You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!
Black
Friday is over – and no one is viciously elbowing his or her way into Walmart
at some ungodly hour of the night.
Cyber-Saturday has come and gone as well – and all those computer geek
employees are breathing a sigh of relief that their particular server is no
longer in danger of crashing. Of course,
they are still keeping their fingers crossed that they will not find out months
from now about a major holiday security breach.
The
Christmas carols are blaring their sparkly tunes, and the bundled up evergreen
trees have been unloaded from the trucks and now stand like tipsy soldiers in
the tree lots around town, waiting to be purchased and adorned. The Santa hats have been taken out of their
boxes, and the ovens are getting warmed up to produce more calories in the
coming month than they did for most of the previous eleven.
‘Tis
Advent. ‘Tis the season to be jolly, fa
la la la la, la la la la! And yet, here on this first Sunday in
Advent, this official beginning of the holiday season, in church at least, our
Scripture reading is not one that references, even obliquely, the sweet, soft,
cuddly baby born in Bethlehem who is still, in religious circles at least, at
the center of the swirling vortex that we call Christmas.
No
– our Scripture reading today is a lament, a poignant psalm acknowledging the
sorrow we have eaten and the large cup of tears set before us to drink. No gingerbread men or spicy wassail for us
right now, the Psalmist sings!
Only
sorrow and tears: What is going on
here? Is this any way to begin the
biggest cash cow family holiday of the year?
What
is going on, of course, historically that is, is that, for all intents and
purposes, God has left ancient Israel in the lurch – again. That is the focus of this Psalm. Not that the “thousands of years before
Christ” people did not deserve it.
As Methodist pastor Marilyn Murphree writes, the
Israelites “made alliances with people who were not even serving God. They
didn’t really think they needed God because they were blessed by everything...Joshua (the leader who had taken over after
Moses died) had led them into the Promised Land, they had defeated their
enemies, they had an abundance of everything and thought they could make it on
their own.”
However,
now it seems that the tables have turned.
The story of these Chosen People has taken a hard swerve, right into a
national calamity. The mighty Assyrians
have not only invaded the Northern Kingdom, but, in their wake, the land has
been overrun and destroyed. The fertile
fields are trampled, and the walls and fences of the vineyards are rubble. The Israelites have been soundly trounced. Defeated, they have been led away into
captivity. And in all this doom, all
this suffering and struggling that they are experiencing, where is Yahweh? Where is their God? That is what the Psalmist wants to know.
Of
course, the Israelites are not unfamiliar with doom, suffering, and
struggling. It has been part and parcel
of their history as a people from the very beginning. As non-denominational pastor Steven Dygert
says, “They long for God’s intervention, like we do….
They fear being utterly consumed and lost…alienated
and alone….Without hope, they are not only not delivered and saved, they’re
doomed to utter despair.”
So
the Psalmist cries out to Yahweh, to God, to anyone who will listen and puts
into words all the emotion, passion, and feelings packed into the collective
heart of Israel.
Hear us, Shepherd of Israel…Awaken your might;
stir up
your might and save us. Restore us, O God;
make your face shine on us,
that we
may be saved. How long, Lord God Almighty,
will your anger
smolder
against the prayers of your people? You have fed them with the bread of
tears;
you have made them drink tears by the bowlful.
This
Psalm we have just read offers a deep and profound description of suffering –
suffering due to the apparent absence of God.
God the most powerful, the almighty, the Good Shepherd: This God seems unreachable and so out-of-touch
to the defeated and exiled Israelites.
The presence of this God is but a memory, now overshadowed by pain and
the sound of voices trapped in darkness.
And maybe to remember makes it all even worse. Maybe to remember God’s presence when life
felt good is only to amplify God’s absence and the suffering it engenders now.
And
if the Psalmist’s words are somehow timeless, as we here in church believe them
to be, then what about us? What do these
words say about our suffering?
What
about the mothers of James Foley and Steven Sotliff, the American journalists
beheaded by ISIS, that misguided and misdirected group of extremist
Muslims? What about all mothers who pray
for the end of war as they watch their sons and daughters being deployed –
hoping against hope that they will come home safe again? “Stir up your
might, (O God) and come to save us!”
What about the families of the Newtown children shot down in
their elementary school around this time two years ago. Have they ever gotten past their pain? “Stir
up your might, (O God) and come to save us!”
What about the jobless and the homeless and the destitute
whispering their desperate prayers?
“Stir up your might, (O God) and come to save us!”
