Next Year for Sure: Isaiah 64:1-9
Advent I
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
2 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!
3 When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect,
you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.
4 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.
5 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.
6 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.
7 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.
8 Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand.
9 Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord,
and do not remember iniquity forever.
Now consider, we are all your people. (NRSV)
“Lions
Ruin Thanksgiving” read the ticker on the evening news this past Thursday.[1] It’s a bit harsh, especially in a year when
COVID-19 had already indelibly altered the American holiday. But yet another loss for the Detroit-based
National Football League team this year made quite a few people unhappy at
best.
It’s a
running joke, the Lions losing. Except for the years of World War II, the Detroit
Lions have played every Thanksgiving Day since 1934.[2] Some fans say it’s a holiday tradition to
have the game on during the family meal so they can watch the team lose,
despite the fact that the team’s record is about half wins and half losses in those
80-odd years.[3] The Thanksgiving games are part of a larger narrative
of long-suffering Lions aficionados who have faith in their team to win the
coveted NFL grand prize, the Super Bowl.
The Lions have never managed to win a Super Bowl, netting their last
national title in 1957, ten years before the Super Bowl was invented.[4] There are shirts for sale that hopefully
state in the Lions’ characteristic Honolulu Blue lettering, “Maybe Next Year
Since 1957.”[5] There are conversations upon speculations
about whether it’s time to change the coach, whether the offensive line is
really up to snuff, whether the quarterback is leading well, whether, whether,
whether. There is so much hope for the
perfect combination that will propel the Lions into football glory—maybe next
year, maybe.
Now, I
do not mean to say that Lions fans and the post-exilic Israelites to whom
Isaiah speaks are in the same boat of disappointment; one, after all, is
football, and the other is the trauma of a nation recovering from destruction
and captivity. “The Persian king Cyrus had
defeated the Babylonians (539 BCE) and established a decree that the exiles
could return to their homeland. Threats, divisions, land battles and power
struggles erupted between and among returnees, those who had remained in the
land, and those who had settled there from other places after Jerusalem was
conquered in 587 BCE. The restoration of
Jerusalem to past glory, that had been envisioned, was clearly not going to
happen — at least not in the time and ways expected.”[6] There is a decided difference between not
getting to the Super Bowl and not being able to rebuild one’s home city.
What I do mean to do is to
underscore the human capacity for hope; hope even in the face of reality,
sometimes, and certainly in the face of statistics. That “maybe next year” spirit involves a
certain kind of denial, a healthy refusal to accept what is in favor of what could
be, a determination that insists patterns are breakable.
Welcome,
Church, to Advent. The name of the
season comes from the Latin term adventus, an arrival or coming or
appearance. This four-week season
preceding Christmas kicks off the Church’s liturgical year and encourages a
sense of waiting for the birth of the Christ child, taking this month to
prepare us for what that birth did to the human timeline. It’s been part of the Church since about the
fifth century and takes time to ground us in the incredible idea that God
became human for a while.[7]
We forget, sometimes, how weird
and beautiful and unexpected that was.
The four Sundays of Advent
traditionally have themes attached; we noted the first in the lighting of our
Advent wreath this morning, bringing light in the idea of hope. But this year, this 2020, has been quite the intense
year of uncertainty and loss, so this Advent I invite us as a congregation to
hold the themes of the Church season together with the stages of grief. Each Sunday of Advent I will pull together a
piece of the Church and a piece of this system noted by Dr. Elisabeth
Kubler-Ross; this first week, we pair hope with denial.
“Because you hid yourself, we
transgressed,” this lament from Isaiah says to God. Remember, God, those times when You would
perform miracles, would change the world to fit Your works? This Israel coming back to the ruins of their
destroyed Temple and the splintered pieces of their people after generations in
exile looks at what is and says oh, God, where were You? Where were the moments when You stopped the
very sun so that we could battle our enemies?[8] Surely it was because You left that everything
fell apart.
This
conveniently makes everything God’s responsibility; “You were angry, and we
sinned; do not be angry, Lord.” The poet
skips over what made God angry in the first place, why there would need to be
space between the Holy and the people.[9] It is denial, this idea that anything went wrong
that the people could have prevented, that if only God had stepped in
and rent the heavens or set fire to things again, everything would be fine. Professor Elna Solvang describes it as “the
lamenting community erupt[ing] in a confession that begins with an accusation.
Like the spouse who ‘confesses’ their cheating was due to their partner’s
failure, the people attribute their sin and their transgression to God’s anger
and withdrawal. The accusation draws upon two key premises: 1) that human right
deeds derive from divine goodness, and 2) absent God, humans will sin. No
mention is made of human agency.”[10]
It is a
dance, this kind of hope and denial. For
the Lions fans, there is nothing they can do about the continued losses; fans
are not players, team owners, or coaches.
