First Sunday in
Advent - B
November 29, 2020
Isaiah 64:1-9
“Where is God?”
[“Hazy Shade of Winter” by Paul Simon is sung by a cantor or soloist]
“Time, time, time see what’s become of me while I looked around for my possibilities…I was so hard to please…Look around, leaves are brown, there’s a patch of snow on the ground…”
Paul Simon in ‘Hazy Shade of Winter’ is echoing the texts for this Sunday. The prophet Isaiah in the First Reading tells us that time, time is passing for God’s people in exile in Babylon as they look around for their possibilities and the wonder: ‘Where is God?’
The world God’s people were experiencing at the time of Isaiah was not the world they thought they should be experiencing. The Jews were returning from the Babylonian captivity and they found themselves in conflict with the Jews who were left behind and had not been exiled. And how are they to understand both the exile and return? Where is God in all these geo-political events?
“Time, time, time –see what’s become of me…when I looked around for my possibilities, I was so hard to please…hear the salvation army band…down by the riverside its bound to be a better ride then what you’ve got planned.” Oh those images in the Gospel reading again reflected by Simon’s words: ‘seasons change with the scenery weaving time in a tapestry…won’t you stop and remember me…”
Where is God in the midst of the end times so vividly described by Jesus in the Gospel reading?
Isn’t it the same today? We too ask the question: “Where is God?” Where is God in the midst of our own busy lives with our ups and downs, our losses and sorrows? Where is God in our community where jobs are at a premium and almost all of us know some who is unemployed or underemployed? Where is God in the midst of the pandemic rampantly taking lives? Where is God in the midst of our national leaders who fail to make difficult but important decisions? Where is God in a global community that seems to teeter on the edge of economic ruin?
With the challenges and problems in our lives and world today we cry out along with Isaiah:
“Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down…”
Did God not tear open the heavens in Biblical times and intervene in history with ‘awesome deeds’? Why doesn’t God do so today? Why would God deliver Israel from Egypt, but not 6 million Jews from death camps? We read stories of God’s spectacular interventions, yet we look in vain for signs of God’s involvement in the world today.
“Look around, leaves are brown and the sky is a hazy shade of winter…” metaphors for the absence of God. Where is God in our lives and in our world today?
It is Advent tide and we are called to awaken to the hope of a new day – yet through the years it seems like an ongoing re-run of bad news as though God were some absent landlord and our building is dilapidated with no one to fix it.
Friend and colleague – Pastor Michael Simmons – from the UCC church down the street once reminded me at our text study group - that our problem is not that God is absent, but rather God has been pushed out of sight – out of sight and out of mind! Most people in America are saying, “We are doing just fine without God – thank you! When we need God’s services we’ll ask, but other than that don’t bother – our lives are just too busy and our hearts often to filled with stuff.”
In other words God is not absent; rather God has been pushed out of our lives when we take center stage. We have lost sight of God. We live in the illusion that our empty hearts can be filled with stuff. We live with the illusion that our deep yearnings can be satiated with things.
We live in a culture of the insatiable – a culture in which we can never get enough. TV screens are not large enough. Remember when you had a black and white TV and when a 19” was large. Now unless you have a 50” or larger flat screen you just must be impoverished. In fact, I understand that 82” is the new standard.
The size of our flat screen TV’s are a metaphor for our insatiable appetite for more and faster and better and newer. And all our ‘stuff’ may just be a distraction from the emptiness in our souls.
God is not absent – God has just been pushed out of sight and out of mind by all our stuff. Think about all the stuff we accumulate that we think will make us happy or solve our problems. We don’t have any room left for God in our lives. Yet, we expect God to show up when there is tragedy or need or spiritual service to be rendered. After things calm down then we go back to the old way of living where life revolves around ‘me.’
Isaiah’s lament and plea does not end with the absence of God. But with:
“Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are the potter; we are all the work of your hands.” God is not absent. God’s hand is at work in our lives. Maybe we just don’t see! How many times will we turn our heads and pretend that we just don’t see?
God calls us out of our hazy shade of winter to awaken with new eyes this Advent Season.
German Lutheran pastor and holocaust victim, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writes in his Letters from Prison:
“God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us to help us.”
[Source: Letters from Prison (New York: Macmillan, 1971), pg. 360]
What Bonhoeffer is saying is that God’s hiddenness is not some cloak of humility covering an awesome powerful glory – some sort of Clark Kent / Superman act. No, but rather God’s coming in the weakness of a babe and demonstrating his powerlessness on the cross is a reflection of God’s character.
God chooses to relate to us through the vulnerable path of non-coercive love. God in Christ works God’s way into human life through suffering service rather than domination and force.
The image of a potter tells us of a God who acts more like an artist creating a masterpiece rather than a superhero rescuing the world. The image of the potter suggests that we are malleable in the hands of God – that our relationship with God is a constant formation – a shaping and reshaping of the clay!
Isaiah comes to realize that just because God does not tear open the heavens and part the Red Sea again does not mean God is not present. Isaiah the poet-prophet tells of a unique presence of God in the Suffering Servant. Early on we hear of a child born who will be wonderful counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace and later on that wonderful counselor becomes the ‘Suffering Servant’:
“Who has believed what we have heard?
And
to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For
he grew up before him like a young plant,
and
like a root out of dry ground;
he
had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
nothing
in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by others;
a
man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and
as one from whom others hide their faces
he
was despised,
and
we held him of no account.
Surely he has borne our infirmities
and
carried our diseases;
yet
we accounted him stricken,
struck
down by God, and afflicted.
But
he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed
for our iniquities;
upon
him was the punishment that made us whole,
and
by his bruises we are healed.” [Isaiah 53]
God is present right in the middle of our difficulties and suffering with the healing presence of Christ. God is about the work of shaping us like clay and forming us throughout our lifetime into the very image of Jesus. No awesome ‘rending of the heavens’ but the creative hand of the potter daily molding us in, with, and under our everyday encounters.
The song we are about to sing – the Hymn of the Day – “Each Winter as the Years Grow Older” is meant to re-preach the sermon. It is a somewhat unusual melody so the soloist and choir will be singing the first two verses.
The hymn was written by a clergy couple – William and Annabeth Gay in 1969 in the midst of the Vietnam War and the ‘God is dead’ movement. Listen carefully to the words because in the pattern of the prophet-poet, Isaiah, the text of this hymn moves from lament to hope:
1 Each winter as the year grows older,
we each grow older, too.
The chill sets in a little colder;
the verities [truths] we knew
seem shaken and untrue.
when sirens call for war,
they over shout the voice of reason
and scream till we ignore
all we held dear before.
that life can spring from death,
that growth can flower from our
grieving,
that we can catch our breath
and turn transfixed by faith.
4 So even as the sun is turning
to journey to the north,
the living flame, in secret burning,
can kindle on the earth
and bring God's love to birth.
O Prince of peace and pain,
brighten today's world by tomorrow's,
renew our lives again;
Lord Jesus, come and reign!
Text
© 1971 United Church Press.
Through the hazy shade of winter God summons us to hang on to our hopes, my friend, because the holy is breaking through into our daily lives.
There are lots of reasons to lose heart. Yet Advent is the time to renew our hope and live with our hearts ‘broken open’ so that compassion, caring, and God’s reckless love can find a way back into our hearts and the heart of the world.
Amen
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