November 27, 2005
Isaiah 64
O that you would 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! When you did
awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your
presence. From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God
besides you, who works for those who wait for him. You meet those who gladly do right,
those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid
yourself we transgressed. We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our
righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like
the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold
of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our
iniquity. Yet, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are
all the work of your hand. Do not be exceedingly angry, O LORD, and do not remember
iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people. Your holy cities have become a
wilderness,
Sermon
The first Advent
candle is lit; it’s time to start thinking about Christmas. For most of us hearing those words, I think what we
usually have in mind is making plans; working out our schedule; getting all the dates
hammered down; figuring out who’s going to be where, when, and exactly what’s
going to be done. That’s the kind of
thing that goes through our minds when we think about getting ready for Christmas. We think about concrete things, or things you can
pin down. What I think is behind our urge to
plan, our urge to schedule, our urge to make lists and solidify everything into actual
events that are coming up; behind all that there lurks something more fundamental,
something deeper, something that touches our hearts in a place where we’re very
vulnerable and tender. Behind all of our urges
to plan and make schedules, I think, lies the kind of Christmas wish that haunts many of
us if not all of us – the wish for a perfect Christmas.
We might not put
our wish into words, and yet the images that are behind that wish are familiar images. Images of journeying through snow; just the right
amount of snow, to give everything kind of a blanket, drape itself over the pine trees so
they look Christmas-y; maybe accented by pinpoints of brightly colored lights. The journey through the snow at dusk is ending in
somebody’s house where you’re greeted with welcoming arms and welcoming voices
into an atmosphere of pure comfort with the smell of cinnamon or nutmeg filling the air. A fire crackling in the fireplace and you are with
your loved ones; and you gather to sing carols, and you think about Christmases past and
our hopes for Christmases present and future. All
of this I think, lies behind our sense of the perfect Christmas. That’s a very real part of what we’re
doing when we’re getting ready for Christmas.
There’s one
problem with this Christmas wish; it’s a very costly one. Financially costly, often, because it’s this
kind of yearning inside us that leads us to make all kinds of extravagant purchases that
we really can’t afford; or if we can afford them, it still leads us to make all kinds
of commitments that we can give unrealistic hopes to.
I know there had been a lot of commercials for taking a cruise for
Christmas; and so you’ll have that imagery of snow you have people standing, staring
into a window on a snowy day, thinking about that tropical cruise which is going to make
it, for them, a perfect Christmas. But the
same thing can be provided by other types of things that people spend – they get an
extravagant gift which is exactly what the person wanted, the fancy car in the garage with
a great big bow around it, (that’s never been a part of what we’ve done, but it’s
out there, as an image in our culture). Or
maybe the perfect experience – spending a few hundred dollars and getting Nutcracker tickets for the whole family and going
out to eat on the same night; and hoping that all the children will be entranced with the
magical sense of the performance. That’s
the kind of cost that we get involved in as we work on this Christmas wish that’s
beating at the heart of perhaps many of us. I
know it’s something that resonates in my own heart.
It’s a costly wish that leads us to extravagant things.
But the
costliness also comes in our heart itself. Because
this kind of Christmas wish is unvoiced, but it lurks behind all the plans and scheduling
we do. This kind of wish can never end in
anything but disappointment. The Carnival
cruise is not as perfect as we think it’s going to be; we’re bursting with our
anticipation, that’s a part of the whole thing. The
same with that evening at the Nutcracker, the
same with that car in the garage; there’s a moment of excitement that you can
remember; and then there’s all those obligations you get involved in when you buy a
car. The reality that surrounds the moment of
high excitement and anticipation has a way of making those moments themselves come
crashing down at your feet at some point; maybe not right away, but when you have the
feeling that Christmas is over, then you look back on it and think “Boy, I really did
invest a lot of hope in that and it didn’t come to what I thought it was going to
come to.” Maybe not every extravagant
gift ends this way, but many of them do. Most
of us, most years, I think, have a wish for a better Christmas than the actuality than we
experience on the basis of these kinds of images and plans and schedules that I’ve
been talking about.
I think the goal
of this Christmas wish is a feeling of acceptance, a feeling of being embraced by the
beauty and warmth of the holiday; perhaps a feeling of being embraced by the universe. It has spiritual elements; but the whole Christian
meaning of Christmas comes to us in a different key, with a different flavor, a different
feel, a different text. This Christmas wish
that I’ve been talking about contrasts rather sharply with the Bible passages that
have been used for 2,000 years among Christians to get ready for Christmas. Can you think of a sharper contrast than the
beautiful Christmas that I’ve been talking about and Isaiah 64?
