Sermon for the 1st Sunday of Advent by Bradley Pace
The audio quality of the sermon in the above video was not ideal. So, for those who would like to read the text, you can find it below.
Let’s be honest, it’s been a brutal couple of weeks on top of a brutal year. (How many of our sermons have begun that way, huh?) I don’t know if it’s the recent spike in COVID cases (more than half of Tippecanoe County’s total COVID cases were recorded in November) or the exhale after a stressful election season, or our collective grief after missing our normal Thanksgiving celebrations, but it seems like most everyone has spiraled a bit over the past two weeks. I thought it was just me, but then I talked to a bunch of people who described the same feelings. I had a meeting with the Bishop last week (over Zoom, of course), and I was worried about freaking out in front of my boss. But she beat me to it, and we had a pretty honest moment of shared panic and grief. I saw my therapist, and it was more of the same. Most of the conversations I had with friends, parishioners, with colleagues all centered around our shared sense that things were getting worse and that we were hitting a new level of anxiety, grief, depression, or all three. Maybe you felt it, too. It’s a like a continuous, smothering layer on top of all the “normal” stuff that makes life difficult—cancer, mental health challenges, broken relationships, lost jobs, financial insecurity…. And then, of course, this past week was made worse when we learned of Fr. Bob’s death.
So despite the fact that we read this lesson every three years, I think there’s a new poignancy to the Isaiah passage we just read: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” That’s what we want, right? We want God to show up and fix things. We want God to get down here and restore and reconcile, to put things back the way they were, to make us whole again, to make things great again.
If we look at the story in Isaiah, that is what the people wanted from God. Some sixty years before, the Babylonian Empire had destroyed the Kingdom of Judah, razing the temple and nearly wiping Jerusalem from the map. The Babylonians took the leading people of Jerusalem into exile where they tried to carve out a new life for themselves. But they held out hope that they would be restored and reconciled, that they might one day go back to their old lives, that the Davidic Kingdom might be reestablished.
Our reading comes at the very end of Isaiah’s long book. A generation or two had passed since the exile, but the memory of what had been remained strong and their hopes had not changed. When they were freed to return to Jerusalem, however, they found their hopes dashed. “O, that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” they said to God, but “You have hidden your face from us.” If we go a bit beyond the lectionary text for today, we see the reason for their lament. In the very next verse, the people cry out, “Your holy cities have become a wilderness, Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and beautiful house, where our ancestors praised you, has been burned by fire….” The exiles returned to find that God had not restored things as they had imagined. God had not reconciled their differences. Jerusalem and the Temple had not been rebuilt in their absence. And so they complain to God: “After all this, will you restrain yourself, O Lord? Will you keep silent?”
Again, we have to go beyond the lectionary to read God’s response. Without going into too much detail or reciting too much of it, let me just say that it was not what the returning exiles wanted to hear. “I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask, to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, ‘Here I am. Here I am,’ to a people who did not call on my name.” God goes on to say, in effect, that there’s no going back. “I cannot restore what was never truly whole. I cannot reconcile those who were never at peace. I will not put things back the way they were because they were unjust and idolatrous. Things were never as great as you imagined them to be. Do not let toxic nostalgia blind you to the failings of the past,” God seems to say, “to the old injustices, to the old vulnerabilities, to the community’s collective callousness and lack of compassion.”
Instead of restoring what never was or reconciling those who had never really been at peace, God promises something radically new, something that would transcend their toxic nostalgia. “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth,” he says. “The former things shall not be remembered or come to mind”. These new heavens and this new earth will be full of God’s presence, full of God’s blessing, full of the kind of freedom God promises. On the other side of this crisis, God tells them, is a new way of being, new, previously unimagined possibilities. But these possibilities are only open—these new heavens and this new earth will only come about for them—if they leave the past behind, move through the pain and grief of the current moment, and into the new world with repentance, with humility, with God’s spirit surrounding them and filling their hearts. These possibilities will only come about if they are open, open to the new thing God is doing. They must not let their toxic nostalgia blind them to the failings of the past OR to the possibilities of a new, transformed future.
