First Sunday in Advent
November 30, 2008
Isaiah 64:1-9

Deus Absconditus

Unless you’ve recently awakened from a coma, or returned from duty on the Space Shuttle, you will know what season we’re in. I’ll give you some hints: Thursday was Thanksgiving. Friday was Black Friday when the stores opened at 4:00 a.m. for the most determined bargain hunters, and Saturday was the day Santa arrived by shrimp boat at the dock in Apalachicola.

The signs are unmistakable. ‘Tis "The Season." Call it "Christmas" if you’re politically incorrect. Call it "The Holiday Season" if you’re socially aware. Or, to be as safe as possible, call it "Winter Festival." That satisfies no one, so it’s probably the best way to go.

Whatever you call it, there’s no doubt the culture is pointed toward that annual orgy of consumption, guilt, sentiment, and nostalgia called by most people "Christmas."

But what about us Christians? Where – and to whom – are we pointed?

There’s no use complaining about the commercialization of our holy day. We lost that battle long ago. Slogans like "Keep Christ in Christmas" make us seem to the rest of the world like the direct descendants of Ebenezer Scrooge. The "powers and principalities" have pretty much claimed Christmas as their own territory, and no amount of whining by us church-goers will get it back.

So I have a suggestion. Let the culture have the culture’s Christmas. Let Santa step off the shrimp boat and eat a dozen oysters on the half shell. Let the ballet productions of "The Nutcracker" continue apace. (I plan to attend one of them on my birthday to see one of my favorite dancers portray a bonbon and a soldier). Most of that has nothing to do with the gospel, and a lot of it is just plain fun, so why not let the culture have its Christmas?

That leaves Advent for us Christians – and that’s a very different season. Advent is not about getting ready for Christmas. It’s about getting ready for Christ. That’s a different kettle of fish altogether.

Advent begins, in all places, with the cry of the prophet Isaiah five centuries before the birth of Jesus.

"O that you would tear open the heavens and come down," the prophet cries. Isaiah has good reasons to lament. Jerusalem lies in ruins. The people of Israel are scattered to the four winds. Their best and brightest have been taken away to exile in Babylon.

What happened to God? the prophet wants to know. What happened to the God who makes the nations tremble? To the God who shakes the mountains with earthquakes? To the God who declared his steadfast love for Israel?

We’re fading like a leaf, the prophet declares, and God bears part of the blame. God is punishing us with his absence, to be sure, but his absence makes us worse.

But you were angry and we sinned,

because you hid yourself we transgressed.

If you’d do a better job of being God, we’d do a better job being your people, Isaiah complains. In the popular vernacular, Isaiah is saying, "Because you aren’t there for us, we aren’t there for you."

That sounds like self-justification to me, but the point is, Advent begins with a frank conversation with God. Where are you, and why don’t you do something about the mess we’re in?

"Because you hid yourself we transgressed." I’m not sure that argument holds water, but at least it’s frank.

Ancient Israel learned the hard way that they could not possess God. Their call to serve God did not grant them control over God. If God seems to be hiding from us, perhaps that’s because we’re looking in the wrong place. We’re looking for the God of miraculous intervention, the God who tears open the heavens, the God of armies and earthquakes.

Suppose – just suppose – that God is present, but in not in the way we expect. Suppose God’s absence is in fact a deeper call to discern God’s presence.

Writing from a Nazi prison in 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls upon us to consider what the absent God is saying:

Not long after he wrote those words, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed. His life bore witness to the God who rent the heavens and came down not with coercive, irresistible power, but with vulnerable, suffering love – the God of the cross and resurrection, not the God of the Third Reich.

When God comes with the power of armies and angels, people get hurt. When God comes with suffering love, God gets hurt and people are made whole.

After his rant about God’s absence, in which he complains that God is somehow responsible for Israel’s sin, Isaiah seems to draw a deep breath compose himself. He then addresses God not with anger but with longing for relationship restored.

Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;
we are the clay and you are our potter;
we are the work of your hand.

I suspect that most of us cannot hear those words from this ancient prophet of Israel without recalling our own family prayer, which begins "Our Father . . ." And those of us of a certain age will hear a hymn embedded in childhood memory.

Have thine own way, Lord.
Have thine own way.
Thou art the Potter;
I am the clay.
Mold me and make me
After Thy will.
While I am waiting,
Yielded and still.

"While I am waiting . . ." Advent is a time for waiting – not for Christmas but for Christ, the child who rent the heavens in the silence of the night, the God hidden in human form, whose power is revealed in the surrender of power. We wait for the God who is our Father, eternally, patiently, gently molding us into a new creation.

The irony of Advent is that it is both "already" and "not yet." Already God is with us in Christ Jesus, and yet the kingdom he inaugurated is not yet fully realized. Already Christ has come and yet Christ is still to come.

Meanwhile we wait, not as those abandoned by a faithless God but as those being shaped and molded by the hidden God. We wait with hearts broken and hearts being made whole, with eyes open to God’s presence in a broken world, and hands ready to do God’s work for the healing of the world.

This is Advent. Let us forgo Christmas for as long as we possibly can, in order to make ready for the Christ who has come and the Christ who is coming.

　

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