That passage is
an anguished prayer to God; speaking out of a brokenness in human life. One who is speaking has experienced the destruction
of everything sacred in which that person’s hopes and future were placed. The destruction of the kingdom, the destruction of
the city of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple; all those things had taken place. Israel reflected back on this experience, all
the individual Israelites and Israel as a whole, together, they realized that they were
guilty in the midst of this destruction. They
could look at it and realize that God did not stop these calamities from happening to
them; being overrun by a foreign power, God did not stop that from happening. And, they had not been faithful to God. And so, putting two and two together, we have many
prayers in the Old Testament, prayers that echo in the New Testament. The New Testament writers picked up this scriptural
language and interpreted it in the life of Jesus Christ, many prayers that talk about this
sense of Christ’s separation from God. The
brokenness of our lives, the disappointment of our hopes, all that in Isaiah 64; and I
want to suggest to you that this is a good place to begin to get ready for Christmas.
The Christmas
wish I was talking about; trying to ice over those disappointments and that brokenness and
separation from God and from our loved ones; trying to ice that all over with frosting to
make it all sweet and nice, to make it go away after awhile.
In the perfect wish scenario, for example, the little kids in the family,
the brothers and sisters, they are never fighting or punching each other. In the perfect scenario they are always sweet and
good to each other; even at Christmas babies never need to have their diapers changed in
the Christmas wish that we have. And yet, the
reality is perhaps a better place to begin.
The reality is
that we are human; and being a human means being incomplete.
Being a human, at least in the world that we live in, the times that we live
in, when humans have all learned to turn away from God and we all fall in that same
pattern at least at one time or another, maybe persistently, in our lives. We are weak, we are fallible, we are finite, we are
mortal, we are separated from the fullness of joy. And
we get tastes of it, glimpses of it, snatches of it; but it’s not ever the fullness
that we are wishing for in our hearts. Because
our hearts remember what we are really created to be; our hearts remember what wholeness
and union with God, the union of Adam and Eve in the Garden with God, our hearts remember
what that’s supposed to be like. And so
our wishes and the actuality of our lives are always separated.
But if we talk
about that, then we start to do the work that needs to be done to make us ready for
Christmas. Christmas is costly, it’s
genuinely costly, especially when you look at it this way – I’m asking you to
take your wish that undergirds perhaps your thoughts for Christmas, and put it over on the
side as something that’s really not all that important.
I’m asking you to emphasize instead something that seems kind of
negative, I’m asking you to take the risk of engaging with that negativity, and in
that sense, it seems that I’m asking you to pay a great price, and asking me to pay a
great price. So let’s think about this. I’m not saying that we should all go off on
retreats and fast for 48 hours and do all kinds of painful things; but there’s a
certain moment in people’s lives for some very serious self-denial; but during the
season of Advent I don’t think that’s really a workable scheme.
Advent
disciplines. There’s such a temptation, I
like to read the Bible everyday, I’d like to add all kinds of prayers and good works
to the list of things that I do and that sort of passionate discipline approach might seem
like what I’m building up to, but it’s not.
Because we don’t have time for those, and the things we fill our lives
with are tied into obligations and promises that we made; and it isn’t realistic to
expect us to address Isaiah 64 in our lives by taking a whole bunch of time that we don’t
really have and applying it differently than we’re applying it now. I think what I’m suggesting to you instead is
simply that you pay the price of remembering and being aware during the season of Advent
of what it’s really all about. It’s
not about being accepted in the warm embrace of a loving universe that forgives and
forgets and doesn’t care about all of our sins and our own brokenness. Instead it’s about being forgiven, the hard
work of being forgiven; the costliness of acknowledging that we are sinners forgiven,
instead of perfect people in our wish scenarios.
I’m asking
you to be aware of that, to remember that; so when those moments break through in your
life, moments when all the kids are being good, when it really does sound pretty, singing
“O, Holy Night” together, and the snow is just the right thickness; those
moments will make us realize that all the goodness of our Christmas wishes can be built on
a foundation that’s real and true and permanent.
So I’m asking you to be aware with me of these things in our lives. And to be aware of one more thing: the costliness
of being vulnerable to God and to each other and to ourselves. The costliness admitting that our lives are broken
and they need to be put back together. That
costliness is nothing compared to the costliness that all this has been to God himself,
who has taken that cost upon himself by coming into the world at Christmas to do the work
that he came to do. If we remember that alongside
with remembering our own brokenness, then we are participating in a Christmas that is
really costly, but a Christmas that is real; that will not disappoint, that will give us
growth and strength for the future; that will give us glimpses and good moments to look
back on and will not leave us feeling we have overextended ourselves to provide an
emotional payoff that wasn’t worth the price. It
was worth the price to God to give us the real Christmas with all of its costliness. It’s worth the price to us to engage with what
seems like negativity on the first Sunday of Advent in the hope that some point between
now and December 25th that negativity will all fall into place in the larger
beautiful mosaic of meaning that God has given to us in this lovely, and possibly painful,
time of the year. Let us keep that in mind
together, as I keep in mind my own brokenness, my own faults, as we march together toward
Bethlehem through the four Sundays of Advent. Amen.