Their crisis is obviously different, but there are parallels to what we’re going through. While many of us are dealing with our own personal stuff—the many dangers we find in life—most of us have not lived through a collective trauma on this scale. Whatever else is going on, we are all affected by the pandemic in some way or another. And like those returning from exile, we clamor for things to go back to the way they once were.
But as I said, God’s response is instructive. The pandemic will end, but we cannot go back to the way things were. On the one hand, we’ve simply lost too much—265,000 Americans and more than 1.4 million people worldwide, some of whom were friends and loved ones and colleagues. Even if the longed-for vaccine is a cure-all, we will now live in the shadow of this virus and in fear of the next one. And besides that, the pandemic has revealed and exacerbated all the old injustices, all the old vulnerabilities, much of the world’s general callousness and lack of compassion. For those who weren’t paying attention, the pandemic has revealed inequalities in health care and education, exposed racial inequalities and injustice, and further highlighted the differences between the haves and the have-nots. These are not new—not by a longshot—but the crisis has shown just how bad things have always been for some folks and then made things even worse. We’ve seen that many Americans don’t care enough about one another to do something as simple as wearing a damn mask. And then, too many folks are simply callous about the death toll. When I told a family member that my friend and colleague had died, she suggested that the pandemic wasn’t so bad, since it’s only the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions who are—as if we shouldn’t take special care to protect the most vulnerable among us. When we imagine that we want things to go back to the way they were, is that really what we want? If it were even possible, would we actually hope for that?
In Isaiah’s imagination, at least, God tells the people “No. We cannot, we will not go back.” It isn’t possible to go back to the way things were. We’ve lost too much to pretend. It wouldn’t be just or right or good to go back to the way things were. Too many people were left out, discarded, abandoned before. But there are new possibilities, God tells his people. We can be different on the other side of this crisis. The world can be different. New heavens and a new earth are possible. If we turn toward God, God will show up. If we humble ourselves before God, God will pick us up. If we bear God’s spirit, God will work through us to make this reality. It has happened before; it can happen again.
How exactly will this look? I don’t know. When it exactly will it take place? I don’t know that either (Jesus told us as much). There’s a lot about this that’s unanswered, and so, we are also left to say, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” The early Christians certainly knew this feeling. In the midst of wars and rumors of wars, in the midst of persecutions and poverty, they told and retold one of Jesus’ stories about staying awake. It is like when the master of the house leaves and puts his servants in charge of the house.
“Keep awake,” they remembered Jesus saying, “for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” When God shows up, the Church must be ready and willing. The Church must hold one another in our grief at what we have lost and what we are losing. Like the events Isaiah describes, this pandemic is no small thing. The racial injustice that has come to light this summer is no small thing. The polarization and division in our nation is no small thing. We must work through these challenges—these communal challenges—with repentance and humility, guided by the spirit. All the while, we must care for one another in large and small ways. After all, friends, this is how God rebuilds the world, this is how the new earth comes about. God’s spirit working through us, through you and me.
One last thing and I hope we will have the opportunity to say more about him, but we know what this looks like. Bob L’Homme was a good and faithful servant. He was awake to what God was doing in the world and spent his life serving God in big and small ways. Our lives and the lives of many others are richer because of his ministry. God’s Kingdom is that much closer because of his witness.
It is now Advent, sisters and brothers. We have called out to God and asked him to come. We must now prepare for that coming. So, let us keep awake. Let us keep awake to the grief that we all share and to the needs of those in and outside of our community. Let us keep awake to injustice and inequality. Let us keep awake for opportunities to show love and compassion. After all, this has always been the Christian community’s vocation. But let us also keep awake to the divine possibility. And let us prepare by turning to God, by humbling ourselves, by welcoming God’s spirit into our lives. Let us be ready to live into the new heavens and the new earth that are on the other side of this moment. And let us be ready to work with God to make them a reality.
Amen.