Isaiah 64:1-4; Mark 13:24-37
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
November 29, 2020
“Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence.” I love this passage from Isaiah, and I hate it. I am drawn to the poetry that expresses such deep human longing—longing for someone to break in and fix this pain-filled world, longing for the presence of the sacred in the midst of all that seems so profane. I hate the way I am drawn in by Isaiah’s words, because I know they can be dangerous. They so easily morph into a prayer for God to make us win and our adversaries lose. They suggest that, if we can just get God on our side, God will come down and solve our problems.
Many scholars identify Isaiah 64 with a group of prophets collectively known as 3rd Isaiah. First Isaiah wrote sharp words in the time before Babylon invaded Judea, warning the people of what was to come. Second Isaiah wrote words of comfort and assurance, after Babylon had conquered Judea and forced many of the leaders into exile. When Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, he allowed the Judean exiles to return home. Their prayer, it seemed, had been answered, their hopes fulfilled.
When they got home the temple was in ruins, and the prospect of rebuilding seemed overwhelming. More distressing, they had returned to discord. The people who had remained in Judea had changed, as had the exiles. It was a rocky reunion—messy, complicated, far from the glorious homecoming they had imagined.
In the midst of this disenchantment, 3rd Isaiah wrote these words, reflecting the people’s anguish, giving voice to their yearning, articulating their struggle to reclaim hope. Maybe this time, he prayed, with enough fire and quaking, God will fix it. We can’t seem to find a way past our conflicts, but maybe, he hoped, God can smooth them out by sheer force.
Our reading from Luke’s gospel brings a more ominous tone to similar imagery of God breaking down the barrier between heaven and earth. The stars fall, the heavenly powers are shaken, and the Son of Man—a strange term Jesus uses to refer to himself—comes in on the clouds to gather the faithful.
This passage, or one of its parallels from Matthew and Luke, is always the gospel text on the first Sunday in Advent, and I always struggle with it. It fits into a strain of biblical writings called “apocalyptic literature,” which predict a dramatic, violent end to the world, out of which God shapes a new, better world. Apocalyptic writings emerged in times of distress, like the time in which Mark wrote—about 35 years after Jesus’ crucifixion. The world as Mark’s community knew it was falling apart. There was an uprising, a last-ditch effort to drive the Romans out, and it was being put down with extreme brutality, eventually leading to the destruction of the temple.
The tone of this passage reflects their desperation—and that same deep yearning for God to break in and make things right.
What do we do with these two passages? One option is to take them at face value, to join with the writers in the conviction that God will return with power to fix it all. I’m not overly tempted by that option.
A second option is simply to reject these texts, to say that Isaiah and Mark got it wrong. That is more tempting, but it ignores the way these passages resonate with our own times and our own struggles.
We can choose a third option, a way that honors the deep pain and the deep yearning reflected in these passages, a way that honors our deep pain and deep yearning.
Eleven years ago, the Open Spirit Jazz Worship Collective, led by Willie Sordillo and me and three other colleagues, offered an Advent service centered on these texts. In preparation for the evening, I cut long strips of fabric and notched them at one end. We placed the strips around the circle of chairs. After we read Isaiah’s poetry, we invited each congregation member to take a strip, hold it in their hands and reflect on their own yearnings—yearnings so powerful they would like God to tear the heavens apart to bring them to fruition. When they were ready, one by one, the worshippers tore their strips of fabric and called out their particular longings.
This year, as I read Isaiah 64 in the wake of a contested election and a COVID surge, I found myself thinking back to the sound of the fabric tearing. It feels as though the fabric of our lives and the fabric of our society has been ripped apart over and over again. [tear fabric] Torn apart as we have had to close our beloved sanctuary. Torn apart by grief at too many losses in our own church, by more than 250,000 COVID deaths in our nation. Torn by economic fallout that leaves too many children hungry, by an election season that lays bare the fear and rage and distrust that threaten our nation. Torn apart by racism, isolation, family distress. How has your life been torn apart this year?
The prophet Isaiah challenges us to allow our losses to be transformed into longing. “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” What is your deepest yearning?
[tear fabric] “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and give us a vaccine to end COVID-19 now! Oh that you would come down and dismantle racism once and for all! Oh that you would break in and stop the abuse of power! Oh, that you would change human nature so we are not ruled by our fears! Oh, that you would transform human hearts so we are no longer prejudiced!
What is your cry? Isaiah invites us to name the yearnings of our hearts, to cry them out to God, to trust that these yearnings are a gift.
Granted, they are a strange gift–a bunch of strips of cloth with fraying edges. What do we do with these torn pieces of our lives? What do we do with the ragged remnants of our yearning? That is the question for this first Sunday in Advent, when we honor the gift of yearning, when we light the candle of hope.
In a few weeks, we will hear again the story of the birth of Jesus, the one we call Emmanuel, God with us. The story reminds us that God does not respond to our cries by tearing open the heavens and coming down with fire and might. Instead, God hears our yearning and comes–amidst the cries of childbirth, to share our vulnerability and our pain, to dwell among us. God comes in the power of love. The hope of our faith is not that God will break in to fix our mess; our hope is that we will be changed as we awaken to God’s presence already with us, as we join with God’s love at work in our midst.
What does that mean for us right now, this year, when we feel even more vulnerable than usual, when our faith in human goodness has been so shaken? How will we be healed and transformed by the power of God’s love this Advent season? I don’t know. It is a mystery.
What I do know is that God works through broken, struggling human beings. God works through exhausted nurses and shivering vigil-keepers, through the crooked handwriting of a birthday-card-writer and the persistence of a frustrated teacher, through a zoom-mediated smile and a chat-room prayer. I do know that God sees beauty in each of these ragged strips of cloth and sees potential in the clump of them piled together. I know that Jesus taught his disciples to follow in his way even when they didn’t know where it would lead. And I know that hope doesn’t always start as a feeling; more often, it starts as a choice to act.
This week, as my choice to act in hope, I am going to take all these strips and create a cloth for next Sunday’s communion table. Maybe I’ll weave them. Or maybe I’ll braid them and sew them in a spiral, like an old-fashioned rug, or piece them like a quilt. I don’t know yet how to do it.
I will make this communion cloth to remind me of all the tables where Jesus sat—with tax collectors, with people who were labeled as sinners, with strangers and enemies. As his disciples, we are called to try to bring people together, to listen to each other’s stories, to honor each other’s pain and yearning, even when we can’t figure out how it will change anything.
I will make this communion cloth as an expression of trust that God can work through us and through our ragged edges, to create beauty and hope we cannot yet imagine. I pray that my clumsy efforts at weaving or braiding or sewing will help me know, at a deeper level, that God is at work through my other clumsy efforts—to build understanding, to fight racism, to feed hungry people, to be an instrument of peace.
That’s my act of hope for this week. What is yours? What action can you take to awaken you to hope? How can you work with the yearnings of your heart to create beauty? What small step can you take toward understanding someone with whom you disagree? In what small way can you speak out against racism? What food can you offer to a hungry family?
No life is too ragged for God to work through us. No yearning is too raw for God to respond to it with love. May God weave our ragged lives and our frayed yearnings into beauty and hope. Amen.