November 30th

November 30, 2008

Waiting for God
a sermon on Isaiah 64.1-9 for Advent 1
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama

I have almost decided that I am only good for one thing. I don’t mean personally. As a human being I’m probably good for several things. I mean professionally. And I do not mean that I am only good at one thing. I can do all kinds of pastoral tasks competently enough. No, I mean I am only good for one thing, particularly when people are hurting.

Figuring out what this one thing is has also given me insight into why people want a pastor around in times of anguish. Have you ever wondered about that? You would if you were a pastor. If you had ever sat with a grieving family and knew you could do nothing to take the pain away, and probably not much to make it easier to bear, you would have asked why. If you ever sat with an anxious family during surgery or prayed with a person before surgery, you would have asked why. You would have wondered because in times like these you are tempted to feel useless. A surgeon may succeed or fail, but a surgeon is obviously useful. What about the pastor? What am I good for? Why am I there?

I might do any number of helpful things, like carry a bag or fetch a cup of coffee, but anyone could do that. With my brilliant wit I might distract a family with conversation or even make them laugh. That’s worth doing, but you don’t have to be a pastor to do that. I pray. Of course, I do not have to be present for God to hear my prayer. So why? What am I for?

I’ll tell you. I am there to remind people who are hurting that they were not wrong about God.

C.S. Lewis married late in life a woman he knew was dying of cancer. She lived longer than expected, long enough for them to become joined completely in heart and soul. And then he lost her. He kept a journal of his grief, mostly in self defense. By writing down his thoughts and feelings he hoped to not drown in them. He later published these intensely personal reflections in the little book A Grief Observed, which I recommend to people who are grieving, especially over the death of a spouse.

In his journal, Lewis wrestles with his faith. His fear was not that God did not exist after all, but rather that he had been wrong to believe God good and loving. He wrote:
Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel his claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the other side” [pp. 5-6]

He compares his faith to a rope. When you do nothing more with it than tie up a box, it is easy to say you trust it. When you hang by it over a precipice and your life depends on it, you find you are not so confident. He also compares his faith to a house of cards, knocked down by this dreadful blow.

“Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language,” he writes. “What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What have we to set against it?” [p. 29]

Lewis did not lose his faith. He goes on to say on the very next page: “I wrote that last night. It was a yell rather than a thought. Let me try it over again.”

When we hurt desperately, our tears cloud our vision and our cries drown out all other voices, maybe even God’s for a while. In our moments of greatest vulnerability and anguish, our chief fear is: “Was I wrong about God? If he is so good, how could this happen?” You grow up singing “Jesus Loves Me,” and you know in your head that life is tough, but you bounce along merrily enough. Then your faith gets put to the test. Not “the professor asked a hard question about doctrine” test but a test like Jesus faced in Gethsemane and on the cross. “Not my will but yours be done” followed by “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

God didn’t forsake Jesus. He does not … he will not … he cannot forsake you either. But in your darkest moment, you don’t reason, you yell. And you don’t think, you fear. And so you wonder if all that stuff about God’s love and faithfulness was just wishful thinking, the fantasies of a naïve mind. That’s what the pastor is for, to remind you—maybe in words, or maybe just by being there as a concrete embodiment of the church’s faith—that you were not wrong.

Of course the danger, for me, of being there is that sooner or later someone will verbalize their fear and ask the question: “Why did God let this happen?” Here is how you can tell the difference between a wise pastor and one who needs more seasoning. The wise pastor will not attempt to answer this question. The pastor who needs more seasoning is like Job’s friends. They attempted eloquent answers. At the end of that book, God himself spoke to Job. Did he get his answer? No. God said, basically, “You cannot understand these things, at least not yet, so trust me.” That wasn’t the answer Job had wanted, but after God spoke to him it didn’t matter anymore. He had been given the tiniest glimpse of God’s glory, and it was enough.

I can’t answer that question because I do not know. I am neither God nor his advisor. All I know is what scripture gives us, which is this: The answer to our suffering will come not in words but in the form of God’s action. God’s act of new creation, the coming of his kingdom in all its fullness—scripture talks about this in many ways—then and only then will it all make sense.

