And come down [Isaiah 64:1-9 - Advent 1B]

 The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Isaiah 64:1-9

 

And come down

 

Marty McFly slyly swipes the sports almanac from a devious young Biff.  Sarah Connor and Arnold protect the future savior of the human race from Skynet and a speedy shape-shifting Terminator.  Bill and Ted scour the past for history homework help.  In each of these time-travel movies, the heroes journey into the past with an important mission: to prevent a dystopian future.

 

Time-travel fantasies are often preoccupied with intervention: stopping Hitler before the onset of the Holocaust, evacuating a building before a horrific attack, using one’s historical knowledge to prevent a catastrophe.  In every case: using one’s power for good, to save innocent lives, to decrease human suffering, to make the world a better place.

 

If we had the power to prevent bad things, wouldn’t we be morally obligated to use our power to do just that? 

 

Standing in the dust of a world of rubble, the prophet Isaiah essentially poses this very question to God.  In the form of a desperate prayer.  On behalf of an exhausted people. 

 

The people had long been grasping for a why, for a reason.  If God had the power to prevent bad things, why the terrible siege, why the destruction of Jerusalem, why the exile of Isaiah’s nation?  Why did the Babylonians get to win, to devastate them, to pummel their future and scatter their children to the winds?  Why did the God who split the Red Sea do nothing when the warriors of Babylon stood at their gates?  Why did the God who shook Jericho’s walls do nothing when their walls fell?  Why did the God who rained down fire from heaven for Elijah do nothing when the enemy empire tore the Temple to the ground? 

 

The questions haunted the nation during their decades of exile.  And then, finally, they returned home – but to ruins.  Things were still bad, just different, and the questions still haunted them, followed them all the way home.  Whatever hope sustained them in Babylon was battered by the trauma of grave disappointment.  The end of exile did not feel like salvation anymore, just relocation. 

 

The prophet feels the suffocating weight of his nation’s despair.  The people feel alone, abandoned, lost in a world bereft of ancient miracles.  And the prophet cannot fix it or fix them.

 

All Isaiah has are words.  And so he throws his words at Heaven: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”  Show up.  Stop hiding.  Be here now.  Like you were in the stories, in the old stories.  Because we need you. 

 

We, like the prophet, are urgent people in an urgent world but faith is a waiting game.  And so we hurry our prayers only to wait for God – not because we want to but because we have no choice.  We wait because the problems are too big, the world’s burdens: intractable.  We need God, a God who stretches far beyond our own limitations.  And so we wait – in this season of Advent, in the midst of our troubles, in the context of a world gone mad.  We wait even though there is no time to wait.  Because there is too much bad and sad in the air.  We live in a time in much need of divine intervention.  We want, need, God to step in and make the world a better place.  To save us from the dystopian future into which we feel we are existentially hurtling.

 

Life does capture us with stunning moments of ecstasy but there is no denying that life is also hard.  Our emotions sit on the surface of a rugged existence; our tender souls have seen too much.  Anxieties pulse through our veins.  No one can shield us from pain; no one can save us from loss; no one finishes this race without a share of scars. 

 

And it feels like that should not be so.  I suppose that is why we make it a habit to pray for “on earth as it is in heaven.”  Because that is the goal; that is our desire.  But suffering is a symptom of our mortal existence.  And while we sometimes, maybe often, maybe always hate that, it is that same symptom that opens our eyes to beauty, opens our hearts to love, opens our mouths in prayer.

 

There is something about this life that knows how to squeeze the prayers out of us.  Some kind of stubborn old hope that allows us to push petitions through our despair and through our doubt.  It always might not happen and still we dare to ask God to tear open the heavens and come down.  To be here now.  To be here with us.

 

We are, of course, in no position to make such demands, sinners that we are.  And yet prayer in this muddled world requires of us the audacity of honesty. 

 

Some of those honest prayers won’t seem to get anywhere – and I don’t know why.  And I don’t know why faith is such a waiting game.  And I don’t know why God doesn’t save us from the scars.  But, for what it is worth, I do know that God has scar stories too.     

 

Those who dare to pray risk disappointment.  But have enough hope to hold out, and lift up, a broken heart.  To a God who is in it with us, incarnate, who has lived in our skin, felt our pain, has taken plenty of losses.  To a God willing and able to tear open the heavens for us, to be with us, to break into our trauma and to hold us through our nightmares and to love us through even our hardest times.