Advent Sunday: Preparing in quiet or waiting for divine fireworks?

Readings
Isaiah 64:1-9
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—
to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect,
you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.
From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you,
who works for those who wait for him.
You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways.
But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.
We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.
We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand.
Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity for ever.
Now consider, we are all your people.

1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind— just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you— so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Luke 12:35-48
‘Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves.
‘But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.’
Peter said, ‘Lord, are you telling this parable for us or for everyone?’ And the Lord said, ‘Who then is the faithful and prudent manager whom his master will put in charge of his slaves, to give them their allowance of food at the proper time? Blessed is that slave whom his master will find at work when he arrives. Truly I tell you, he will put that one in charge of all his possessions. But if that slave says to himself, “My master is delayed in coming”, and if he begins to beat the other slaves, men and women, and to eat and drink and get drunk, the master of that slave will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour that he does not know, and will cut him in pieces, and put him with the unfaithful. That slave who knew what his master wanted, but did not prepare himself or do what was wanted, will receive a severe beating. But one who did not know and did what deserved a beating will receive a light beating. From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.

Address
What do you do when God seems a long way away, or even totally absent? Does it really get to you when you hear preachers talk about knowing the presence of God or hearing God speak? When I was a teenager there was a popular Christian T-Shirt with the slogan, ‘If God seems far away, who moved?’

When I reflect on that now it seems simplistic and judgmental, designed to make you feel guilty if you don’t sense the presence of God, and yet so many dedicated believers talk to me about how it feels to sit in the pew, Sunday by Sunday, talking to what feels like a closed heaven.

Advent is about waiting and preparing. It’s about making ourselves ready once again to remember the visible presence of God incarnate in Christ, and to wait and prepare for his return in glory. But that’s the past and the future. What does it mean to live in this meantime, this in-between time, in a world where he seems so absent? What does it mean when he seems silent?

I want to examine this question and to think about waiting and preparing in the light of the reading from Isaiah, and to get the best out of it we need to know a little of the background to that reading. Isaiah’s an interesting book of prophecy because we can say with some conviction that it was not the work of one prophet. We’re pretty sure these days that there were at least two writers or groups of writers, and quite possible three, because the book appears to refer to three periods of history.

The first writer, known as Isaiah of Jerusalem, or simply, First Isaiah, was writing during a period of turmoil in the nation. Babylon’s empire was expanding in their direction and Isaiah of Jerusalem was convinced that the small kingdom of Judah was soon going to be in trouble. He laid the blame for that firmly at their own door, believing that God was going to judge them because they had not kept God’s laws.

Judgement was coming and the phrase, ‘We’re doomed’, pretty much summarises this section of the book which basically covers the first thirty nine chapters. Then at chapter forty we get a big turn around with the opening words from God, ‘Comfort, comfort my people.’ This next section of the book, penned by Second Isaiah, was written in Babylon while the ruling parties of the nation were in exile there after the nation had indeed been invaded as First Isaiah had predicted.

This second part of the book is a complete turnaround. Instead of a message of doom it is all about hope and a return to the promised land. Isaiah even goes so far as to name their saviour, King Cyrus of Persia, who indeed invades Babylon as Isaiah predicts, takes over, and then sets the captives free and allows them to return home to rebuild their nation. There is great hope of the fullness of God dwelling with the people again as the nation returns to its former glory.

Except it doesn’t quite happen like that. Many scholars now add a third division in the book, beginning at chapter fifty six, believing that there was a Third Isaiah, probably a group of several writers, who spoke into the post-exilic Jewish community, now back in their own land, but it was not turning out as they expected.

Instead of the nation’s former glory being restored and the presence of God dwelling visibly among them, there were questions amidst the ruins and a nation divided between the ruling parties who returned from exile and the ordinary working people who had remained in the land. And so we come to today’s reading which is part of a longer lament about the state they found themselves in.

As we ponder the poetry we uncover a huge yearning for it to be back like it used to be, with a new temple and the visible presence of God back in the Holy of Holies as in the days of old, leading up to that opening statement,
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—
to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence!

This is what they expected God to be like; the mighty power who overturned everything in his way. This is how the stories of their nation had described their former relationship with God. But then it goes a lot further and we begin to see the prophet actually blaming God for their current predicament.
But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.
We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.
We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.

