By
Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.
Flat
Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership,
The
First Sunday of Advent (Cycle A),
December 1st, 2019
Christmas is just around
the corner. Hopefully you’ve already
begun to ‘make your lists and check them twice?’
If you’re still working
on it how about checking off something good for your children, grandchildren,
nieces or nephews—-one of those fun, great, classic books to read could be good
ol’ Dr. Seuss? In his classic called “Oh, the Places You'll Go!” Seuss even has
a poem that expresses these next 4 weeks, called “The Waiting Place... for people just waiting: “Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come,
or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the
phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No....”
I hope the answer is
“yes”, because it's Advent. Christmas is
coming and many people are now, officially in waiting. My favorite memory of waiting for Christmas
was in icy cold Germany, going to a well-lit Adventmarket, riding a Ferris
wheel with our daughter in subfreezing weather and eating a daily chocolate morsel
from an Adventskalender. That Kalendar’
was made for children, but was also enjoyable by adults, who at Christmas,
return to the dreams of their childhood.
While none of us like to
wait, in general, waiting is at least a little more tolerable when what we are waiting
on is Christmas.
THE WORD…ISAIAH SAW (v.1)
In today’s text we are
introduced to Isaiah’s dream of waiting for a whole new world; a new reality he
believed will come into the world. Most
interestingly, Isaiah does not ‘hear’ these words, but he sees them. He wants his hearers to see them too. His vision is so thick, ‘you can cut it with
a knife’.
It’s a beautiful vision,
but you’ll notice it’s about what should be, or what shall be, and it’s a
vision of what is not yet. If you dream
of a world like Isaiah saw, you’ll have to learn how to wait.
Advent is the church’s traditional waiting time. Each year during Advent, the church waits
for Christmas. Most people love Christmas…unless,
you’re someone who feels more lonely this time of year. You’re family is grown up and gone, or if
you’re having to celebrate Christmas alone.
In this case, it might not be Christmas you’re waiting on, but you can’t wait to get through Christmas. You’re waiting for a new year, or maybe you feel
or fear that you’re now waiting on less and less, or nothing at all. As hall of fame catcher, Yogi Barra once
remarked, "The future ain't what it used to be."
But Isaiah reminds us
that it’s not just Christmas that we are waiting on, it’s a whole new, Christmas-like
world. It’s that world many fantasize
about when they say, ‘I wish everyday
were like Christmas!’ It’s the kind of world we mean when we recite that
angelic greeting: “…on earth peace, good
will toward all people.”
The true church isn’t simply
waiting on Christmas gifts, or family traditions, nor even church traditions
either. The church, like the world too,
struggles with what Christmas should mean.
Sometimes we who are charged with the responsibility for helping others get
into the ‘true Spirit of Christmas’ also have a hard time getting into the
spirit and can’t wait until it’s over.
It’s not that we mind Christmas or that we mind the wait, but because
there are so many extra things to do this time of year that we wouldn’t mind
skipping some of the activities, especially the extra meals and pounds that
come.
Besides that, what is it
about this time of year the church should be still be waiting for? Wasn’t Jesus born long ago? And how much has the world really changed
since then, since he came, taught, died, was raised, and ascended away? What difference has Christmas made in this
broken world? We too are still waiting
for God’s truth and redemption to come to some kind of completion, or at least
a fuller expression.
And this kind of waiting
can be hard. Just when it appears the
world, the politic, or the moral situation might get better and that God’s glory
and fullness might come—on earth, as in heaven, it doesn’t. Things fall apart. Things get worst. People disappoint us. Hope gets lost again, again, and again. The future ain’t what it used to be, and even
if we still hope for something to happen, we still have to learn how to wait.
On a lighter note, perhaps
something we can all relate to, waiting
is part of everyday life too. Our
whole life is filled, one way or another, with waiting. The robot voice on the telephone puts us on hold. “If you
like this or that department press 1. If
you like another department press 2. You
push a lot of buttons, but you seldom get a person.” If you try to get a person, then they fill
your waiting with bad, irritating music.
These kinds of moments
of waiting happen everywhere. The doctor
is late. Your order hasn't come. The
elevator must be stuck. Your spouse is late. Will the snow ever melt, the rain
ever stop, the paint ever dry? Will anyone ever understand? Will I ever change?
Life is a series of
hopes… hours spent waiting and half-fulfillments. In our human condition of unsatisfied desire,
we even have to wait on the fullness of salvation. Advent invites us to ‘learn’ how to wait. It calls us to understand this time of
waiting with patience and with hope. But
how do we learn how to wait in hope, especially when life can seem hopeless? How can we wait when our dreams, and God’s
dream hasn’t fully come true?
