Isaiah 2: 1-5
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| God Is with Us |
Always I find myself being drawn into this short season of Advent, not because Christmas now seems around the corner, but because the readings from Scripture, are urgent, the music of this season is holy, and the divine Spirit of Expectancy is hopeful. They all confront us with a daunting challenge, a challenge that seems to jeopardize our world and which, if you really listen, make life as we know it exceedingly awkward. What is - is going to end, and what is to come – well, it hasn’t arrived.
So we are told to get ready and wait for the coming of Christ who is going to shatter all of our self-sufficiency and heal our hurt, and redefine the conventional wisdom that assures us that we can live in this world on our own terms. Conventional wisdom, dare we say conventional religion, is not biblical, and not Christian, and certainly not Good News because the world we know is not the world that God has in mind.
At the least, Scripture puts us back in touch with the Divine will for this community and for every community that invokes the name of Jesus. We hear again how Jesus expects this to be a place that celebrates alertness and awareness of God in everyday life. He wants this to be a community that calls people out of their religious hesitation in order to make fresh decisions about their lives. He wants people to give up enough of their own stuff so they can serve a world that cries out for compassion and generosity and justice.
Let’s look at that for a moment and understand the context in which Jesus speaks. Isaiah, the prophet, had once prayed ardently for the reign of God, the messianic Prince of Peace, to come, as he says, to restore the fortunes of Israel and to rule over all the earth. Israel is under judgment. She has followed false gods. She has ignored the hurt and marginality in her people. She has, Isaiah says, played the harlot with other cultures.
But within the waiting community there is hope. Things CAN be made right. There CAN be justice and security. There can be, in OT language – “munath” – which is to say…..stability. Isaiah’s vision for stability is one of peace, when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither learn war anymore. In our country there is an Army War College, a US Naval War College, the one that I attended for a period of time, an Air War College, and a National War College. People go to these places to learn how to make war. Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people. And now Jesus picks up with the same prophetic language and announces the cosmic struggle, when the heavens are opened and the earth trembles, and when the coming of the triumphant Christ will be like a mighty flood. And out of the chaos, something new will be born. And look where this reading appears in St. Mathew’s gospel. Matthew places these dire and urgent words immediately before the Palm Sunday narrative and the events that lead up to our Lord’s Passion and his own personal chaos. It is, in fact, one of the final teachings in Jesus’ ministry, a teaching that he uses to sum up what has gone before. He has arrived in Jerusalem for the final time and has come to the temple to teach. It is there that he is challenged by the temple authorities who want to know why he is doing the things of God, and Jesus, in response, rebukes them for their false and hypocritical piety. And then, he tells his disciples about this final struggle between God and the Evil One, that it will be so frenzied that the temple itself will be destroyed, not one stone left upon another. When will this be, the disciples want to know, and Jesus says that the signs are everywhere. Be alert. Watch….Listen…Wait……. for the one who has the authority to both judge and redeem is coming.
I suspect that when you hear that kind of language, you find it archaic. It isn’t always easy for us to identify with the cosmic struggle, with the battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light, although a lot of that seems to be going on these days…. We with our wars and our societal injustice, with our crippled economy, and the killings in our own streets, and the paralyzing congressional dysfunction. You know as well as I do that we are doing battle all the time. In the traditional language of spiritual direction, we call it Spiritual Combat. For however we appropriate the language of cosmic upheaval that Isaiah and Jesus describe, it personifies the battle that you and I are called to every day.
I was on an airplane on October 11th going from Cleveland to Chicago, one month exactly after the Twin Towers were destroyed. I had flown a few times since September 11th, but it was still very unsettling. As we were cinching into our seats, the captain spoke to us, not from the cockpit and over the intercom, but in person from the middle of the aisle at the rear of the plane. He asked us to turn around and look at him. He reminded us that it was October 11. He asked people who were flying for the first time since September 11th to raise their hands. Most everyone did. He assured us that despite the world’s dangers, the plane was secure, that the flight crew was really good at what they do, that there was nothing to worry about. He went on to say that we are a noble people and that the best way to fight terrorism was not to be afraid.
There was absolute silence in the plane. And then the pilot asked us to turn to the person sitting next to us and say hello, much, I suppose, like we do in church…..to introduce ourselves to one another so we weren’t strangers any more. I turned to a woman on my left and put out my hand. She was probably in her mid-twenties, traveling alone, and was one on the ones who was flying for the first time since 9/11. She looked vulnerable, perhaps like one of my children. Who really knows? She said her name was Anne...... that is all she said, and suddenly my eyes welled up and the tears came rolling down my cheeks.
When we are in chaos, when life in unstable, it is hard to wait, and it is hard to be clear about the voices we hear, hard to test and discern which of them is light and which one is darkness and what it is that wants to be born. In this case, as I listened to this young woman say that her name was Anne, I knew that her voice was, in some mysterious way, bearing a word that I needed to hear. What was in that tentative voice that said, “Hello. My name is Anne”? This word - Was it a word of greeting, or hospitality, of healing? Did it sound like the voice of an angel saying “Hail, O favored one. Blessed are you and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus?” We weren’t strangers any more, I knew that, and we weren’t meant to feel alone. Something new was emerging from the chaos of that time just in our being together. And I want to say to you that it has been my experience, not just on that airplane, but elsewhere, that the new thing is so often revealed, not in upheaval, but in some quiet way…… with the still small voice if we are empty enough inside to hear it.
So often, Jesus is our guide and companion in our listening for the word. As he grew up, there must have been so many times when, in difficult circumstances, he heard something in his spirit that came from far beyond the boundaries of the little village of his youth and experience- a yearning, a compassion, a desire for mercy that he began to recognize and name as the Divine Spirit within him, filling him with God’s own yearning and desire for restoration and reconciliation and peace in this world. In time, of course, that word became his life - the word was made flesh we say - the Word of hope, or of forgiveness, or of justice. Some Word that came forth from his heart so that he could give voice to the divine compassion of God...... to give voice to the love of God which is the voice we all need to hear right now. I believe that all of us have that voice within us. Because it is the voice of goodness, and you and I have been created for goodness. A young woman on an airplane at Cleveland’s Hopkins airport, a person whom I will never see again, just by saying her name, spoke that word.
Advent, we have to understand, and I think we do, does not begin with twinkling lights. The natural habitat for Advent people is the community of hurt that is waiting for some divine word of reassurance and, better yet, deliverance. Oh that you would come down cries the prophet Isaiah. Often the word is heard in the silence of prayer or the language of the church, or in a quietness of a poem or in the love of a true friendship. Moments of grace, I call them, as do others. Sometimes the word is found in the saying who we are….., “Hello. My name is Anne”, because what is spoken makes evident the inevitable triumph of what is good and lovely and gracious over all that might make us hurt and be afraid and feel alone.
That same Word is within all of us who gather here this morning. Its goodness is poured into our hearts, the Scripture tells us. May we prepare to hear it this Advent. And for the refreshment and encouragement of others, may we come to speak it. I believe that in time, Christians come to know that the Word for which we wait is found in the living Spirit of this child who is born among us full of grace and truth. And I believe that if we live in him, in the end we discover what the disciples discover: that God is with us – Emmanuel – and God is where we have not yet been. And if that is true, then we have nothing to fear, no matter how mixed up we might feel at any given time. You see, God waits just as we wait, for God is with us in this place and the next place as well.
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12/14/10