Tear Open the Heavens - 1st Sunday of Advent - Isaiah 64:1-9

1st Sunday of Advent - B
Isaiah 64:1-9
November 27, 2011

Tear Open the Heavens

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Something is seriously out of joint. And, I think, it has something to do with time. Time goes on in the regular way, sixty seconds each minute, sixty minutes each hour, twenty-four hours each day. Time seems to pass more slowly the closer we get to December 25th. I’m told that time is regular and only seems to go slower or faster, but we’ll never convince kids that time itself isn’t slowing to a crawl.

Time passes regularly say that scientists and I’ll trust them. But we don’t observe time regularly. We don’t just mark the time; we observe times. We mark time with seasons.
We’ve just begun a very important season in our particular culture: the holiday shopping season. We hear news stories about how important this time of year is to retailers. We hear news stories about how important consumer spending is for growing the economy. (And of course, the economy must grow!) We hear advertisements telling us how to make this year’s holiday better than last year. (And, of course, it would be bad if this year were only just as good as last year!)

Friday was one of two days that frame the ends of the holiday retail season. It’s called Black Friday because that is the day that retailers hope to show a profit for the year—their accounts move out of the red into the black. December 26th marks the other end of the season. It doesn’t have a name, but it’s the day for returns and using gift cards.

I’ve called it the holiday shopping season, rather than Christmas, for a reason. The holiday shopping season isn’t about Christmas and it certainly has nothing to do with Jesus; it’s about celebrating our identities as consumers, as people who are defined by what they can afford to buy. The fact that we are buying things for someone else doesn’t change this in the least. It only helps cultivate that good feeling that helps us spend more. That good feeling won’t encourage us to stop and ask whether spending more will be bad or even ruinous for us. When it comes to the holiday retail season, it’s all about the spending. That is the deeper meaning of the season.

Against the background of our culture’s annual orgy of consumption, the Church observes another set of seasons: the seasons of Advent and Christmas. We’ve been marking these seasons for a thousand years or more.

Christmas has marked the birth of Jesus, and not because we regarded babies as sweet and cute and their births as a reason to celebrate. For almost all of human history, the birth of a baby was an event hedged about with fear and anxiety. Half of all babies died. And it wasn’t just the babies. In the ancient world pregnancy and childbirth were more dangerous for a woman than fighting in a war was for a man. We didn’t start celebrating babies as sweet and cute until the late 1800s. The birth of Jesus was not celebrated because he was sweet and cute, but because his birth changed our world.

And even at that Christmas was a less important festival than Easter. Consider this: Christmas falls on one day of the year and is a season of twelve days. Easter is a season of fifty days and falls on one day each week. Christmas took off in the Western church, the church that used to speak Latin, in the late 1800s because it got wrapped up in the Victorian Cult of the Child. We see Christmas through Victorian eyes and for that reason, Christmas makes a certain amount of sense to us.

But Advent makes no sense at all. We try to squeeze it into our cultural frame by describing it as a season of preparation and usually as a preparation for Christmas. But I think that, given what has happened to Christmas over the years, it might be better to uncouple Advent from Christmas altogether and think of Advent as a response to the whole church year instead of a preparation for the next season.

The Church year unfolds for us the story of the love affair between God and God’s people. Through the ministry of Jesus we have had a glimpse of God’s dream for us and for our world. It is a good dream. It is a dream of a covenant that binds us in neighborly relationship with each other, with God, with each living creature, and with the planet that we share. It is a dream that all our relationships will be characterized by peaceful justice. It is a dream for our well-being. We’ve seen that dream revealed in Jesus’ words and in his actions. We’ve been called together as the church to embody that dream in our shared life here and in the life that we share in the world at large. It is a good dream.

We can’t listen to this good and peaceful and just dream for forty-eight weeks without our hearts being touched. To one degree or another we are won over to the dream. We want it. We can even see that the world needs it. But it remains just beyond our grasp. We stand in reality and strain toward the dream. We live in tension. We wait with unfulfilled longing.

This is not an easy way to live. The very idea of “waiting with unfulfilled longing” is heresy to a consumer culture, especially during its high holy days. What else is credit for, anyway, but for fulfilling longings so we don’t have to wait? Our culture has not prepared us for waiting. When the Church year asks us to be aware of our waiting, we get impatient pretty quickly.

But that’s not the hardest part of it. Waiting for anything is hard. Just ask the kids; they’ll tell us how hard it is. But waiting for the fulfillment of God’s dream for us is excruciating. It is at one time the most important waiting we can do and the hardest.

We pray every week for God’s will to “be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We recognize that there is a gap between the way God’s will looks when it is fully done, that is, as it is done in heaven, and the reality that we know, where God’s will isn’t done that way. There is a gap and we pray for that gap to be closed. We try not to notice that we have been praying for this for a long time. We haven’t gotten an answer yet, at least not a full answer, but we won’t give up praying for one.

Sometimes the tension becomes too great to bear: Why shouldn’t people in Egypt have the freedom they long for? Why should there be hungry people in the country that feeds the world? Why should the people we love suffer and even die? Why can’t our government seem to make any decisions? Why isn’t the work that we do respected? Why, why, why? We have a question and a longing for justice for every place where God’s name is not yet hallowed, God’s kingdom not yet come and God’s will not yet fully done.

If we stay inside those questions, if we sit within that longing, if we host that dream for long enough they will lead us to prayer, but it won’t be the polite prayer that we were taught in Sunday School. It will instead be prayer that is raw and ragged. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence!” The heavens, you may recall, refers to the sky that seemed to the ancients to be a hard shell. One of the first acts of creation was to fix the firmaments above and below the earth. The prophet’s prayer would have God undo the firmament that keeps us safe on one side and God safe on the other. It is a dangerous wish, but deliverance only happens when dangerous wishes come to pass.
The prophet prays for the mountains that God had made firm would be set to quaking. This is a prayer for the undoing of the world so that a new act of creation may take place. And the prayer recognizes that, whatever is wrong with our world, the recreation of the world must begin with us. We are clay that God can take and reshape and the prophet prays for precisely this to take place. “We are the work of your hand. We are all your people.” You have fashioned us. Refashion us so that we, too, may hallow your name and do your will. Remake us to be places through which your reign bursts into our world.

Yes, something is seriously out of joint. The world around us celebrates its high holy days of consumption. We have a foot in that world. At the same time we have a foot in God’s peaceful dream of justice for us and our world. We live as consumers competing for the few bargains given out so that we may be taken in. At the same time we are covenant members of the community of peace and justice. We live in an inescapable tension, a tension that will—if we pay too much attention to it—lead us to cry out for God to “tear open the heavens and come down.”
The season calls us and I call us to pay attention to that tension, to live in it consciously as long as we can, for in that longing lies our deepest vocation as the people of God.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.