Or, as Presbyterian pastor John Leggett wrote: What about you? “What are you longing for?
What about your life or the life of this world causes your heart to ache with
the very longing of God and to cry out from the depths of your soul, almost
demanding God with the prayer? “Stir up your might (O God), and come to save
us!”
The
Christmas carols are blaring their sparkly tunes, and the bundled up evergreen
trees have been unloaded from the trucks and now stand like tipsy soldiers in
the tree lots around town.
Waiting to be purchased and adorned. The Santa hats have been taken out of their
boxes, and the ovens are getting warmed up to produce more calories in the
coming month than they did for most of the previous eleven.
‘Tis
Advent. ‘Tis the season to be jolly, fa
la la la la, la la la la! But is it
really? Is that what Advent, this
preparation time for Christmas, is all about?
We
have already seen that, clearly, the Psalmist would say no. If that is what we are thinking, the ancient
poet would declare, then we have sorely missed the point.
You
see, there is another side of Advent – and it is a side that does not sparkle,
and it does not pack on the pounds.
Neither does it trample people in Walmart nor cause computer servers to
potentially crash.
There
is another side of Advent, and if we listen to the whispered groaning of our
hearts, we can hear it. It is a
longing. It is a painful recognition
that the world and our lives are so different than what God promised them to
be. And all we really want is for God to
tear open the heavens and come and save us.
It
does not sound like the joy-filled season that we are used to, but perhaps, in
the long run, this other side of Advent is a blessing. Maybe to cry a bowlful of tears, maybe to
take some time out to lament, just lament, maybe that is the most faithful
response we can have to our lives and to the sorrow that they hold, to that
sorrow that is so close to the surface but, at the same moment, so deeply
hidden and pushed down into our souls – particularly at this time of the
year. Maybe – just maybe - that groan of
lament is really the only way that God can enter our lives.
Maybe
then it is OK to not be jolly all the time in December. Maybe at least part of what Advent needs to
be is a time to notice and then to name the things that break our hearts – war,
scarcity, a failed friendship, a deeply troubled child that we cannot seem to
reach, loneliness, job insecurity, a cancer diagnosed, a loved one lost – even
one lost years ago. Maybe a part of Advent
needs to be is a time when the church at least gives us permission to
acknowledge all those things that can make us feel hopeless – because maybe the
church knows that we cannot really embrace hope until we viscerally feel its
lack.
“In
his book, Living the Message: Daily Help for Living the God-Centered Life, Eugene
Peterson points out that what a lot of us call hope is in reality something
different. It is wishing. “Wishing,” he says, “is something all of
us do. It projects what we want or think we need into the future.
Just because we wish for something good or holy we think it qualifies as
hope. It does not.”
He
goes on to say that we can picture wishing as though it were a line coming out
from us with an arrow on the end, pointing into the future toward that which we
desire. But hope is just the opposite. It is a line that comes from
God out of the future, with its arrow pointed toward us.” (Chris Zepp)
In
the end, this Psalm then is not only a lament, a song of desolation and
desperation. It affirms those things,
for sure, which is good. But the fact
that this psalm is even being sung, the fact that it is also a prayer to a God
that can not been seen or touched or even remembered means that it is also a
song of hope, of great high hope that somewhere, the God who is being called to
will answer, and, as 21st century theologian Frederick Buechner once
wrote, the answer he will bring will be herself.
For
us, it will be a child, a baby born, the Word made flesh. And in that youngster, in that birth, in that
incarnation, the barriers between us and God will be broken down. The heavens will be torn open, and God will
come to meet us – with a message of hope that has the potential to reach even
now into our deeply troubled worlds and lives.
You transplanted a vine from Egypt (the Psalmist
sang); you drove out the nations and planted it. You cleared the ground
for it,
and it took root and filled the land. Turn to us, Almighty
God! Look down from heaven at us;
come and save your people! Come and save
this grapevine that you planted,
this young vine you made grow so strong!”
It is the
other side of Advent, the whispered groaning in our hearts. But listen, for there is another song that is
playing – and it is the soft voice of Isaiah that sings:
“And there shall come forth a shoot (like a
grapevine), a shoot out of the stump of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of
his roots: And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom
and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, and he shall not judge by what
his eyes see or what his ears hear.
But with righteousness shall he judge the
poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth: And righteousness shall
be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins.”
It
is the other side of Advent – the side that allows us to cry a bowlful of
tears, so that we can embrace with great high hope the promises of God.
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine
