Waiting in Exile

I don’t know about you, but by the time the first Sunday of Advent rolls around, I am ready. I am ready to prepare and wait. I am ready to put up the (cough) Christmas Advent Tree. I am ready to sit and watch the candles burn low as I wait for Jesus to come. And aren’t we always waiting for Jesus to come? Then we come to the texts appointed for today, and I think… that this isn’t quite what I was waiting for. I’d prefer not deal with the suffering or the darkness that is revealed when the sun refuses to shine and the moon withholds her light. I’d prefer not deal with the stars falling or calamity. I want to hear the Magnificat, but I want to plug my ears when I hear of calamity and darkness. I think part of the problem with Advent is that, though we want Jesus to come, we want Jesus to come on our terms, in ways that aren’t too inconvenient or too harsh. But a savior that comes into the world and changes nothing is hardly worthy of our trust or our belief.

            We wait for Jesus to come as we see the injustice in the world. The broken relationships among people of different colors continue in our society. We wait for God’s justice and righteousness to prevail, for people of all colors. We cry:

            O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would             quake at your presence—

Because then we could point to something tangible, something besides confusion and conflict, something besides the messes we have created for ourselves through hatred, violence, and discrimination.

            But the movements of God are usually far from obvious. Some of us may relegate God’s opinion to the unknowable, justifying our own apathy toward our neighbors, toward our families, toward our own unwillingness to recognize that, often, as we switch off the news, the concerns that seem so important leave our minds – and our prayers – as soon as we hit the “off” switch. Others of us may believe that God agrees with whatever we think should happen, defining God’s justice as our justice. And so, we do not cry out to God; instead, we take matters into our own hands, demanding justice through violence and righteousness through retribution.

           
            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!

            God responds to our cries for help, for justice, for God’s presence, but comes in ways that we would not look for or expect. God comes in the face of the stranger, in a family member or friend who has become hard to love, in the midst of our doubt, our fear, in the midst of the world crashing down upon us. When we would look for God on the tops of the mountains, God is bowing the mountains:

            When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains             quaked at your presence.

            Sometimes, I wonder why God comes to us under the sign of the opposite, masked in creation, and I think it is because God wants to keep us looking, to continually draw near to us, to invite us into relationship, into conversation, into a relationship that is something more than us grasping at our ideas of the divine and casting them in our own images. Instead, God chooses to come to us masked, cloaked in the garb of our broken world, frustrating our attempts to contain or restrict God.

            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.

            And so we wait. We meet the masked God and wait for God to be revealed plainly. God works under the masks, under the moments – if very brief – in which we realize that the world is, indeed, good, the times in which we forget our self-interests, our pride, all the things that we cling to for definition, and realize that we have been claimed and set in the world to work toward a more trustworthy world. It is the times in which we recognize in our neighbors the reflection of God’s image.

            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.

            But there are times in which we feel forgotten, alone, neglected. There are times where God’s masks are so obscuring that we can only see the evil that exists in the world. We forget to hope. We forget to imagine the world anew. We forget that God has come and does come to us. We start to act and live as though we are alone, left to our own devices, to bring our justice and to call it God’s justice. We take matters into our own hands, and in our hands, violence begets violence and hatred begets hatred and distrust begets distrust. Our cravings for power make us look not to God but to ourselves to craft a world that serves us and ourselves better.

            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.

            But, at least in my experience, it is when I feel most powerful that I am weakest. It is when I think I can do things by myself, when I think I can bring the kingdom of God (cast in such a way that looks a lot like Mandyland rather than the reign of God) by my own means. And, at some point or another, it all comes crashing down, leaving me with a pointing finger that has nowhere left to point but to myself, and I am reminded to wait. To be silent. To stop and look at the world with baited breath, to hope that God will come and save me from the mess I have created.

            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.

            And, if God does not respond immediately, we fear that God has left us behind for good, so we scream louder, begging for God to rend the heavens and come down. In our brokenness, we lift our hands; in the shattering of our pride, we pray our silent prayers, asking that we be made new.

            Yet, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the             work of your hand.

            Finally, we arrive at the point at which we are ready to place ourselves at the mercy of God. Our clenched fists have been pried open; we have been broken, and, just when we thought we could never be put together, God fashions us into something new. That’s the funny thing about God: God seems to love broken things. God seems to only work through broken things. There are great cracks in the pottery of our lives and, just at the point when we thought we were worthless, useless, and cast away, we realize that the great cracks in our lives, in our world, make it possible for the light to seep in.

            Do not be exceedingly angry, O LORD, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now             consider, we are all your people. 

            God rends the heavens and comes down, in ways we don’t expect, hidden under the masks of creation; God comes to us in our self-sufficiency and in our desires to bring our justice and peace on our terms. God comes in the stillness, in the waiting, in the midst of night, shining a light into the cracks of our existence, revealing not only our brokenness but God redemption of our brokenness. An we wait, we watch, and gaze with wonder as we lift our hands, asking God to transform our broken world into a new creation, to transform our broken communities into God’s people. Though the stars fall, the moon be darkened, and the sun refuse to bring its light, we look for the dawn, in which God’s justice and righteousness will prevail.