Deep Sorrow

Text: Isaiah 64:1-9
Other texts: Mark 13:24-37

Come down, God! O that you would come down! O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!

There is such longing in these words, these words in Isaiah. So much loneliness. These are words of a people abandoned. People left alone. People confused and without direction. You hid yourself, they say, and we have faded like the leaves in the late autumn days. You have hidden yourself from us, they say, and we are blown about by the cold wind.

When these words were written, it was a time of fragile and uncertain hopefulness. Somewhat like our time now. The exile of the people of Israel was at an end, they were returning or had returned home, but their land and nation had been devastated. They look forward to rebuilding. Yet in this hopefulness the prophet calls expectantly for God’s presence and guidance. God had hidden God’s face.

We are living in uneasy, queasy, times at the moment. Yet the presentation each of us makes is unchanged. As always, we show to the world the best we can. We put on a good face. No one wants to hear about our troubles, we think. If they only knew, we think, they would think less of us. To reveal ourselves to others or to an other makes us vulnerable. Being vulnerable is the last thing we want to do when we do not feel so great inside. When someone asks us how things are going, we might answer “OK” instead of “great” Just a hint. That’s about as much information as they need. Maybe too much.

Everyone else seems fine. They are all smiles. They are doing well, it looks like. But we are reminded not to compare our insides with someone else’s outside. Who knows what is going on in their lives, their homes, their families, their heads? Maybe they are hard on the outside and soft on the inside, just like us.

For many, for much of the time, suffering and sadness are not far below our OK exteriors. There are no shortage of causes: worries about money, safety, food. Disappointments about careers, relationships, performance. Regrets and unresolved conflicts. And for some, worse: war, poverty, hunger, grief. You have fed us, the psalm says, with the bread of tears. You have given us bowls of tears to drink.

We suffer. Why is that so? It seems to be our nature as human creatures. Perhaps it is because we so easily imagine the future. A time yet to come when the present will be as it should be, could be. Yet it never comes. Or perhaps it is because as social beings we long for intimate and complete unity with others. And yet we are aware of our fundamental loneliness. Or perhaps it is because, even lonely, we are connected with—feel with, which is what the word compassion means—connected with others, even strangers, and bear the burden of all their sorrows. Yet we can do little to relieve them.

O that you would come down! O that you would tear open the heavens and come down! says Isaiah, who tries to explain in this passage people’s sadness. It is because God has abandoned God’s people, he says. We sinned, Isaiah says, because God hid God’s self. The passage through its symbols reminds God and reminds Israel of the time when God last came. Of that time when God came down on the mountain of Sinai and adopted Israel as a people. And gave them guidance. Of that time when God came as fire, burning a bush, speaking to them in a clear voice, and making promises. Come down, God.

We call for one who can know our sorrow and can heal our sorrow. So in our deepest prayers, we pray with the Israelites: Come here, God. Come here, be with me. Come here, guide me. Come here, comfort me. Come here, heal me. Come here, bring me peace.

For some, and in some times, people have felt there is no solution in their age for the suffering that they endure. They have felt that the only solution to suffering is the end of the world as we know it. They cannot imagine a healing powerful enough to restore our present existence to the way it should be. In those times those people hope for a grand upheaval and see it coming. Writings about that upheaval are called apocalyptic. The word comes from the name in Greek of the Book of Revelation, which is the most extensive writing we have of its type. But a smaller version of this kind of story appears also in Mark (which we heard today) and in Matthew and Luke. The verses in these Gospel passages are called the “little apocalypse.” They all predict the immediate return of Jesus and a drastic change in the world. These passages are a problem now because “these things,” as Jesus said, did not happen in the lifetime of his disciples. We can try all sorts of ways to explain this, but it seems to me that these passages are just another way of saying what we have already heard in Isaiah. Come here, Jesus. Come here, be with me. Come down from the cross and return to your people. Help us. Deliver us from suffering and sadness.

This is the season of Advent. Advent is traditionally a time of reflection. It is a time to look at ourselves and our lives and see how well things are going. On the inside. It is time to keep awake, as Jesus says in Mark. It is the kind of awake you feel when you’ve just worked out at the gym (before you get endorphin-sleepy). Where all your senses are sharp and when your mind is open. And with those senses and with this open mind, we try to look closely at the intersection of our lives and God in our lives. During most of our days that spot, where God meets us, is a little vague and easily missed among all the other conversations we have inside our heads. And among all the sorrows that are calling, seeking to be relieved. To attend to God, to stay awake, takes the same energy and concern that attending to any other relationship we might have. Sometimes you take someone you love for granted, but you cannot keep doing that and have the relationship work. And the same is true of the relationship you have with God.

The spiritual disciplines of Lent apply to Advent, too. Especially the discipline of prayer. During these days, talk to God in prayer. Thank God. Ask God for what you want and need. Ask God to help you find out what you want and need. Ask for help, for comfort, for understanding of things. For patience, clarity, and enthusiasm (or whatever are your inside desires). Tell God of your sorrows. Tell God you’d like God to come down and talk with you clearly and immediately.

