Advent 1B - 11/30/14 St. David s Hearing God's Whisper in the Cacophony of the World O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence... Amen. It was as surreal a dichotomy as I remember seeing in quite a while. This past Monday evening, as the President addressed the nation after the Ferguson, Missouri verdict, CNN simultaneously showed the scene on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. At literally the same moment the President was asking for calm and peaceful demonstration, we watched cars being rocked and tear gas flying. We saw businesses being torched and looting taking place, all while the President continued asking for restraint and composure. It was as if we had been transported back to the 1960 s, as if the progress we had made with the bitter hatred and racism that ripped through this country for 200 years had all evaporated. Just a few scant hours later, at 0 dark thirty the next morning, I walked into Catalina United Methodist Church with some other local clergy to meet with Mayor Rothschild. He walked in with a report thicker than most Bibles. It was a commissioned study done by the U of A. It paints an incredibly bleak picture of the level of poverty surrounding us in Tucson, ranking us among the nation s poorest cities. The number that I just cannot get out of my head is that 33% of our children in Tucson live below the poverty line. At the same time, the mayor made it clear that there is virtually no city money to address any of it. Sometimes it is not very easy for us to relate to what is going on in our Hebrew Bible readings. Because we are so detached from that strange world, it often takes 1
extensive in-depth study before we can understand what in the world a text is really all about. But such is certainly not the case this morning, is it? The opening cry of Isaiah sounds pretty darn close to my own prayer Monday night and Tuesday morning. Really God, race riots now, after all we ve been through? One-third of our kids not having enough to eat, right here in Tucson, America? You need to tear down the heavens and rock the Catalinas. You need to make something happen in cataclysmic pyrotechnics. We need a massive display of your presence for all the world to see. And my bet is that most of us here have used very similar words in response to our own life situations. It s funny, when life is going well, we can philosophically ruminate about the inner workings of God, politely discussing whether the essence of the almighty is more Deist or laissez-faire. In the good times, we have no problem with a theology of God who just started the world s clock billions of years ago and has been on a vacation in Hawaii since. But when we see backwards steps like Ferguson, Missouri and hear reports of how difficult life is in our town, when we are feeling our own deep suffering from the punishing events in our personal lives, all that rational philosophy stuff flies right out the window, doesn t it? Deism, my foot. Now is when we want and we need a hands on God. Come on God, you need to save us, right NOW. All of us also know just how those anguished, desperate people in Isaiah s day felt. Think for a moment about the time in your life when you needed God the most, your dark time of despair when you needed to know more than anything else that God was with you. And instead, all you felt was empty, all you felt was alone. Despondent. Afraid. Desperate. 2
Very often, it is events like Ferguson, Missouri or our own time of deepest despair that causes us to really question this whole God thing. If there is such a being, It certainly has no personal concern for me. God abandons us in our time of need, so we abandon God. We also tend at times like this to load in the element of guilt. Why can t I feel God when I need God? What did I do wrong? What s wrong with me? At such a time, people go out of their way to avoid folks like me. The last thing we want to do when we have no awareness of God is talk to a representative of religion. That s because most people think that it s different for me, that I have some magical connection to God that they don t, that I know how to access God when they can t. Therefore, I won t understand what they are going through. Well, guess what? My times without God are just like yours. I too have periods when God seems so far away that I am absolutely convinced that God does not exist. There have been times when my pain and my suffering have been so deep that I was sure I would never, ever heal. I have spent years when I could not walk into a church without crying. And if you think it is difficult when you become convinced that God is dead, imagine having that feeling as a priest. Imagine what it is like to be unable to feel God s presence when you are responsible for cultivating in others an ability to experience God. I don t know about all of you, but I learned that this kind of detachment from God meant a loss of faith. But if that is the case, then it is not just me and you who are atheists, it s also Isaiah. He wants God to come in that lightning bolt because he too has lost God in his life. There is no one who calls on your name, he yells at the sky, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us. It happens to 3
us now and it also happened to almost everyone we encounter in our sacred text. Isaiah makes it clear today that it happened to him, and to virtually all of his fellow Hebrews. We hear it over and over again in the text, yet we still think we are losing faith when it happens to us. I m not just talking about the Hebrew Bible either. We hear it, after all, from Jesus himself. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Very often, the God of our Bible seems to be experienced by our ancestors as an absentee landlord. In fact, it seems that for all of us, part of the experience of faith is having periods of time when we have no faith at all. So if you are feeling the loss of God in your own life right now, take comfort in the fact that we get this honest. Our Biblical ancestors had the same struggles. They too wanted God to appear to them like the grand and all powerful Wizard, because sometimes they could not feel God in their lives either. The problem, at least from my perspective, is that often in our text when someone asks for this over-the-top experience of God, they seem to get it. God in the burning bush, in the mountain, in the thunder, a voice in the clouds, all these high definition experiences of the almighty. And when we hear those stories of God present in their lives, we start questioning again our own faith. How come I don t have such a heart pounding experience of God? How come those people got to have these experiences and I don t? This is for me, one of the more dangerous effects caused by listening to the Bible with a literal ear. When we hear a prophet state, THUS SAYS THE LORD, we understand that the people heard God s voice loud and clear. They experienced a God, we read, that we do not. A God who constantly intervenes, a God who rolls seas over top of enemies and appears to real believers (hear not us) in blinding flashes of light. 4
