Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Psalm 80 "The Other Side of Advent"


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

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