What is the last thing you had to wait for?
Do you remember the nervousness that accompanied the waiting? The way you repeatedly checked the clock or your watch or phone, willing the time to pass more quickly? Or how impatient you felt as you watched for a sign that the waiting was coming to an end?
In the novel This Magnificent Dappled Sea author David Biro tells the story of a young Italian boy whose life is saved when a New York rabbi volunteers as a bone marrow donor and is a match for the boy. Months after the boy’s health was restored, arrangements were made for the Americans to travel to the village where he lived and everyone is eager to meet the man who had saved the young boy’s life. The author describes the boy’s anticipation and excitement waiting outside customs for the rabbi and his family, the way they recognized each other from photographs, and how the whole town filled the street and swarmed around their car when they arrived in the village. Chaotic but joyful scenes began a new season in their lives.
Today we are beginning a new church year and a new season in our liturgical year. Advent comes from the word adventus which means approach or arrival, and during these next four weeks we are invited into a time of waiting with eagerness and anticipation, but what are we waiting for?
One narrative tells us these next four weeks are about grand surprises and perfect presents, blazing displays of colorful lights, popular carols and Christmas music, fanciful food and family celebrations. And, before you call me Scrooge, those things can bring a lot of happiness in their own hectic and hurried way.
But Scripture and Christian belief tells another story – a story that invites us to remember that we are waiting for something new and that God is the one who fulfills our waiting.
In our first reading, we heard from the prophet Isaiah. The passage is in the portion of Isaiah called “Third Isaiah” written after 538 BCE when Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon and allowed the Israelites to return to Jerusalem.
The prophet, now an old man, has returned to the ruins of his city and together, with the people of Israel, they cry out to God.
For a generation, they had wanted to return and now, they are there and it isn’t what they expected.
If there has ever been an Advent when we could relate to things not being as we expected or hoped, this is the year.
So, as tempting as it is to skip these troubling texts and find more encouraging words in Scripture, words that leap to Christmas joy, we need to hear these laments because they are honest.
These verses give us the words we need when it feels and looks like everyone around us is celebrating but we are struggling.
They help us name the distance, and even the absence, of God that we feel when we are suffering from pain or loss.
And, they give us language, and permission, to yell at God when the world around us doesn’t make sense.
We actually only hear one part of the full lament. The full text begins in 63:15, but we pick it up at the beginning of chapter 64 with the prophet’s plea:
1O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
The prophet invites Yahweh to intervene forcibly and physically in the world, to obliterate any distance between creator and created, and show up in the same way God that had delivered Israel from previous enemies and calamities.[i]
The words are spoken even as the world feels like it is falling apart and all we feel is anguish and agony. They are spoken with confidence that God is with us even when we feel alone.
Here we are. Your promises tell us you are here too. Restore us, O God, let your face shine on us and we shall be saved.
The next verses confess Israel’s sin, in the same persistent patterns that we have of ignoring God and forgetting our dependence upon God. The prophet’s words are filled with sorrow and shame, or what some old-timers might call “sorry-ness” – when you have nowhere else to go and nothing else to do but fall on your knees and confess how hard hearted you have been.
Incredibly, in the confession, the poet tries to point the finger at Yahweh. Toward the end of verse 5, he tries to lay the blame on God, saying, “We only acted that way because You hid from us.” Sometimes the responsibility we bear for our own transgressions is too much, but, even then, God does not turn us away.
Here we are. Forgive us for what we’ve done and not done, what we can name and what we cannot bring ourselves to name. Restore us, O God, let your face shine on us and we shall be saved.
And then “the prayer continues with a mighty ‘yet.’”[ii]
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.
In this one verse, the prophet moves us from past to present. We know God’s actions and character from the stories shared with us by our ancestors in faith; we trust in God’s mercy and goodness; and now we name God as Lord and Father, and ask God to be faithful, renewing us and recreating us that we may know hope and healing.
The prophet also calls God “our potter.”
Over the last year and a half or so, I had the opportunity to begin learning pottery and I discovered that wheel thrown pottery begins with a process called centering. As the potter, you take a lump of clay and, with some force, you throw the lump of clay onto the wheel and slowly begin pushing the clay down and coning it back upward and pushing it down and then up again. You’re always watching to see whether the clay is centered; there’s a lot of joy when you’ve centered it and you begin to see a shape come into its own as you work with it. It’s harder when the clay gets off kilter or wobbly and you realize it’s not centered anymore; and it’s surprising how quickly it can happen. And how obvious it is - there’s no hiding it. Sometimes, you can salvage it, or create something “organic” but just as often, all you can do then is set the clay aside, adding some water to it so it won’t dry out and become unusable. After some time has passed, you can come back to that clay and begin again.
Imagining God as the potter, I can picture both the joy and the consternation that must accompany watching creation as we first draw near, centered on God, and then we turn away, distracted and deceived into thinking that we don’t need God at the center of our lives.
But the prophet knows that despite whatever disappointment we’ve inspired, the potter will not reject us.
Remember that we belong to you. Restore us, O God, let your face shine on us and we shall be saved.
As we enter into this Advent, may we have this same confidence that God hears us, forgives us and restores us. In God’s own time, as we wait expectantly and hopefully, God is doing a new thing, with all of us.
Amen.
[i] Walter Brueggemann. Isaiah 40-66. 233.
[ii] Brueggemann, 234.
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