorites, can only point us toward the Inscrutable One who is always beyond our understanding and comprehension; the One Paul Tillich called “the God beyond God.” We need human words, of course. But we must always be careful about confusing our words for God with God. They are not the same. God is always bigger.  

I’ll give you just one example. You can come here and hear the image of “Father, Father, Father” in our liturgy and our prayers and our readings and our hymns. And hardly anyone blinks. They will say that they know it’s “just a metaphor” and God isn’t an old man in the sky. But use “Mother” just once and watch people perk up: some with a twinkle in their eyes, and some ready for a fight. We need human words, of course. But our words are not God. At best our words point us toward God.

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 always ask them to tell me about this god they no longer believe in. And usually if they are willing to 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 some old images that are keeping them from encountering the more mysterious but true and living and real God beyond God. Their crisis of faith is real, for 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 in fact be a very good place to start our Advent journey.

So if I still have your attention, or can get it back now since I’m coming to the end, let me move from preaching to meddling. If we aren’t careful, especially in this month, we will confuse God with Santa Claus. Our prayers will be too much like compiling a wish list of what we hope we’ll get if we’ve been more nice than naughty this year. Sometimes it takes an exile or a crisis in faith or even a crisis in our congregation to bring us to our knees. And then we find ourselves vulnerable and frightened and maybe we cry out for God to make it all better by fixing the ozone layer or cleaning up the oceans or bringing about peace on earth: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down here, God! You LION!”

And then when nothing happens we may begin to wonder, since God clearly hasn’t done what we asked. If God is real, why isn’t God doing what we want God to do? I want to say to you today that in that moment, real faith is born. A distorted faith begins to be deconstructed so that something closer to the real thing might begin to emerge. In that moment, as we let go of those old images, we may well encounter the true and living God in new and fresh ways. Or at least begin that journey with hope.  

Here is the thing though: the process of giving birth is always painful, isn’t it? (Or so I’ve been told!) And if it is about nothing else, this season of Advent is about birth. Not only of the child whose birth we are preparing to celebrate, but also the new birth that each of us must go through to discover or rediscover authentic faith. We prepare ourselves for a king of kings and a lord of lords, a messiah to rule the world and triumph over evil and bring peace on earth and good will to all. And then what we get is a tiny little baby who needs his diaper changed. We find ourselves kneeling before a manger and before a child who needs to be fed and cared for, and loved.

So here is the good news: God meets us where we are. God actually does tear open the heavens and come down; just not in the way we expected. In Bethlehem we see God as a homeless and helpless infant who says, “I am with you always, to the end of the ages.” The irony of this opening prayer of Advent is that it has been answered in Jesus the Christ: the heavens have been torn asunder and God has come to dwell among us, very God of very God, begotten not made. The Word has been made flesh and we have beheld his glory, full of grace and truth. But not as we expected. Brian Wren, in a hymn we’ll sing today at the Offertory, puts it in the form of a question:  

Can this newborn mystery, an infant learning to feed,

defeat the grim and chilling powers of domination, death and sin?

Can he? Is this infant with the tiny little hands and fingers the best God can do? Can he really defeat the powers of domination, death, and sin?  Stay tuned…