Sermon Title: "The God Who Came Down"
Date: November 30, 2008
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  Isaiah 64:1-9

Today’s lesson from the prophet Isaiah is probably not how you wanted to enter Advent.  The four weeks leading up to Christmas could have been a time of building anticipation, just as the familiar Christmas decorations will be added to our sanctuary over the next two Sundays.

But there’s no warm and inviting Advent for Isaiah.  Too many years have come and gone without a sign of God’s presence.  He and his fellow believers are longing for God to reenter their lives in tangible, this-worldly ways.  It’s been a long time since God sent pillars of cloud by day and fire by night.  It’s been a long time since God rained manna from heaven or sent plagues upon Israel’s enemies.  In blunt and violent terms, the prophet begs God to come out of retirement:  “Tear down the heavens and come down…  When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.” (64:1-3) 

Isaiah goes on to admit that the people sinned and transgressed, but they actually believed God turned away from them, hid himself from them.  This absent God is known as Deus absconditus, or “hidden God.”

Have you ever felt like Isaiah or the people of his day, wondering where in heaven or on earth God is?  Have you tried to pray and felt nothing, seen nothing, sensed nothing for a long time?  Have you ever been ready to give up on faith or felt the sad weight of Bob Dylan’s song, “Knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door,” with no one answering?  If so, you’ve entered Advent when, each year at this time, as the new Christian year begins on the First Sunday of Advent, we cry out to God to “tear open the heavens and come down.”  We beg God to come down, to enter the public squares of life, to give us some evidence that he is present and rules the Earth.

But most often we feel we’re only getting Deus absconditus, God who hides from us.  G. K. Chesterton said, “God came down and slipped in the back door . . . to surprise us from behind, from the hidden and personal parts of our being . . . as if we found something at the back of our own hearts that betrayed us into good.”

God sometimes chooses to enter our world in a barn at the edge of town.  God breaks open the heavens and comes down through the back door of life’s hovels.  You won’t hear us reading any birth narrative from Mark on Christmas Eve.  Mark’s Jesus walked out of the wilderness as an adult.  It is Luke and Matthew who tell us how God came down and entered time as a lowly infant born to a humble couple in the roughest of physical settings in the midst of an unsettling political time.

So if we are to acknowledge that this just might be God’s preferred way to come to us, most often in a whisper rather than in earthquake and fire, then it must be easy to miss God’s voice when it comes to us.  If God stands aside in the shadows, flirting with us, appearing among us only indirectly, then it must be easy not to see God’s appearances among us.

It is rather like those teenagers who have the bass speakers blasting out on their thumping, rocking cars next to you at the stoplight, or the volume on their iPod cranked up so high that their hearing is damaged, so they are now no longer able to hear any subtleties of sound.  Everything must be a shout to be heard.

Or when we are never free from the blare of the TV or the radio, the sounds in our office or the roar of traffic, constantly being bombarded with sounds and sights, so much so that we become numbed, blinded.  Sensory overload leads to a kind of blindness.

So maybe that’s why the Church, in its wisdom, began to celebrate Advent in the fourth century, and by the sixth century defined it as a time of waiting and preparation for Christ’s second coming.  Of the Christian churches that observe it today, most of us use it as a time of preparation for Christmas.  If we are to see the fragile light that dawns among us in Christ, we must sit awhile in the darkness.  If we are to hear the songs of the angels, we must first be silent. 

Most people milling about the little village of Bethlehem that first Christmas saw only another poor baby.  How common to have been relegated to birth in a stable or cave for livestock.  Yet for those who were listening, leaning toward the light, crying for God to come and save them, here was Emmanuel, God-with-us.

Advent is about the nearness of God, our hope to experience God, right here, “down” here, on earth, God’s radiance and power and love.  While the commentaries on today’s Advent text from the Hebrew Scriptures necessarily speak of hopelessness and repentance and doubt, Esther de Waal takes a different route, a gentler but unsentimental route to the same conclusion.  She describes Celtic Christianity as “a practice in which ordinary people in their daily lives took the tasks that lay to hand but treated them sacramentally, as pointing to a greater reality which lay beyond them.  It is an approach to life which we have been in danger of losing, this sense of allowing the extraordinary to break in on the ordinary.”

I don’t normally have the time to read the UCC’s online devotional before worship on Sundays, but I’m glad that today I did.  Anthony Robinson, UCC minister, author and professor, reflected on today’s Isaiah passage with these words:

     “O that you would disturb our committee meetings, break in upon our congregational gatherings, and take hold of our conference and synod meetings;

     “O that you would trouble our placid worship, intrude upon our tidy rituals, intervene in our sacraments;

     “O that you would surge into our bland Scripture reading, strike dumb our wordy prayers, and lay your hands upon our feckless preachers;

     “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down;

     “It is you we need, O God, you alone.”

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” begs the prophet.  But the living, free God rarely does.  Most often God comes to us in a glimpse, a whisper, a shadow moving in the darkness, and we, whose lives are so full of noise, sights and sounds, lights and thunder of our own creation, miss heaven’s opening up for us.

RESOURCES:

James E. Brenneman, Reflections on the Lectionary, Christian Century, November 18, 2008, p. 21.

William H. Willimon, “Where Is God?”, Pulpit Resource, December 1, 1996, pp. 37-38.

Anthony B. Robinson, retrieved from dailydevotional@ucc.org for November 30, 2008.