November 30, 2014
“The Wilderness”
- Isaiah 64:1-9
- Dr. Teri Thomas
November 30, 2014
Wilderness – Advent 1B
Isaiah 64:1-9 and 1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Welcome to the season of Advent.
Four the next month we will be on a journey
from Wilderness to Incarnation.
The word Advent comes from Latin, meaning ‘come to’.
But is it God who comes to us?
Or is it we who come to the wilderness, the darkness
and travel to discover God?
I am willing to guess that Advent is probably the least popular season of the church year.
We want Christmas.
We want carols and bows and glitter and gifts.
We want family and friends and peace on earth.
We want the idyllic Christmases we think we remember from years past.
We want to hear stories of shepherds and angels and a baby in a manger.
Instead, this morning we get wilderness; stories of dread and abandonment.
That was the mood of both of our readings from the Old Testament,
the deep pain of the poet of Psalm 80
and the sorrowful questions of the prophet Isaiah.
Both were writing in the midst of suffering.
God's people, Israel, were lost in the wilderness and pleading--
Where are you, God?
Why don't you act to fix this awful situation we are in?
Why don't you "come down" and make things right?
Where are you when we need you?
They are in the wilderness and all they feel is dread and abandonment.
They were forced to rely totally on God.
They didn’t get what God was wanting to do with them
They were losing their faith, their trust that God was even there,
because God had left them, alone in the wilderness.
They had forgotten that God does some amazing things in the wilderness.
The people are brought to a place where they can focus on their relationship to God—
where they are basically forced to do that.
And God knows that is not always a bad place for us to be.
God is at work in the hearts of the people out in the wilderness.
So according to the week's readings, we enter this season of Advent in the wilderness.
"Our world is not okay," these Advent readings declare,
and God's apparent absence isn't okay, either.
But Advent doesn’t call us into the wilderness empty handed.
It gives us gifts-
The first gift of Advent is the permission to tell the truth,
even if that truth is laced with sorrow and despair.
We are invited to describe life "on earth as it is,"
to admit we are lost in this wilderness.
We are surrounded by evil and suffering,
and we're not sure our faith can endure what our eyes reluctantly witness each day.
The wilderness of Ferguson
where a child is dead
a community is torn apart
and a country is divided.
The wilderness where we no longer have expectations of peace
as we experience an inability to find common ground;
and a profound sense of how far we are from being a society marked by justice for all;
The wilderness where children go to bed hungry
amid reports of worsening poverty and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.
The wilderness polluted with threats to our environment
and a sense of helplessness about fixing it.
Wilderness isn’t the first word that comes to mind when we look around Indianapolis,
but there are barren places where it seems like all life is being sucked out.
Is it our jobs, or lack of a job?
Is it a broken or bruised relationship?
Is it the waiting room at the hospital?
Is it the classroom where you feel lost and alone?
We are all familiar with the wilderness.
It’s desolate and undesirable;
it is frightening and unknown,
no one would willingly go to a wilderness.
But, time after time, the wilderness is precisely where God shows up.
The second gift of Advent is the gift of waiting.
During Advent, we live with quiet anticipation in the "not yet."
We stop rushing, and decide to call sacred what is still in-process and yet not here.
As Paul puts it in 1st Corinthians, we "wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ."
And the third gift is that Advent prepares us for the God who is coming —
a God who will turn out to be very different from the one we expect and maybe even hope to find.
Isaiah longs for a Very Big God to do Very Big Things.
He asks God to once again do "awesome deeds" —
deeds that will make the mountains quake and the nations tremble.
Who among us has not prayed like that?
Since our healing service last week I have prayed desperately for God to fix things-
heal broken relationships and hearts
free those who are caught in addictions
end depression
comfort the grieving
Protect our children. Protect ALL children.
End anxiety. End loneliness.
"O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!"
I don't believe we can — or should — ever stop praying these prayers.
God is big, and when we come to him in prayer,
dreaming of a just and wholly redeemed world,
I know we are dreaming a tiny version of God's own dream.
But during Advent, we are asked to prepare ourselves for something else.
Someone else.
Someone so unexpected and so small,
we are tempted to either laugh or cry.
The world is falling apart, our hearts are exhausted,
we are wandering in this wilderness
and God chooses to send us … a baby?
Next week our journey continues.
Thanks be to God.