So where does that leave us? Waiting. … Waiting for God.

Today is the First Sunday of Advent. Advent is a season of four weeks that begins the Christian year. As you may already know, the Christian year tells the story of Jesus. It is a series of holy days celebrating different events in his life. It does not start with Christmas because Jesus was not just born. Long before he was born, he was promised. If you do not understand Jesus as the center of the history of God and his people, you will never understand him at all. God promised to send Jesus, not just to Mary and Joseph, but to his people in ages long past. When God told the serpent in Eden that Eve’s offspring would crush his head, when God told Abram that in him all the families of the earth would be blessed, and I could go on—he promised Jesus. When Isaiah prophesied the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and swords shall be beaten into plowshares. God’s people lived in anticipation for a long, long time. They waited.

Advent has a dual personality. In a way, it is about their long wait. We remember how God promised and then … finally … sent the Savior. But Advent is also about our wait. The work of Jesus is not yet done. Not all the promises have been fulfilled. As you can see from the brokenness of the world around you, he has more to do. Advent reminds us that we are waiting. Maybe this is the one thing God’s people are good for: waiting. It is no different today than it ever has been for the faithful. We know our hope is in God. God alone can heal this world and us. God alone can, not only explain why the world is this way, but also redeem it. So we try to do our part, as best we can: honoring God in our lives, telling others the Good News. But we do so only in his strength, and we know the really big stuff is his work. And we wait. The trouble is—and you know this if you tried to do any shopping Friday and got caught in long lines, or if you have ever spent three hours waiting for a five minute appointment with your doctor—we are not good at waiting. I don’t know about you; I would rather go the long way around a traffic jam—even if it meant I had to drive for half an hour instead of sit still for ten minutes—just so I can keep moving.

Good at waiting? Once when I was a boy, Christmas fell on a Sunday. My parents decided we would open presents after worship. I was so excited I threw up during Sunday school. We had to go home, and ever after we opened all our gifts on Christmas Eve. And I’m not much better now. Good at waiting? No! We’re not good at waiting. Try telling that to a grieving family: “Someday all of this will make sense.” No one on earth can even begin to imagine how. Personally, I agree with our scripture reading. That prayer is my prayer: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” That’s what I want. Enough of books and sermons! Let God show up in all his might and glory! I must be crazy to want such a thing; how could we endure it? I doubt we could. I expect we would be utterly blown away. But I want it anyway. I want God. “Please, Lord, no more waiting! Tear open the heavens and come down!”

Our scripture reading shares the same basic logic as the season of Advent, which is probably why it was chosen as an Advent reading. What you heard read is only the last part of a three-part section near the end of the book of Isaiah. The first part is chapter 63, verses 7-14. It recalls God’s mighty deeds of the past. The problem this whole passage—this whole book—wrestles with is the Exile. Just as C.S. Lewis wrote a journal about his grief when he lost his wife, the prophets wrote a journal (of sorts) about Israel’s grief when they lost everything they thought mattered. Of course, the prophets’ journals are not just reflection because they spoke God’s Word into his people’s grief.

In their grief, God’s people need to remember the past, when God seemed so real. Once upon a time they had been so certain of God’s goodness, so confident in his love for them. Back then it was easy to believe. But does this idealize the past too much? Isaiah 63.11 says, “Then they remembered the days of old, of Moses his servant.” On one hand, they are absolutely correct. God did mighty things and made himself known powerfully in the time of Moses. On the other hand, though, that did not make it easier for God’s people way back then to be faithful. If you recall, all the people who left Egypt with Moses died in the wilderness, except two. God’s people rebelled against God. They saw God’s glory on the mountain, and they made the golden calf and worshiped it anyway.

We often make the same mistake. If only I had lived in the time of Jesus’ ministry! If I had walked with him in Galilee and seen the miracles! Then faith would be so easy. Would it? By the end he had only a small band of disciples left, and even they didn’t understand what he was doing. Would we be so different?