Our hope is in God because God is our maker. We are the clay and you are the potter, says the prophet Isaiah. Who else knows us better? Who else has more of a stake in us? Who else greets us with such powerful intention? Come down here, God. We need you. We are the work of your hand. We are your people.

We Are the Water

Text: Amos 5:18–24

There have been in the press lots of comments about John McCain’s concession speech on Tuesday. It was gracious, relaxed, and forward-looking. Many people have said that the real John McCain had re-emerged. They said that this was the McCain they had known and admired. Some people speculated on whether the results of the election would have been different if this McCain, this brave and gracious man, had been the one who had campaigned over the past few months. For the general consensus was that in the campaign the candidate had not been true to himself. That in the campaign he had been fighting against his own nature.

It is a common failing. And an understandable one. The parts of us that are fearful and greedy—fear and greed being two sides of the same coin—those parts of us make us do things we rather not do, really. Or to put it more strongly, to do things that go against the person we really are. Or to say it in another way: to do things that go against the person God made us to be.

Amos was the earliest of the prophets of Israel. Unlike the prophets we read more frequently, Amos wrote before the fall of Israel, the northern Kingdom, and before the fall of Judah and the exile of most of Israel to Babylon. Unlike Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, or at least portions of them, who try to make sense of the destruction of Israel, Amos has no explanations. There was nothing yet to explain. Israel was whole and strong and its people prosperous, more or less. The criticism of the nation that the other prophets saw as a reason for the exile, Amos shares. He criticizes, too. But he offers not an explanation but a warning.

The book of Amos is for the most part dark and gloomy. Amos does not warn the people with the expectation that they will mend their ways. For Amos, the time for repentance has passed long ago. Too late for all that. Amos says that the people have abandoned the ways of God. And as a result, Israel will die. The nation will be destroyed and the land taken away. And the people exiled. Which is what happened.

Israel, Amos says, has gone against its own nature. And for that, it will suffer. Not as punishment, but as the natural result. It’s biology. Going against who you are causes suffering.

The nation of Israel was God’s creation. There was an agreement between God and the Israelites. I will be your God, you will be my people. A covenant, as we say. The covenant was like a design document. It was more than just a series of laws. The agreement between God and Israel—this formal relationship—defines Israel, defines its nature. And essential to this nature, a defining characteristic of this nation, was the idea and practice of justice. Justice. So in the passage we heard today, God says through Amos, I’m not really interested in all this worship stuff right now. Take all that stuff away. What I’m concerned about is justice. It is as if God were saying, You are not the same nation I created and thought I knew. For I see that you have forgotten to be just.

When we talk about justice these days, it often means something about courts and jail and punishment. The justice system, or bringing someone to justice. But that’s not what is meant here.

First, justice primarily is enacted (and justice primarily is demonstrated) through the nation’s treatment of the poor and the outcast. The prosperous and the strong can take care of the themselves, but in Israel’s time, as in every time, the poor have little power and few friends in high places. God’s people watch out for all people, and especially those that no one else watches out for. The sick and the crazy and the inelegant and the uneducated and the hard to understand and the ones that make you uncomfortable. In a just nation, the people care for all the outcasts.

Second, to be just is to be aligned with God’s intentions for the world. Justice and righteousness are intertwined and inseparable. Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, God says in Amos. Righteousness does not mean holy and proud and right and good. It means to be in agreement with God. To be on the same wavelength. Righteousness is like having a friend who finishes your sentences, or one with whom you can just sit quietly together, being with them in harmony, or one whom you haven’t seen in a long time, but when you do, you just start up the conversation as if you were never apart. In a just nation, there is no tension between the intentions of God and the actions of people.

And third, justice is in the nature of humans. As Israel is created to be just, and as Israel becomes ill and confused when it forgets that, so people are created to be just. And we get ill and confused when we forget that. When we see injustice, things seem out of kilter. When we are perpetrators of injustice, it makes us sick. It weakens us inside and takes away our capacity for pleasure and joy. We cannot easily oppress others nor leave the poor and the outcast on the roadside. We do it, but then we pay a price, not through some divine punishment, but in painful and queasy souls.

When we act unjustly, or condone injustice, we are going against our nature. We are not the people we were created to be. We are at odds with ourselves.

When we hear what God says through Amos, we might think that God despises the worship of Israel—”I hate, I despise your religious feasts,” it says—we might think it is because Israel has violated some rule. But it sounds to me that God is more sorrowful than angry, the same way you might be if you saw someone act against his or her own best self. Alas, says God. The word in Amos is a word for grief, not anger. What is happening to Israel is tragic and sad. Israel dies, according to Amos, because it is no longer the nation that God created.

