1 Advent B November 30, 2014
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie Guengerich Hutson
Isaiah 64: 1-9 + Psalm 80: 1-7, 17-19 + Cor. 1: 3-9 + Mark 13: 24-37
Stir up your power, O God, and come down. Open the heavens. Lighten our darkness. Remove our pain. Mend our brokenness. All for your love’s sake. Amen.
We were watching football on Thanksgiving Day – the turkey was in the oven, along with stuffing and yams and kale and dumplings and well….you get the picture. And it was halftime of whatever game was on TV and there was a HUGE production number….a giant halftime show featuring two clearly-very-popular performers. And here’s the thing. I had never heard of either of the them. I kid you not. I felt really old. So, with that said, I’m going to travel back in time to a day when Carly Simon had a hit single that could have been about waiting on the turkey to come out of the oven and the meal to be on the table, OR it could be about the liturgical season we are about to enter. That’s right, this is Sermon Jeopardy and the category is Songs from the Seventies for $200. Any takers?
Anticipation. Anticipation is making me late. It’s keeping me waiting.
This season is the season of anticipation. Culturally, we anticipate the coming of Christ in rather frenetic ways: over spending, over consumption, and working ourselves into a frenzy to out-do one another’s Christmas card letters.
And this is why I am so grateful for the way the Church keeps this season of Advent. We light a few candles and sit in shades of blue. The hymns of Advent thread anticipation and lament together like melody and harmony.
And in the readings assigned for this day, we are reminded that waiting is often accompanied by lament, by sorrow, by grief.
“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” cries the prophet Isaiah. “You have fed them with the bread of tears; you have given them bowls of tears to drink” cries the Psalmist.
And all at once we are jolted out of the sameness of Ordinary Time.
Perhaps, our first instinct is to turn away from the cries of the prophet and the psalmist. We would rather consider the savior who is to come than consider why it is that we need him now.
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.
Perhaps we insist that we have had enough of lament. We have had enough bad news. We don’t want to talk about it anymore.
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.
So if you’ve come here this morning without a single concern weighing on your spirit… if there is no sorrow, no disappointment, no worry in your life. If there is no sorrow, no disappointment, no worry for the world. If you carry no piece of pain with you today and if your heart is entirely intact, then you can have a pass this morning. You don’t have to listen to the rest of this sermon today.
But for the rest of us, we join our cries with those of the Prophet and the Psalmist who carry their heartbreak to God. We join our cry with the prophet’s cry for God to tear open the heavens and with the Psalmist’s cry that the people have been fed with bowls and bread of tears. Collectively, as a nation, we are living in a time of brokenheartedness. Racial tensions still exist, despite the work of prophets before us. We decry the riots and the looting….but what if they are lament at an extreme? I’m not talking about those people who for inexplicable reasons destroy property simply because they can. But I do speak of those people who march and walk and perhaps even lash out in pain. In the pain of being treated as less than God’s children because of their skin color. Have we really made such little progress? Does racial inequality or ANY inequality have a place in a society that is able to make strides in almost every other area of life?
Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down.
Last week our Bishop, Bishop Unti, sent a Thanksgiving message to the pastors in our synod. In it, he noted that it is at this time of year when people’s lives often break. Later, at a synod council meeting, I had the chance to talk to Bishop Unti about that. Because it is true. This is often the time of year when struggles with illness, addiction, unemployment, and broken relationships magnify. Even in the life of this congregation I can think of many for whom this season carries particular pain.
Yet, in order to open our hearts to one another’s pain, in order to open our eyes to the pain of the world, and our minds to our role in that pain…. we need this season. We need a time that makes space for waiting. We need a season of anticipation. And we pray, in these days of Advent, that God will be present in our brokenness, that God’s balm will heal our sorrows. Then the promise that God will come to earth glimmers with possibility….bringing with it the anticipation of peace, of hope, and of life restored to us.
Whenever I read this Isaiah text, I am reminded that the same language for tearing open is found in two other places in Scripture. The first is at the baptism of Jesus, when the heavens were torn open and the Spirit descended upon Jesus, like a dove, and as a sign and symbol of who Jesus was. That Jesus was the one the people had been waiting for. That Jesus was God’s answer to the pleas of the people for God to come among them.
The second place that the same language of tearing open is present is at the hour of Christ’s death. The curtain in the temple was torn in two as reminder of who Jesus was. As the centurion confirmed “Surely this was the Son of God.”
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, the prophet cries and we echo.
And God’s answer was to dwell among us. To come down. Jesus was Emmanuel – God with us. Not with us to end our struggles in this life, but with us to walk with us through them. Not with us to give us answers in some sort of secret code, but with us to serve as a model for righteous living – serving others, caring for the poor, feeding the hungry. Not with us to say that no bad things would never happen to us if we would only believe, but with us to remind us that through every difficulty and every tragedy and every sorrow and every injustice and every disaster….God remains with us.
This is the blessed beauty of this season. That we do not lose heart because the greatest hope of all has come into the world and will come again. That in these days of crying out, crying out against injustices that live on; that in these days of crying out in despair and grief and sorrow; that in these days of fumbling through with our broken hearts and our broken selves….that in these days, we walk as people who are certain. Oh, we aren’t certain of the when….they didn’t know the when in Mark’s Gospel reading this morning and we still don’t know it today. But we wait and we watch and we keep awake. And we walk as people who are certain. Not of when, but certainly of who.
In these days of Advent, we are anticipating a savior. One who has taken on human form and who knows our sorrows. One who has been betrayed by friends, abandoned by followers, and questioned by family. One who wept in sorrow. But this was the very one who came down that we might have hope….that we might have love. Even in these days of crying out that the heavens would tear open and God would come and dwell with us, we know and claim the great mystery of faith: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
Thanks be to God. Amen.