Sermon by John Brierly McCall, D. Min., November 27, 2011
Isaiah 64:1-9
On this first Advent Sunday, at the tail-end of Thanksgiving week, there’s a danger of whiplash. Since last Sunday hundreds of pounds of Thanksgiving food have gone out into the community; the red paraments on the altar have gone and the purple of Advent has appeared. The Christmas tree is prominent and will soon have envelopes for our gifts to residents of the Longcreek Development Center; the evergreen wreaths are the walls, and the four candles are ready to mark our progress in preparing for the birth.
For many of us, these customs are an anchor that feels familiar and nurturing.
Last week we marked the final Sunday of the Christian year and focused on gratitude as our response to God’s generosity. Today we begin again. This ancient rhythm calls us to ask the fundamental question: “Into what kind of world was Christ born? Into what kind of darkness has the Light of the Nations come? And can this ‘light shining in the darkness’ change anything?”
That was in the prophets’ question some 3,000 years ago. It was in the hearts of those who toiled under the harsh whip of the Roman Empire. And it has been in the hearts of every believer since. It’s just as much our question.
Not that you could tell from the Black Friday juggernaut: Christmas sales began earlier than ever as retailers hope to make up for a bad year in sales. Eventually the experts will announce their judgment about the health of the economy and whether our recession is a classic single-dip or possibly an unusual double-dip, as if accurate labeling did anything to ease the fears.
If there’s no joy in the retail market, and little hope inside the Beltway can we still find joy in our observance? Yes; yes we can. In this season of Advent we still make a counter-cultural claim that God is still engaged deeply in this Creation and is still guiding every seeker away from darkness and toward the light; away from despair and toward hope; away from all that eats at the soul and toward all that feeds the soul.
I don’t believe for a moment that Christians have lost their claim to Christmas; that we’ve finally reached the time when we have to just go with the flow and give in to the darkness, and pass over all the spiritual preparations so we can rush all the faster through the preliminaries and get on to the gifts and trinkets.
Call me sentimental.
Okay, call me naïve…or worse if you must.
But every year I still want to keep the door open.
I still want us to claim the possibilities of what might happen if we could recognize God coming to us again this Advent.
Many feel God is silent. It may seem so especially in the Christmas season. It’s:
- Hard for you who’ve endured the loss of a loved one this past year or two.
- Hard for you if you’ve lost your job, or if you’re postponing some critical decisions so you can just “get through the holidays.”
- Hard for you who are offended by the crass commercialism that has overtaken much of the season.
- Hard for you who simply dread another winter of the soul.
You may be feeling keenly that God is silent, absent and disconnected from you and your challenges; even uncaring about the struggles that mark your days.
On this first Sunday in Advent, 2011, most of us can testify that we’ve felt God’s silence. But let’s be careful we don’t assume that God’s silence means God’s absence.
The ancient prophet Isaiah spoke the longing of the hearts of the people of Israel who had been enslaved by the ancient Babylonians for nearly 50 years. Through that long exile, and long before, they’d listened for the Word of God… and God had been silent. The people lived with that sense of winter in the heart.
Isaiah begged for a dramatic and stunning appearance:
…tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence – as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil – to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
In everyday language the prophet says: “So where have you been? We’ve been wandering. But it’s time for you to show up and make things right!” Can we see that God is present in those pleas, even in the wailing and the howling that rise up from our souls?
I’ve come to believe that our connection to the Holy One is made manifest in our hunger to make sense of it all. When we enter into the longing that Isaiah expressed we’re drawn deeply into the presence of God.
If God had answered Isaiah’s cry with some explosion or meteor shower, the prophet would have gotten the message. But the world would have long-since forgotten. What effect would that grand gesture some 3,000 years ago have to do with you or me today?
Instead, God broke the silence… but hardly by tearing open the heavens or demolishing the temple. It happened in God’s own time and in quite a different way: quietly, gently, without much fanfare, the Lord God of all the ages who was a master of earthquake, wind, and fire, appeared in the cry of a tiny baby.
So we sing: “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given; so God imparts to human hearts the blessings of God’s heaven.”
Do we have the energy to seek the silent God this Advent? Or are we just too busy with our lives; too disappointed in the past so we’ve just given up? If so, then Christmas will simply come and go as it does year after year without some deeper sense that God has passed through our lives, that the living Spirit dwells deeply in us.
We begin with four candles, daring today to light the first Advent candle – the candle of Hope. We welcome the mystery that’s just beneath the surface.
In that, we dare to believe that our waiting will be pregnant with hope, that it will grow to full-term and will be delivered into the world, screaming like a new-born.
- That hope is born again in a crib in Harlem, and in the home of a child whose dad died on 9/11.
- That hope is witnessed in the peasant girl in the streets of Iraq, or in the narrow streets of old Jerusalem, or in the little town of Bethlehem (now a Palestinian city).
- That hope is born in the hearts of the Super Committee and jobless construction workers.
- That hope is expressed in the lives of our dear friends who lit the first candle on the Advent wreath reminding us that physical illness doesn’t mean spiritual defeat.
Isaiah cried out and pleaded for God to hear and to tear open the heavens and to come down.
And God did. And God does.
And so we hope, even in the face of all that tells us to fall silent.
When God seems silent, fall to your knees and be still, and listen for the sound of a baby’s cry.
Amen.