One thing that helps, I
believe, is to realize that we don’t wait alone. We are not the first people to be in
‘waiting’ on a better day, and we most probably won’t be the last. The children of Israel were captive as slaves
in Egypt for an impossible length of
time. They were longing to be set free from Pharaoh's taskmasters. What we now know is that their freedom would
have meant nothing to them if they had not had the incubation of a long, hard
wait.
Or fast forward to Moses
leading them out of bondage. Instead of being able to go directly from Egypt to
the Promised Land, they had to take a detour by the way of Sinai and a 40-year
trek through the wilderness so they could be hammered into becoming a nation
that was strong enough, hearty enough, and hungry enough to overtake and claim
the land.
Now, here in today’s
text, in Isaiah’s time, God’s people were waiting again. What were they waiting for? They were waiting for righteousness to return
in the land; and later, they would be waiting as captives in Babylon, longing
for God ‘to tear open the heavens and
come down.’ Three times in Isaiah
64, prophet and people demand God's presence to intervene again in history.
Three times they acknowledge their failure and its consequences. People confessed
their unclean condition and how their lives were fading away like a leaf.
What the prophet realized,
and what we must come to realize too, is that everything finally rests in God's
hands. We are but clay, and we return to
dust. Something like this is being confessed
on both sides of today’s text. At one
point, Isaiah even says, that if it weren’t for a few righteous ‘survivors’ (1:7), Jerusalem would be
like ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’. You can examine his heartbreak for
yourself.
The situation in
Isaiah’s day was certainly not as healthy as it could have been. People then, and people now, still have a tendency
to live rebellious, complacent, unhealthy, and unhappy lives. And it is exactly because we are not who we
should be, and are unable to move beyond who we are, and aren’t, that ‘creative
waiting’ seems to be a part of God’s plan. For not only do we wait, God waits too.
THE LORD'S HOUSE SHALL BE ESTABLISHED
So, what is God waiting on? Perhaps
we get at least is glimpse of it in this text. You’re probably already familiar with some of these
lines: “They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into
pruning hooks” (Isa. 2:4 NIV). These
words are so impressive they have been carved into an Isaiah Wall, located in a
park connected to the United Nations Building in New York City.
These are beautiful, hope-full words; but how realistic are they in a
world like ours? When you examine this picturesque hope Isaiah
envisions for the world, you realize just how unrealistic it was then, and
still is now. This is NOT the kind of
world we live in. It does not even seem
to be possible in the world as we know it.
This is true on many different levels.
For one thing, Jerusalem is not the tallest mountain in the Holy Land. Thus, there is no genuine physical reality
being projected here. Second, the city
of Jerusalem is not at the center of the world, then or now. People might go to Jerusalem on vacation, or
to see the ancient ‘holy sites’ to examine that is still the place where three
major religions meet--- Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, but who would say
that people might actually go there to ‘be taught’ God ways? Besides, what good can Jerusalem politics
have to teach the world? Even more so,
who even comes to the church in their own neighborhoods, let alone make some
kind of pilgrimage to Jerusalem?
Obviously, ours is not a culture that likes to wait; and especially not
to wait on God. Instead, we are being pushed ever faster in our desire to hurry up by
the advances of technology. God does not
give hope; technology gives hope. While
this vision of ‘beating swords into
plowshares, and spears in to pruning hooks’ displays a hopeful image, we know
all too well that we live in a violent world, where the religious ‘paths’
seem to prove unworkable, invalid, or irrelevant. Through high tech advances we may ‘get still’ and ‘know’, but what is in the ‘know’ is not to ‘learn’ from God.
The big problem many
people have with Israel’s God is right here in this Advent text. This hope of peace which Isaiah pictures has not
fully or finally come, no matter how long, how hard, nor how much people have
prayed, worked, or waited. No matter what
human ingenuity invents or what God has promise, this kind of peaceable future
never comes. We just cannot seem to get
to this idyllic world. We cannot even get
to the kind of world where the dream of world peace is even partially realized.
Besides, how can
anything like this actually happen when religion seems to be the problem,
rather than a solution? When Jew, Muslim and Christian can’t get together, religion
appears to be a root cause of persistent hate, violence, and war. No matter how beautiful, how can a religious
vision offer hope in a world that has lost trust in any kind of ultimate,
absolute, or shared understanding of hope, or singular way of truth?
So, is there still
anything in Isaiah’s vision for us to wait and hope for? When will ‘the LORD Establish it? Where is the ‘word’ or the ‘world’ WE can
see’ (2:1)? In a world where
technology rules, where human differences dominate, and when religion seems to
divide us more than unite us, why should we still learn to ‘wait on the Lord’ (Isa. 26:8), or become
“still (to) know that (HE IS) God…" How can we still believe that Israel’s
God will be ‘exalted above the nations’
(Psalm 46: 10)? Like children,
having to endure the reading of the Christmas story as a ‘devotional’ before
unwrapping presents, why do we have to wait?