Basically the writer is saying, ‘If you, O God, had stayed with us, we would never have sinned. It’s your fault that we’re like this. If you had stayed around we’d have remained righteous.’

Now in one sense this is laudable because it recognises that age old truth that apart from God we can accomplish nothing, and that anything that is of lasting value is accomplished through God. But it doesn’t quite sound like that. There is, instead, a petulant sound to this prophet’s voice. He sounds rather like a teenager saying to his parents, ‘You don’t like me the way I turned out? Well you’re my parents - it’s your fault I’m like this. If you’d been there for me as a child I might have become a better adult’

God seemed to be totally absent from them. There was no thunder and lightening, and so they blamed his absence for causing their bad behaviour. Now whilst I’m not for a minute suggesting that those of us who yearn to feel God’s presence actually blame him for our bad behaviour, I do know for sure that many of us, when we look at the suffering in our world, wonder why God doesn’t do something about it.

The opening words on the lips of the prophet resonate within us.
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down...
And so we feel that absence deep in our hearts, both for ourselves and for the world. ‘God, where are you? Why don’t you answer our prayers? Can’t you see what your absence is doing to us?’ Our voices may not quite have that petulant edge, but rather than taking responsibility as people supposedly changed by God and ready to do his work, we blame God for not coming down and changing things directly.

And that brings us to Advent, because whether we are looking at our own personal experience of the absence of God, or the suffering in the world that we may well blame on his perceived absence, the message of scripture is very clear: Wait and prepare, because you do not know when he is coming.

I’ve stood in this pulpit and told you about some of the times in my own experience when it’s seemed as if the veil between heaven and earth has been drawn apart and God has been very close, but I would also have to be honest and say those occasions are always unexpected and unpredictable. These are the times we think we’re waiting for, just like the explosive presence that the Jews of Isaiah’s time waited for. But it’s not just about waiting for the sound and vision special effects version of God, it’s also about preparing ourselves, about doing some work to help us hear God in a different way.

You see there is another way of knowing God’s presence in a more all-pervading sense, and this is more, I think, to do with learning how to perceive him. It requires our work rather than God surprising us, and depends on spending time learning the disciplines of stillness and waiting. As we do this so we begin to grow in the awareness of God’s continuing presence. There is a simple immanence, a ‘thereness’ of God. I believe that this, far more than the surprising presence, is how we are changed.

In those quiet times God doesn’t necessarily say anything, and sometimes it simply feels like the Holy Spirit brooding. From the Isaiah reading it seems to me that there was little of this sense of preparing themselves to be alongside God amongst that particular community. They just wanted the thunder and the lightening, the special word that comes out of nowhere, the unpredictable timing of God’s speaking to us. But it sounds like they were not willing to do any of the hard work of learning to listen. I wonder if we’re like that too.

It’s interesting what we find in the next chapter because we get God’s answer to their accusations when he replies:
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 nation that did not call on my name.
I held out my hands all day long to a rebellious people, who walk in a way that is not good,
following their own devices; a people who provoke me to my face continually,

We can blame God for not being there, for not giving us some amazing experience, but what if he’s actually holding his hands out saying, ‘But you’re not searching for me. I am here if only you would put away the noise and listen.’ Advent is about waiting and preparing. Waiting for the future to be born. Waiting for the past to be reborn within us. And all the while preparing ourselves to be able to perceive God’s continuing presence with us.

If we turn to our Gospel reading we get more of the same kind of urging. Jesus calls us to be dressed and ready, to be waiting. And he warns us against letting our behaviour slip, that’s the on-going preparing. We have been given the truth, that God did indeed come to his people. Just as they yearned for him to rend the heavens and come down, that is precisely what he did, but not in the way they expected.

He tore open the heavens and came silently to be born as one of us. And when he returned to the temple in physical form, God coming as a man, although some accepted him most of the nation rejected him again, just like they had done so many times. God had not come in the way that they demanded. They had set the rules but God hadn’t kept to them, and so they were disappointed. They wanted power, and through his birth and death he came in powerlessness.

So what do we want, the fire and the lightening and sound, or the stillness? Power or gentleness? Christ comes to give us his peace. We may be waiting, but are we preparing? Amen