But if God really did speak to all of them in surround sound, what exactly are we to do with readings like today s? How could a monumental prophet like Isaiah have possibly heard God speak to him through his plasma TV, and then come up with this desperate prayer, obviously addressed to a God he cannot hear with the best hearing aid ever invented? How could a people who watched their Egyptian persecutors get swallowed in a flood, state to Moses the next week that God didn t exist? That is what we do when we slip back into biblical literalism. Of course, Cecil B. Demille had the waters of the Reed Sea part in 200 foot high walls. But when you read the oldest account of the Exodus tale right there in our Bible, what does it say? That the Egyptian chariots could not get to the Israelites because their wheels got stuck in the mud. Yes, when you read the description in Acts of Paul s conversion to Christianity, it does sound like a scene from Harry Potter. But isn t it funny that when we read Paul s own description of that event, it sounds more like a personal inward experience? Biblical descriptions of the presence of God are often written in Hollywood extravaganza language to honor the magnitude of experiencing God in our lives. But the unintended result of that 1000 megapixel language is that all of us begin to believe that if we haven t experienced God in a lightning bolt, somehow our faith must be suspect. The truth of the matter is that the experience of God in Biblical times is no different than it is today. In my own life, I have experienced God most often as in the Blessing that we just used during Creation season. Be alert and be silent, for sometimes God is but a whisper. 5
All of this has suggested to me that the season that we begin today, this season of Advent, just may be the most important one of the year. Advent is a Latin word which means to come or coming. It is the season of...not yet here. Advent is like going to the movies...and leaving after the coming attractions. It is the season when we learn first hand that it is NORMAL to have times in our life when we can feel no God. It is so normal to NOT feel God s presence at times in our lives that we have created an entire liturgical season to acknowledge it. Advent reminds us that often we are going to feel alone, empty, and abandoned by everyone, including God. And what Advent teaches us is that these feelings are not only okay, but essential. It is through them that we will have the opportunity to recognize God s presence when it does come. The lessons of this season are ones we find no where else in our world. What it teaches us is how to find God when we most need God. Advent is all about living with those times in our lives when we become convinced that God is dead. It is the darkest time of year. It is the loneliest time of year. It is uneasy. It is uncomfortable. We want it to go away. But what Advent teaches us is that if we are going to evolve in our faith and deepen our sense of God, we need to know first what it is like to be without God. It is only those times of darkness in our lives that we become still enough to hear the whisper. Advent asks us to live in courage. Don t be afraid of the darkness. Don t be afraid of the fact that God seems to have abandoned you. Try not to panic when it seems like God is gone from your life. Instead, live in the tension. While the world around you leaps to fill the vacuum of Advent with Christmas, stay here. Stay in the emptiness. 6
As Jesus puts it in today s Gospel, none of us knows that day or hour when God will become known to us again. Therefore, we must all keep awake - for we do not know when the master of the house will return, when God will suddenly be obvious to us again. The constant danger in the Advent of our lives is that instead of waiting and staying awake, we will choose to anesthetize ourselves. We will deal with our emptiness and pain, with the loss of God, not by thinking about it, but by keeping ourselves busy with the inane stuff of the world. That s why we have become so afraid to be in silence. That s why we can no longer sit alone without an external form of stimulation. Afraid of what may happen in the silence, we make sure we do not experience it. And in so doing, we could not possibly hear the small voice of God. That is, of course, why the culture in which we live has totally rejected the entire concept of Advent. Instead, it teaches us to keep up the pace. Pump up the volume. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Go immediately to Christmas. And in so doing, the tiny cry of a baby in the back of beyond cannot be heard. So not only do we skip Advent, but we miss the event that we are awaiting. God remains silent in our lives, and the pain we are suffering does not go away. If we are going to have the tools to do something about the constant Ferguson, Missouris and U of A Poverty reports that we will face, we must begin by hearing Isaiah today. We need to stop asking God to come on the clouds and save us from all this, and instead realize that sometimes God is only going to be a whisper, and that sometimes, like now, we are not even going to get that. We need to be willing to watch only the coming attractions. 7
It is truly a counter-intuitive and counter-cultural approach. There is little that our world or our church gives us to live into this patient waiting of a return of God into our lives. But we can do it. I know that because I have seen it. Last year, I introduced you to my Jewish friend, George Harris. He is the one who taught me how to be an Advent person. Some of you might remember that. The symbol of George s ability to wait was the way he ate dinner. He planned everything he would eat beforehand, based entirely on what he was awaiting. Dessert. George did that in every aspect of his life. Not only did he patiently wait through dinner for the best part, for the dessert, he did the same thing in every aspect of his life. I watched him get passed over time after time at work for promotions he deserved, but George took it all in stride. His blood, after all, contained 4000 years of suffering and not getting what he deserved. Beloved, you and I have that same blood. We too can draw on that same Spirit of waiting. Advent can bring God s presence back to us. Advent can give us the tools to deal with the setbacks we will inevitably face in all of our Ferguson, Missouris and all of the overwhelming feelings we will have in trying to deal with the poverty and loss that surrounds us. Everyone will tell you you are an idiot. No one watches the coming attractions and skips the movie. But if you can do it, it will change you. So please don t jump ahead. If we can stay here, all together, we will know just when the master walks back into our lives, and we will experience God with an intensity and a love we have never known before. You will see and you will hear the whisper that makes life marvelous again. Happy Advent. Amen. 8