Let justice roll down like waters. If justice is like a river flowing, then we are in the river. When we act in or tolerate injustice, we swim upstream. It is tiring and ineffective. When we act justly, we float downstream. When we put aside our fear and greed, we are able to be the people we really are, God’s creatures. But the river of justice is not something that surrounds us. It is us. There is no such river that exists without us. We are not only in the river of justice, we are that river. When in our daily decisions, large and small, global and personal, we are just, then river of justice flows. And we pray that the world may become what God hoped for in its creation.

Only One Foot in Heaven

Text: Revelation 7:9-17
Other texts: Matthew 5:1-12

If you were looking for a book in the Bible that talked about the other world you might decide to turn your Bible over and open it at the back and look at Revelation.

This strange book is unloved by many, including Martin Luther, who felt it had no place in the Bible. He thought it should have been left off the list when they were choosing which books were in and which were out. The book of Revelation has been used and abused from its beginning. It is an example of apocalyptic literature. In fact, the word “apocalypse” is just the name of the book in Greek. It means “things revealed.” The word does not mean the end of the world.

Though on the face of it the book seems to be about that. It is full of weird images and symbols and creatures and violence. Revelation has been used by those who hope for the destruction of the earthly life and for the establishment of another kind of life in another kind of place. A story of escape from the sorrows of this life into a heavenly life. Or escape from its sins. They hope to be part of the elect who make it and not part of those left behind.

It is certainly likely that the community to whom this book was first addressed had plenty of sorrows to contend with. They lived in the empire of Rome under Roman rule. They were an occupied people, with little control over their own lives, powerless, and seeing no hopeful horizon ahead. In times like these, people imagine a radical change, divine destruction of their enemies, and a restoration of both peace and power to the good and the righteous.

But it is not so much the end of the world that such people long for as it is the end of the age. The end of the evil times and a restoration of the times as they were intended to be. A return to ideal and so far unachieved good times. So you might consider the story of Revelation not to be the story of ruin of the world but a restart after a seemingly failed first attempt. A re-doing, not an un-doing.

There is a tension in our lives between wishing for a better present or longing to escape the present. Do we stick with the bad or do we flee? Stay in or get out? Do we work from within or resign? Do we make do with what we have been dealt or do we re-deal, or do we leave the table altogether? When we talk about the coming kingdom of God, do we hope in our hearts most for the good life on earth or the good life in heaven? What exactly is God’s promise? To save us out of our lives someday or to strengthen and bring joy to our lives this day?

This passage from Revelation that we just heard starts with praise and worship of God seated on the throne. “Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to God forever.” You are not mistaken if you think that these words resemble the Gloria that we sang at the beginning of worship today. It is not a coincidence. The words of our worship that honor and thank God and acknowledge God as the source of all things often come from the Book of Revelation. So we start, in worship as in this reading, as in perhaps our own spiritual lives, with a glance, a bow, a thank you, to God. We start with the ineffable, with a sense of mystery and grandeur, with gratitude at what we have been given, and with humility.

But the last part of this same passage turns the worshippers’ attention back to the things of this life. The Lamb who sits at the center of the throne, always interpreted as Jesus, looks after the sorrows and trials of us, his people. In the Gloria, we end with Jesus’ presence here with us. “For God has come to dwell with us,” we say. God is with us here, here where as it says in Revelation, here where there is hunger, thirst, and scorching heat. Here in this world the Lamb guides us to springs of water and wipes away our tears. At the end of Revelation the people come to a new city, the New Jerusalem. The book of Revelation ends not with all the world being taken up into some heavenly castle, but gathered instead in a new place into which God has been restored and re-seated as sovereign.

The list of blessings or beatitudes—same word—appear in both the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. But in Matthew, whose version we just heard, the earthly is qualified constantly by the heavenly. What appears in Luke as “blessed are the poor” becomes “blessed are the poor in spirit.” “Blessed are the hungry” becomes “blessed who hunger for righteousness.” And so forth. I used to disdain the Matthew version, thinking that it spiritualized the physical. But now it seems to me that together these two versions—the physical and spiritual—describe our nearly equal needs for both physical and spiritual food, peace, and companionship. You cannot bless one without the other.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, of which we are a part, has a motto. It says: God’s work. Our hands. We cannot leave the work of the world to God, sitting on our couches waiting for the dramatic end, nor can we do the work ourselves, trusting in our own abilities and goodness. Faith, this church, has a motto too. It appears on our website and in the literature we send out. It says: Spirit, Joy, Reverence, Service. There is no way to separate out the life of the spirit from the life in the world. The life of worship from the life of service. God knows, we are physical and spiritual creatures. God constantly call us back into real life from our fantastic visions of escape.

All Saints day used to honor only the Christian martyrs. Then about 1200 years ago it was changed to honor all the official Saints. And then later to honor all the Christian dead. Yet on this day we honor all who come to worship and to serve the Lord. Not to flee from the world but to serve it. Martin Luther reminded us that we are saints and sinners both. Both sinners and saints at the same time.

Here we stand. With one foot in heaven and one foot on earth. Thanks be to God.