Isaiah 63:15-64:12 November 30, 2014 WAITING FOR GOD TO BREAK THE SILENCE Have you ever wanted to blame God for the mess you were in? Have you ever wanted to begin a prayer something like this: Lord, if you really are great and almighty, can t you do something about all these bad things that are going on in my life and in the world? Preachers aren t supposed to say things like that, especially when our refrigerators still have leftover turkey and pumpkin pie from the Thanksgiving feast we celebrated only three days ago, when we thanked God for all of our blessings. And certainly those words seem inappropriate now, on the First Sunday of Advent, when our hearts and minds are already half-way to Bethlehem and Jesus joyous birthday celebration; and they shouldn t be spoken as we re tuning our voices to sing Christmas carols and celebrate the pleasant excesses of Christmas. But, have you ever wanted to blame God anyway? Sure, we feel as though we re not supposed to; and it doesn t seem right and proper for people of faith like us to complain to the Almighty, or about the Almighty. But have you ever felt like you wanted to, whether you re supposed to or not? Sometimes we can t contain the way we sometimes feel about God, and the truth just slips out. We say it. We blame God for the troubles and challenges we re experiencing in our life. It happens to us. And it happens even in the Bible. Tucked away in the final chapters of the book of Isaiah is a psalm, much like those found in the book of Psalms. It could easily come from in the book of Psalms, but it doesn t. It s in Isaiah, a book that s filled with writings that ache with hurt and deep disappointment. This psalm, which was read this morning, was one of the common prayers of the people of Judah. What I mean by that is, it wasn t the private prayer of a single individual, but was a prayer that was shared amongst the people in the Jewish faith community during times of worship, the way we sing hymns together during our worship services.
But if this is a common prayer, we can also call it an uncommon common prayer. This psalm is an abrasive blend of high praise and whiny pout; deep faith and terrible despair; soothing comfort and searing pain. This isn t the kind of prayer you really expect to find in the Bible; but then again, for the people of Judah, things hadn t turned out the way anyone expected. The people who sang this psalm believed that their nation had been created and blessed by God. God had promised to increase their prosperity and always protect them from their enemies. But it seems that God s blessing to Israel wasn t indisputable, because God hadn t protected them from the Babylonians. Some prophets reassured Israel that God s own people, living in a land that was promised to them by God, would never be conquered; but it did happen. The Babylonians swept down from the north, raided and laid waste to Jerusalem, and reduced the proud citizens of that proud city to eating dogs and rats. And after Jerusalem fell, and after the very temple of God was burned as if that weren t devastating enough the dreaded marauders hauled off the royal families of Judah and made them slaves in Babylon. Those who remained in Jerusalem were left in ruins not just the ruins of the city, but the ruins of their own lives, the ruins of their hope, and the ruins of their faith in God. What had happened? What had gone wrong? Whether or not they could ever find adequate answers to those questions, they had to go on living. But how do you do that? How do you keep on keeping on when nothing makes sense anymore? How do you carry on when your faith in God, that was once such a comfort and assurance, is now a mocking wound in your flesh? What do you do when you ache like that? You turn to God. You go to God s temple to pray. And what do you do when that temple is a burned out ruin? You go to the ruins of the temple and pray there, with the smell of smoke in your nostrils. That s what these people did. They prayed beside the shattered remnants of the temple. They reflected on their immediate surroundings when in their psalm they sang: Our holy and beautiful house, where our ancestors praised you, has been burned by fire; and all our pleasant places have become ruins. In the ruins of the temple, with the smell of ashes raw in their throats, they prayed and sang their psalm. There were glimmers of praise in it: You, O LORD, are our Father; our Redeemer from of old is your name. And they remembered better days, and wondered what had happened since then:... you did awesome deeds that we did not expect; you came down [and] the mountains quaked at your presence. From ages past no one has 2
heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him. You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But remembering their God of old only increased their sense of despair. God seemed to have abandoned them. Maybe God left them high and dry because of their wrongdoings; so the people confessed that: We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. But then, it slips out:... for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity. Why have we fallen away? Why have we done wrong? It s God s fault: You, Lord, have hidden your face from us. How can we possibly be faithful, God, when we can t see you and can t know your presence? As the psalmist of Isaiah wrote: Why, O LORD, do you make us stray from your ways and harden our heart, so that we do not fear you? You were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself, we transgressed. Back in the 1960s and 1970s (I m dating myself now), Flip Wilson had a comedy routine where he used to say, The devil made me do it. Well, long before Flip came up with that catch phrase, the people of Judah had a phrase of their own: God made me do it. This isn t a theme we re used to hearing in the Scriptures. The people who prayed this prayer may sound whiny; they may offend us with the frankness with which they blame God; but their prayer is utterly daring and