AWAITED

A Sermon Based Upon Isaiah 64: 1-9

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

First Sunday of Advent (B),   November 30, 2014

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence-- (Isa 64:1 NRS)

Harry Emerson Fosdick was pastor of Riverside Church in New York City for many years.  When he retired, he moved to Bronxville, but he maintained an office in Manhattan, daily traveling by train into the city.     "He soon noticed that every morning a fellow commuter, whom he knew casually and who always caught the same train, would pull down the window shade as the train passed 128^th Street, and then he would close his eyes.

Having observed this ritual for a while, Fosdick said to the man across the seat, `I have watched you pull your shade every morning, and I'm curious as to why.'   The other man explained, `I was born in that slum, and I find it painful to be reminded of those early days. Besides, there is nothing I can do about the pain.'     After a sympathetic silence, Fosdick responded, `I don't mean to poke around in your private life, but surely you could at least leave the shade up.'" (P.C. Ennis, p. 26, Journal For Preachers, Advent, 1993.)

It’s not easy to ‘leave the shade up’ in a world that is full of so woe and worry.   But as we move these next 4 Sunday’s of Advent, from Thanksgiving to Christmas, the Old Testament prophecy of Isaiah is going to ask us to ‘leave the shade up’ on our world and in our hearts.

DESPAIR

This first Scripture from Isaiah 64 asks us to look at the despair and desperation of those Hebrew exiles, as they returned to their homeland in Jerusalem from exile in distant Babylon.

         You would think it would have been nice to come home, after being away so long. 

        You would think they would be excited to cross the Jordan River and return to their             

                 ‘Promised Land’. 

You would think that God would be there waiting for them, like a family waiting on a prisoner who has just be released, with arms wide open full of

         welcome and warmth.       You would think….    but that is not what happened at all.

That feeling of leaving the wealthy city of Babylon and returning to the dusty desolation of their homeland must have been something like a person feels when they lose their home in a fire, or in a hurricane, or a tornado, or maybe even when someone returns from the funeral of their spouse or best friend.  They are alive.  They are even glad to be alive.  But when they look around they don’t know how they are going start again.  They look around in complete dismay and desperation, wondering why this has happened and worrying how they will ever start their life again.

That’s how Teresa and I felt when we learned that our only daughter had a mental illness.  We knew there were some issues going on, but we still hadn’t put our figure on it.  She had just started high school and wanted to play on the volleyball team.  I told her, when you come home from school, I’ll take you outside and we’ll practice a little and I’ll teach you some skills.  “That’s O.K., Dad”   I thought she was just being a teenager.  The week went and at the end of the week, she came home with a disappointed look.  “I didn’t make it”.   I tried to console her, but she said she was fine.   It was a strange that she worked through it that fast.  Within the next week everything fell apart.   It wasn’t about the volleyball.   Her behavior became self-destructive.  She wasn’t on drugs.  It was worse than that.   The chemicals in her brain weren’t firing correctly, the doctor told us.  “I’m not like you!”  She told us.  “I can’t think like other people.”  She went from making straight A’s in Latin, to making C’s and just getting by.  Nothing made her happy.  Nothing made her sad.   She was a ‘mind’ in her own world, with only brief moments any sense of normalcy.    We did all kinds of therapies, medicines, treatments, counseling to try to help.  All we could do is watch her mind and her life become as desolate as a desert.

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,…” (64.1) was how prophet echoed the desperation of the people.    Have you ever been in a situation of total desperation?   As we enter this Christmas season many are feeling the desperation of poverty, of the stress of life, of joblessness, or uncertainty and fear of the future.   Most of us have been there, or we will:  You feel all alone.  You wonder how you will make it through another day.  You wonder why God has done this to you and you worry that God might be against you, rather than for you.   “The mass of people…” the great poet Thoreau wrote, “lead lives of quiet desperation…”   Then he adds,  “A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games of amusements.”  When I repeat that line, I can’t help but think of how the recent comedian, Robin Williams, kept a straight face, even told jokes, and helped people, all to cover up his own true feelings of despair, until his “quiet desperation” finally took away the last bit of energy he had for life.