Nevertheless, we must look back on all the God has done in the past, because it is the reason we continue to trust him for the future. I believe God will someday set things right and make all things new because I know the Father raised Jesus from the dead. The first part of this larger passage is about remembering what God has done.

The second part (Isaiah 63.15-19) laments the present situation. In this case, the exile. In our case … well, you know about our case. It is life in this broken world and the brokenness in each of us that cries out for healing. Then we come to our scripture reading. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence.” It’s looking back to Mount Sinai, when God did this very thing. Why doesn’t he do it again?

The rest of the passage wrangles with grief in practical ways. Three of them I want to briefly highlight. First, the passage is realistic that our hope is in God. We wait for him because help will not come from any other source. Second, it struggles to see the justice and goodness of God. And finally, it gives itself to God in faith.

First, our passage is realistic that our hope is in God. Verse 4: “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.” Here is the beginning of faith, knowing that God can be counted on. God and God alone is our hope. God delivers, and we ought to know that. Unfortunately, right there near the end is that dirty little four-letter word again: wait.

Waiting for God is an act of faith. You wait because you know your deepest needs cannot be met by anyone or anything else. You also know that God can meet them. So what else can you do? You wait for God!

Second, if faith begins in this assurance about God alone being worthy of our hope, faith matures as it clings to God’s goodness. This passage struggles mightily to preserve the justice and goodness of God. The problem is again, How could God let this happen? The answer the prophet gives is: We can’t blame God; we can only blame ourselves. “All our righteous deeds are like a filthy rag … our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”

A word of caution here. This was true of the Exile. Israel had turned so far from God that she no longer served the purpose for which God created her. She failed in her mission. So God did something drastic. He took away all the things Israel thought were important. Then he started over with his people. The exile was radical surgery to cure Israel of a terminal disease. That’s how the prophets saw it anyway.

Your suffering may be a different story entirely. It is not always a punishment or meant to teach us a lesson. That’s far too simplistic. “Who sinned that this man was born blind?” asked Jesus’ disciples. “No one,” he answered.

Therefore, I do not want you to come away from this passage thinking your suffering is your own fault. It may be. But not necessarily. What you need to do instead is consider how even in the worst circumstances the prophet never gives up on God’s justice and goodness. You may think you know the reason for your suffering. More likely you will have no clue at all. The two possibilities you can rule out at the start are: God is unjust and God is not good.

Finally, faith flowers into wholesale trust in God. “Yet, O Lord, you are our Father …” I hope you appreciate how rare it is to find God called “Father” in the Old Testament. Jesus taught us to say that, but it is almost unheard of in the Old Testament. This passage is one of the rare exceptions. The Old Testament almost never does this, but then, surprise! Here it is in a passage that is banging on that closed door C.S. Lewis wrote about. The worst has happened. All we can do is wait for God. Where is he? Then out of nowhere this simple truth: “You are our Father.” A world of trust stands behind that one little word.

“You are our Father; we are the clay, and you are the potter …” This is another way of saying, “Not my will but yours be done.” You can only say that when you trust that God is good. “We are all the work of your hand.”

This passage is not through banging on the door, but as it bangs and cries out, it surrenders itself to God. That’s what we should do. Bang on that door. Cry out to God. Beg for the wait to be over. But do not stop trusting and always put yourself into his hands.

Here’s what I want you to do now as I conclude. Think back to a time when your faith was vibrant. Perhaps an Easter Sunday. You knew Jesus is alive because you felt him there with you. The preaching was compelling. The music lifted you to heaven. In that moment is was so easy to believe. You simply knew, in your head and your heart, that God is real and good and loving and doing amazing things all around you.

Now if you are hurting and doubting today, I say to you that you were not wrong about God then. You believed God is bigger and stronger than your problems, and that you could trust him to see you through. You were not wrong about God. You were perhaps naïve about the size of your problems or the brokenness of this world, but you were right about God. He is bigger still, and able to see his work in you through to completion.

Ultimately, that’s what life is about—God’s dream for you. His desire is not to make you comfortable or happy. His desire is to make you like Jesus Christ.

So know that you were not wrong about him, and no matter how hard it is, keep waiting for God. Amen.

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