audacious. These were no Pollyanna prudes addressing the Lord here, pretending that God is in heaven and all is right with the world. And they didn t walk away cynically, as if their belief in God was some project or experiment that just didn t work out for them, therefore, they decided to call it quits. No, the people praying this uncommon prayer were clearly in it for the long haul. They planned on hanging in there with God, right til the end, even when they were at their lowest ebb. Like Abraham and Moses and Job, they called God to accountability. Other people might conclude that the ancient promises of God were false, were a fraud or a lie; and still others might recall God s pledge to bless them, shrug their shoulders and decide that they must have been mistaken. But these worshippers whom Isaiah wrote about well, they might not have come up with the most appealing psalm in the Bible, but we can say this about them: they had a resilient faith that wouldn t let God off the hook. And they weren t afraid to express to the Lord their rage, hurt and confusion. 3
Another thing can also be said about them: they knew that something was terribly wrong, and only God could fix it. They understood that their moral fractures were so great, they couldn t possibly heal them on their own. They looked at their ruined city and knew that something was out of sorts so deep down that only God could adequately redeem and save them. They were a people who vividly remembered the history of their faith; and because they remembered, they understood that the world wasn t theirs God made it. And they remembered that they didn t belong to themselves. Listen to us, Lord, they say: Now consider, we are all your people. They prayed with the audacious confidence of people who understood that, whatever else may be true, they were God s own, beloved children. Therefore, their problems were also God s problems. Long ago, God chose to be deeply involved in their lives. God made an unbreakable covenant to be their God, and to make the Hebrews God s chosen people. And their prayer was intended, in no uncertain terms, to remind God of that covenant. Now consider, we are all your people. What would it be like for us to pray with such audacity? To say, Lord, there s something broken within us, and fixing it isn t just a matter of trying to be nicer to each other, or striving to be a little kinder and gentler, or even to Keep Christmas in our hearts all year round. Something is significantly off about the way we human beings live; the way we can t or won t love our neighbors or forgive those who have wronged us; about the things we want for ourselves and the things we refuse to share with other people. Something is seriously wrong, Lord, and most of the time we blame someone else or beat ourselves up, but none of that works for us. Yes, something is definitely wrong, God, and only you can fix it. You made us, Lord, and you alone can heal us. Now consider, we are all your people. And what would it be like to pray like that for our community, our state, our nation and the world? To admit that we have a billion opinions and thousands of vested interests but not a clue about how to live well together? The problem isn t poor leadership, the President of the United States or the Congress. The problem isn t high taxes, the budget deficit, undocumented immigrants or Muslim radicalism. And the problem isn t us. The problem, we have to admit in the end, is that we don t even know what the problem really is; but it feels like a sickness of the human soul, and it goes down deep and it hurts, and we want to be healed but we can t heal it ourselves. So we need to call on the Lord to do for us what we re unable to do for ourselves. Yet, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. So, mold us, dear God; kneed us and shape us into the people you want us to be; the 4
people you created us to be. My friends, Advent yearning and hopeful waiting are in constant danger of being trounced on and overwhelmed by preparations for Christmas. We think Christmas or, more specifically, our society s way of celebrating Christmas is enough to distract us and brighten up things for a little while. Like the peppy Christmas song declares, We need a little Christmas, right this very minute. We need a little Christmas now. But even the peppy, cheerful beat of that song can t disguise its sadness, because the version of Christmas most of us celebrate just leaves us emptier and more disillusioned, because we can t give ourselves, and we can t create for ourselves, what we truly need. We ask children, and we ask each other, What do you want for Christmas? Well, the psalm we read today sweeps away any illusions we have that what we find under the tree will finally give us peace and bring joy and contentment to our lives. Because this psalm makes it totally clear is that what we truly need for Christmas is to fill our emptiness and heal our hurts, is God. It tells us that what we need, what our community needs, what our nation needs, what this world needs, what we all need, and need desperately, is God s healing. And so it is that, what we yearn for this Advent season is what the people of Judah yearned for thousands of years ago. We re different people, and we live in different times, but we have the very same hunger. O Lord, that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence. Will you keep silent? Will you keep silent, Lord? That s what we wait for, this Advent season: for God to break the silence and respond to us in our need, our despair, our hunger and our emptiness. We wait for God to answer us. We wait for our Savior, and our salvation, to come. That is the yearning, and that is the prayer of the faithful; and that s our prayer, as well, this Advent season. Don t be silent, Lord. Speak to us! Come down to us! Save us! May God not delay too long before replying to our prayer. And may we never give up hope and remain strong in faith while we wait for the Lord s response. Amen. 5