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down…”  If you only go up a few sentences before today’s text begins, you will notice the prophet crying out for the LORD to ‘look down from heaven and see, from (his) holy and glorious habitation (63.15a).   That’s how everything else looks when you are in a moment of depression and despair.  Everyone else is looking down on you.   Everyone else is ‘holy’ and has a ‘glorious’ living.   You are the one who is left alone.  Even God himself has gone into hiding, it seems.  Even the one who promised to ‘never leave or forsake us’ or the one who promises that ‘nothing will ever separate us from the love of Jesus Christ’, where is He?  Where is that love now?  Where are those promises now?   Or as Isaiah puts it in the rest of this verse, “Where are your zeal and your might?  The yearning of your heart and your compassion?  They are withheld from me” (63:15b).   When we feel like this, it is very hard to ‘leave the shade up’.   When we feel like all we want is to put down the shades,  crawl into darkness, and have the world come to an end.

Just the other day, I ran into a fellow who was looking around at the troubles of our world, maybe in his own world too, and he was saying to me, that according to the Bible, we are in the end times,  the signs are everywhere, and it won’t be long now.    “It’s in the Bible.  It’s all in according to the Bible”,  he said,  treating the Bible more like a crystal ball he’d read at a Séance, than a book of hope, he’d read at church.   

I listened to him tell about how bad things are, agreeing with him that there is much trouble around, but then I answered something like: “I know we want Jesus to come,  (for God ‘to tear open the heavens and come down’, but don’t count on it to happen like we think.”   “What do you mean?”, he asked me.     I answered, people have predicted and even prayed for the end of the world to come, but it hasn’t.   Even Jesus said, “When you think it’s the end, don’t count on it!” (Mark 13:7 , KJV).   When Jesus spoke about the end of the world, it was the end of Jerusalem, but it was also the beginning of the church.    When the Romans thought it was the end of Rome, it was, but it was only the beginning of Christianity.   When people have thought, many times in the past, that the world was ending, or that the Martians were landing, or whatever might happen,  it normally didn’t happen exactly that way.   When we look back in history, normally, it was even only a part of their world that ends, and then life started back up again, though in a very different way.  

During the great depression in the United States in the 1930’s, everyone thought it was the end of the world, the end of America and the end of their lives.   There were some people who even took their lives, thinking there was no way out.  Someone went to an economics expert and asked him,  “How long do you think this depression will last?”  “When do you think it will end?” they asked.    The expert answered that the last time things got this bad lasted 400 years.   They called it the Dark Ages!  (As quoted from Ken Burns Series on the Roosevelts, Sept. 2014).   But even the dark ages came to an end, but the world didn’t.

This “quiet desperation” among those Israelites who returned from exile, and went back to the desolation in Jerusalem, was difficult and depressing.  It is true, that ‘their own world had ended’, and it would never be the same again.   They returned home, and it didn’t feel like home.    Everything was different, and worst of all, it even felt as if God wasn’t there.   The feeling they had was not that God didn’t exist, but it was as if God was in his ‘holy’ and ‘glorious’ heaven and God didn’t care.   Can it get any worse than that?

DIGNITY

Even though predictions of the end of the world have always failed (Thank God!), or the realities we have awaited have often proved to be more complicated and quiet different than we thought (Thank God again), there is a certain ‘dignity’ to those who feel ‘disquiet’ and ‘desperation’ when the world around us become ‘desolate’.  

When the people and the prophet looked around in their own moment of ‘rude awakening’, they remembered how it was and hoped for how it could be again---how things could be better and how they might be different than they are and how they might make their world better than it was.    Isaiah hoped the “mountains would quake at (God’s) presence” (vs 1),  just it did in ‘ages past’,  like it did with Moses on Mount Sinai, or with Joshua at Jericho.   The people’s desire for “God to come down” and “make known his awesome deeds” was also a desire for them to   ‘gladly do right’, the text tells us.   They were prodigal sons and daughters coming home, and their wanted to be their father’s child again, and to make their Father proud.   We have a desire like that, even when we are surrounded by desolation, there is dignity and there is a sign of hope.  