The spirit of “you could have done it this year” can be comfortably embraced
by the armchair quarterbacks who speculate that next year could be the year if
only X would get himself in order. But
the Israelites—and, so many thousands of years later, us—are complicit in this
relationship with God. Our actions do
not cause God to leave because God has promised to be with us even to the end
of the age,[11]
but we can certainly frustrate a Being Who sees all of the ways we turn away
from compassion toward ourselves and others.
We deny the places where we have stepped around the people crossing our
paths; where we have looked at God’s promises and said no, not going to happen. The practice of singing the Magnificat that
we began this morning is a wondrous celebration of Mary’s acceptance of the
coming child, but her initial response to the news was, “How can that be, since
I have not been with a man?”[12] Surely You got it wrong, God; don’t You get
how this works?
Dr. Kubler-Ross
emphasizes that denial isn’t always a bad thing. “Denial functions as a buffer after
unexpected shocking news, [allowing a person] to collect [themselves] and, with
time, mobilize other, less radical defenses.”[13] Denial can be a form of hope—hope that
refuses the idea that this is all we have to work with, that what is
intolerable must also be incessant. Mary
needed some clarification and time to absorb the idea that she was chatting
with an angel. This lament of Israel
that calls God to account for the absence of the Spirit reaches backward for
something to hold onto in the face of such destruction and seeming
powerlessness. Denial stretches both
hands toward what might be, and that is a very human thing. After all, which of us here in the 21st
century hasn’t gotten to a place of saying, “God, I am overwhelmed, where were
You when things went wrong and why did You let all this happen?” Never mind whatever choices we did or didn’t
make, never mind how we are or are not allowing ourselves to be open to the
reality that we can’t control everything.
We take a breath, sometimes, to be able to handle the latest curveball, the
newest disappointment, the news we cannot bear yet, and that’s okay. It is only when denial becomes a refusal to
deal with what is before us at all that it becomes problematic.
“Yet you,
o Lord, you are our father.” Any turning
language like “yet” or “but” or “even still” in Scripture is a call to pay
attention. Here we have this plea for
God to act like the God the Israelites are used to, the One Who leveled
mountains and peoples and made a way out of no way—yet. Yet there is the awareness that whatever
happens, the Israelites are still in God’s hands, malleable, protected, loved.
“At the point when the chasm appears too wide and too deep to be crossed, the [lament] leaps into faithfulness with a simple ‘yet,’” writes Professor Samuel Giere. “When all hope seems lost and the chasm between God and God’s people seems to have drifted far too far apart, the prophet on behalf of the people makes a profession. ‘Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are the 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.’ (64:8-9) From the image of the Lord as the divine warrior who comes bursting out of the heavens that begins the pericope, the prophet brings the poem to a far different place. From a cosmic military-like interventionist, the Lord is envisioned as an artisan; a potter working, molding, fashioning in a continuing way this broken people.”[14]
It is
hope, this moment of trusting a God Who is still working on us, on the
Israelites. It is the faith that all is
not lost yet, that there can be rebuilding, that maybe next year. Is there still a desire for a God Who swoops
in and fixes everything and conveniently doesn’t call out all the ways we contribute
to a broken world where evil twists our spirits? Absolutely, but that desire bows to the
reality of a God Who is God so thoroughly that we are not, a God Who is still
shaping that world back into wholeness.
On this
first Sunday of Advent as we begin the journey to a stable in Bethlehem during
a year when it seems that everything is hopeless and the only thing denial is
getting us is deeper into a hole, breathe deeply. Remember that we are the clay. For those of you who have ever worked with
clay on a potter’s wheel, you may know there’s a lot of redoing that gets done;
sometimes a piece that seems finished gets squashed down entirely to make it
stronger, better able to stand the kiln that burns it into stability. It is not an easy process, this formation of
faith, and that is part of why we start over again every year with Advent to remind
ourselves there is a God Who came into time itself as a human and disrupted our
notions of what strength really is.
I close with a prayer from the Rev. Audra Hudson: “Divine One who comes among us, and makes themselves known, surprise us. Shake us from our complicity and comfort. Meet us in our righteousness and correct us when we miss the mark. For you are the Creator and Destroyer both, who comes to set right that which harms holiness and the whole that you have designed.”
May we
have the hope that lights the way to a God Who never leaves us alone. May we have the faith to let ourselves be
made and remade until we are strong and whole.
And may we recognize that the God on Whose name we call is fiercer even
than we know, year after year, since far before 1957. Amen.
[1]
WOOD-TV 8 broadcast 11/26/20.
[2]
Why
do the Dallas Cowboys and Detroit Lions always play on Thanksgiving? - Los
Angeles Times (latimes.com)
[8]
Joshua 10.
[9]
The New Interpreter’s One Volume Commentary, 422.
[11]
Matthew 28:20
[12]
Luke 1:34.
[13]
Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 1969, 39.
Thanks for doing this. I still hear that it is difficult to hear so this helps. Now just to tell people how to use this!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad this is helpful! I can put the link on the church page (web and Facebook), but it's a matter of folks coming along as needed, I think. If anyone says they were having difficulties, please feel free to direct them here.
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