MANY PEOPLE WILL COME
I saw a most interesting ‘spot’ on the news the other day. The CBS News team where showing pictures of ‘Flying
Saucers’; photos of what appeared to be a couple of ‘alien spacecrafts. These photos were taken, not by quacks, but by
the US Military. These photos had been
top secret but were being released to the public. According to the report, many
unanswered questions still remained, not just by viewers, but also by the
Government. No one actually knows or is
ready to say just what is ‘out there’, but people keep seeing and photographing
‘something’.
Are you laughing? That’s how many
people imaging waiting on this God, or waiting for the Jesus who never
comes. But this expectation, or persistent
human belief that there is ‘something’ or ‘someone’ out there, is never ending,
isn’t it? And this belief in UFO’s can
also be strangely similar to those Jews who still leave an empty chair, in case
Elijah returns. Or it’s like Christians
who expected Jesus to return in 1844 and also in 1988. It’s even similar to the belief among Muslims
who expect not only Jesus, but wait also for a future witness named Mehdi, who will
finally clarify who Jesus was and that Mohammed is God’s ultimate prophet. It is part of our human nature to ‘wait’, to
‘hope’, to ‘envision’ and to dream; even to project our ‘fears’ about the future
into the future that is still coming.
Alien sightings and religious visions might sound silly to some, but even
such strange sightings and visions actually go to the core our deepest human needs
and feelings. All belief, religious or
not, tap into our our ‘hopes and fears of all the years…’, as the song
says, our longings and fears of what might be or could be.
Isaiah’s vision too, envisions the broad human hope for what is most needed
in our world too. Religion provides a ‘framework’,
an openness, and the offer of a share awareness of how things should be, giving
a capacity for hope and imagination, which inspires us to pray and work toward
what is possible, even in a world where there seems to be little hope.
And any shared vision must include exactly what Isaiah imagined—-a vision
beyond what we now experience, which is not just for Israel or only for us, but
a vision for ‘many peoples’ and for ‘all nations’. There is no true hope for the world, without
hope for all the world. The remaining
question, which Isaiah does not fully answer here, is how do we get to this peaceful,
united, and transformed world? How do we
from the way things are, to the way the world should be? How do we get ‘many peoples’ and ‘all
nations’ to see, to dream, and especially to be inspired to ‘wait’ for what
Isaiah saw?
"The greatest revelation is stillness"
said Lao-Tse the ancient Chinese philosopher.
Good things, even great things, begin to be seen and understood in the ‘stillness’
of waiting. You cannot get to the highest
mountain or the highest hope in a rush. It
was in such a stillness of waiting that we too become aware of the Holy Spirit
and of Jesus. It was indeed, only in
‘stillness’ that Mary yielded to bearing God into the world. It is only in our own willingness to ‘be still and know’ God’s ways, which are
not our ways, that unhopeful people can find hope for the fullness of God’s peace.
It was in a such a
difficult place of ‘stillness’ and waiting that Nelson Mandela, who spent 27
years - 10,000 days -- as a political prisoner in South Africa, learned God’s
peace. During this waiting time, the revolution was taking shape. Discontent
with apartheid was brewing in the soul of his country. Twenty-seven years of
waiting and wondering, 10,000 nights of loneliness and separation, 27 years of
depravation and humiliation. But it was i that very ‘waiting place’ strength
and focus, vision and determination were forged so that when the apartheid system fell, Mandela could emerged
to preside over a free nation. He wrote: "It was during those long and hungry years that my hunger for the
freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white
and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be
liberated just as surely as the oppressed. When I walked out of prison, I knew
my mission to liberate the oppressor and the oppressed, " he said (Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (New York:
Little Brown & Company, 1994), p. 64. I got this and the idea from
this sermon from Bill Self).
It was in such a
‘waiting place’ (I borrow this phrase from Bill Self) that Mandela choose God’s
purpose for his life. It was there he
learned to choose the way of peace rather than to threaten with force and violence.
It was in the ‘waiting place’ where his
own heart was transformed.
We too have choices to
make about our own future, don’t we? Everything
isn’t already written in the stars or even in this vision. Like one Christian scholar wrote, we still
have to choose between Mt. Zion or Armageddon. Pessimism speeds the arrival of
Armageddon. Hope for peace keeps us working
with the God who dreams and hopes through us.
Today, we live in this ‘waiting
place’ too. It is a place where we wait
for what is to come, but it is also a place where hearts can be transformed for
God’s transforming purpose, we too are called to envision and embrace. It was in such a ‘waiting place’ that an angel
came singing the chorus announcing Jesus’ birth: “Glory to God in the
Highest, and on earth, peace …!” It
is such a waiting place, that something new and unexpected can still be born. Amen.
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