When those fires were releasing their terrible, destructive force in California,  you could hear the desperation of people who had lost it all.   “Everything I’ve worked for all my life for all these years, gone!”   That is a terrible feeling.  But what might be even worse is that building a house made of wood and stumble is all you have accomplished in all your life.   I prefer, the spirit of that couple I heard in Oklahoma, after the Tornado leveled their home and an entire down.  “It hurts, yes, but it’s just brick and mortar.  We’re thankful to have our lives.  We will rebuild.  We will not let this get us down.”

Thomas Edison had worked for months, all day and late into the night, trying to invent the light bulb.  As he came out of his lab one evening, he looked exhausted.  A friend asked, "How many experiments have you done already?" "More than 1,900," Edison replied. "More then 1,900!" exclaimed the colleague. "That's incredible. You must feel very disappointed by now, very much a failure."

Edison straightened to his full stature, and his eyes glistened. "Not at all," he said. "I don't feel like a failure. I've made so much progress. You see, I now know more than 1,900 things that won't work. One of these days, I'm going to hit on the one that does." (Maxie Dunham, Perceptions, p. 76)

When the world around us is not working, people with dignity and faith, keep working, and they also keep looking around for what will work as they keep working themselves.   Even in moments of ‘quiet’ or ‘noticeable’ desolation and desperation, people prove the values of dignity in their heart.   They know, to put it bluntly, that wherever God appears to be hiding in the moment,  God will ‘meet those who gladly do right’.    We too, in times like these, or any times for that matter,  must keep on ‘doing right’, ‘praying for the kingdom’ and doing the good works we are called to do, in the name of Jesus, who also never gave up.   We ought to remember his words, when he also contemplated the end of everything.   He not only said, when there were ‘wars and rumors’ of wars ‘that the ‘end was not yet’ (Mk. 13.7), but he also said,  “the gospel must be preached to all” (Mk 13.10) and that ‘those who endure to the end will be saved (Mk. 13.13).”   Keeping our dignity and our determination in troubled times may not be the sign of the end, but it might just be the sign of a new beginning---a new beginning with God and a new beginning of God at work in the world.

DEPENDANCE

The hardest thing we ever have to do, as a person and a Christian, is to keep working for the good and staying true to our faith, while we wait on that new day to come.   Waiting and wondering what will happen next is the hardest work of all.   But we will have to wait, the prophet says.   We have to ‘gladly do right’ and wait on God, because there is no other God we can depend upon.   “No eye has seen any God besides you”,  the text says.  There is no other God other than the God “who works for those who wait for him.” (v. 4).    Do see what the Israelites had learned in Exile away in rich, but pagan Babylon.   Even, back there when they had everything they wanted, they came to realize there was no other God they could truly depend upon, other than their God, so they had to learn to wait.

Desmond Tutu, the gentle prophet who remained faithful during  South Africa's terror, said that to be a Christian means to be a prisoner—a prisoner of hope and grace.  In our Christian baptism, we too surrender to God because we have been captured by the powerful, overwhelming, everlasting love of God.  There is nothing we can do to escape the prison of Christ's promise to us—the irresistible pull of his purpose and hope of our lives.   (As told by Susan Andrews, in her sermon, Alert in the Abyss, www.goodpreacher).

Life---even life in the grace of God, can certainly feel like a prison sometimes.  When that happens we have a choice to make.  We can choose to feel boxed in and defeated when come to realize the limits of our situation, or we can submit to the discipline of waiting for God with dignity and awareness of our full and necessary dependence on God.  Scripture tells us, and our experience of God’s love and grace assures us, that to be imprisoned by God's grace is to be invited into new kind of freedom---a freedom of hope---and this hope in one that will prove to be worth the wait.

 

DIFFERENCE

But what difference does waiting make?   If God can give us hope, why can’t we have God come down and fix everything right now?  Like children, who want Christmas to be here tomorrow, we cry out our questions of frustration and impatience to God.   “O that you would tear open the heavens, and come down….”  

We all want God to come, or do we?  Do we really?   And if God did come, would we even notice, or would we recognize him any better then, than we do now?  They did not recognize Jesus, when he came, did they?   What makes us any better at responding to the things that God gives us to bring us hope?   Desolation and despair can drive us to our knees in dignity with a desire to do right, and it might even bring us to realize our need and dependency upon God, but why doesn’t God make himself fully known right now, revealing himself, fixing the messiness of the world, bringing his kingdom that is always coming, but never comes, why doesn’t he do it all at once, and once forever?   What difference and what value is there that we have to wait?  What is this ‘waiting’ all about?

Waiting is not always what we want, but it might be what we need.   Let me explain.  Are you ready for Christmas, tomorrow?   The children are, but of course, they don’t understand, but you do.   When you haven’t done all your shopping, you aren’t ready for Christmas to come tomorrow.   When Christmas comes too fast, too soon, and too often or too early, you surely can become bored and unenthused with it all.   How many of us complain about how the stores start putting up Christmas trees, sooner and sooner?  Once they started Christmas after Thanksgiving.  Then, the start to show up the week before Thanksgiving.  Before you know it, you start seeing Christmas decorations right after Halloween.   Now, it’s already starting not just before Halloween, but my Lord, now the WMU have “Christmas in August, or July”.  

We all want Christmas to come, just like we all want our hopes to be fulfilled, but what will we do with ourselves when it happens.   I guess we all be like that cynical person who wonders what they will do up in heaven for eternity.   Won’t it be a little boring, they think to themselves?  We might then start realizing too, just like a child must also learn, that getting what we want , when we want, is not always the best thing.     Not long ago, on the news I heard about what the Rock musician Sting, told the press.   He said, I quote, “My children will not be inheriting my 180 Million Pounds.  They will have to work for a living and earn their own way.  Besides, he’s going to be spending his money, anyway.  He doesn’t want to leave them trust funds that will be Albatrosses around their necks…  He fears it would ruin them not to have to learn to learn to wait and to work. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2662557/Sting-I-earned-money-hard-work-You-try-singing-two-hours-getting-plane-day.html).

I know, that sometimes, when things are difficult or desolate, we can all wonder, Where is God?  Why won’t He show up?   Mark Twain had Huck Finn praying for fish hooks and he didn’t get any, so he quit praying.   Some will lose faith over that, when they look around at what has happened, or how things are, and don’t get what they want, or need, as when prayers seem unanswered.   We all have times when we wonder?  What is God waiting on?   When will Jesus return?  When will the millennial reign of Christ on earth begin?  When will the kingdom come, when the kingdom’s of this world become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ? as Handel wrote.  When will God come to get rid of all our problems and enemies?

I know we don’t like to wait, but I do think Isaiah might have a point, when he says, while we are waiting on God, God could be waiting on us.  Did you read the end of verse 9, when the prophet wrote, “Now, God don’t be too angry at us, because of our sins!  Think about that.  Aren’t you glad God didn’t show up just when you were in the middle of YOUR sins?  But there is more, when the prophet concludes:  Consider this, O LORD, we are ALL your people.”  I just wonder if this realization or reality is what God is waiting on?  While we  want God to ‘tear open the heavens and come down to take care of things,  God may be waiting on us to at least  ‘consider’  that “WE ARE ALL (God’s) PEOPLE?    Could God be waiting on that kind of understanding from us?   One thing for sure, you don’t get that kind of ‘knowledge’ when things are going good.  You only get it when you realize why God is still waiting---and he is also waiting on you.   Amen.