Advent 1 - November 30, 2008

Kingswood UMC - Buffalo Grove IL

Texts: Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80

Both the Psalmist and the Prophet provide us with pleas of lament as we begin this new church year and the season called Advent. Advent means to come or coming ... and so during this season, we sing and pray and wait and watch for our God to come again. In the best and in the worst of times ... there is the yearning for God, and the faithful call for God to come.

It was Thanksgiving weekend, 1966. And it was cold and rainy in Oakland. I was 21 years old, 2 months pregnant with my first child, and living with another Army wife ... who was only a little more pregnant than I was. We were sharing her apartment near her family across the bay from San Francisco. Her husband had shipped out in September. Mine on Thanksgiving Day. Both were deployed for 12 months ... that was the pattern back then for regular Army. They had gone through Advanced Infantry Training together at Fort Gordon near Augusta, Georgia ... and we’d become friends. When Fran and I realized we were pregnant ... and going to be on our own to carry and deliver these babies, it seemed a reasonable plan to share expenses and to support each other through the year. I could find a job ... and she already had a job to which she could return.

So some friends of my folks drove my VW beatle cross country for me and picked my young soldier husband and myself up at the airport. After Leon shipped out early on Thanksgiving morning, I made my way to the home of Fran’s family for the rest of the day. It was one of the saddest days I’d ever known at that young age ... but I was sure things would get better. But jobs weren’t easy to find for a scared, sad, small town girl from the Midwest. I didn’t feel good most mornings. Fran would go to work ... and I’d face the cold, wet December days in a city I didn’t know. Frankly, being in a big city was scarey enough. Later in my life I have come to love city life and neighborhoods ... at least in Chicago. But this was all new for me then. When Fran got the flu ... my coping skills gave out and I finally gave up, called home, and asked my folks if I could live with them for the year. It was one of the hardest calls I’d ever made.

But hard didn’t get easier when I got home. My sister was getting married at Christmas, and my sad, sick face sure didn’t match the mood at home. And when the holidays and wedding were finally over ... and my Dad back from his cross country drive with my car ... things settled into a routine that was anything but joyful. It was the winter of the big snow ... 1967 ... and I’ve got pictures of my car literally buried in our front yard. I cried. I took a class. I tried to help with the house and cooking. I cried. I worked retail. And I wrote letters every day and waited for the mail to come. All of our belongings ... from our first apartment and the trailer where we’d lived on base ... all of our stuff was boxed up in the basement. Some days I’d try to get that organized. But I think I mostly just wanted to be reminded that I’d had a life independent of my parents ... and probably would again. But my young husband was in a war a zillion miles away ... and what if....?

I yearned for the year to pass — and I waited:

for Leon to come home — safely;

for the baby to be born;

for life to move forward.

It felt like my life had come to a complete stop ... though in retrospect I realize the problem was really that things were moving way too fast. Changes were happening over which I had little or no control ... and there was always the fear of what could happen.

It was a year of lament — of crying out in my heart for the restoration of the life I’d known and was planning. I’d like to be able to claim that my faith was strong and kept me grounded ... but that just isn’t true. I was scared and sad and mad ... and not very aware of God’s presence through those dark days. I now know that I could have turned for company to a number of characters and situations in scripture.

In a few minutes we are going to meet a woman of the Old Testament who had even more reason to lament. It isn’t a story we hear very often because it is tucked into the middle of the story of Joseph and the technicolor dream coat. It seems that Joseph’s brother, Judah, had three sons and he married the oldest to a woman named Tamar. But this son ... Er ... died. Judah directed his second son ... Onan ... to do the duty of a brother-in-law, to make Tamar pregnant so that the brother who had died would have off-spring. But Onan disobeyed ... and then he died, too. Judah now encouraged his daughter-in-law Tamar to wait until his youngest son ... Shelah ... grows up ... and he sent her back to her own father’s house to wait. She waited ... and cried out in her heart when she realized that Judah would never send the third son to her ... being afraid that he’d lose that son also. And so after many years of waiting ... Tamar finally took things into her own hands ... tricking Judah into a liaison by acting the prostitute ... and becoming the mother of twins. It turns out that God was with her after all. She even becomes one of the five women named in the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew ... and her prayers of lament were answered. Restore us, O God. Come down.

Perhaps you have sometimes wondered where God is. Or yearned for God’s intervention in the affairs of your life or the world. Have you ever tried to pray and felt nothing, seen nothing, sensed nothing for a long, long time. Perhaps you heart has been broken ... or at least broken open by the events of your life. In the prophet Isaiah, we encounter this yearning again. It is many, many generations after Joseph and Judah and Tamar. The people have lived in Egypt and then been brought forth into a promised land. There they made settlements and organized themselves for protection and prosperity. Eventually they were carried off into exile ... to live in a foreign land with people who did not know their God. They waited for years in exile without sensing God’s presence.

It is in the midst of exile that we hear the lament of the people in the prophet Isaiah. It is not so much a personal lament ... but a communal one. The prophet ... on behalf of the people ... begs God to come.

In the midst of the despair of the people, there is a yearning that finally is voiced in the cry for God to come ... to come into the world. And they remember the ways that God has acted on their behalf before ... the great and mighty deeds that have shaped this people: the bringing out of the people from slavery, the giving of the law on Mt. Sinai and the entrance into the land that had been promised. They have known God’s power to save and create a people. And now they’ve known God’s hiddenness ... and that when God’s presence is not made known, they too easily forget to call on God. And so a part of this lament includes the confession that without God, sin abounds.

It has been said that where there is no vision, the people perish. One of the things that means, I think is that without a vision of life with God, the people forget that God is there, is here, and their life, our life together as God’s people withers and dies. Even if our common voice is a cry of lament at God’s absence .... it is in the communal act of turning to God, of yearning for God, that brings us back to the affirmation at the end of Isaish’s cr:.

We hear the voice of people crying in lament again in the Psalm today.

Again, it is a communication of the deep yearning of the people for God’s saving presence. The setting is not exactly clear ... but the situation is of "enemies" out to get the people and of God’s seeming unavailability. But the exact context may not be as important as the reality that this Psalm ... and others ... provide for us the language to express our own yearning for God.

The cry of the Psalmist is communal. Unlike the cries of Job, or my own tears of yearning so many years ago, we hear the cries of a people in this Psalm and in most. It is the very communal voicing of this Psalm that reminds us that we are not alone. In the voicing of lament ... especially when undertaken as a community ... there is also a prophetic element. Remember that prophecy is not so much about telling the future as proclaiming the present ... proclaiming the presence of God ... even now, even in the midst of horror, terror, despair, fear, longing. Whether the present is filled with the anguish of exile (as Isaiah voices), the fear of being overtaken by enemies (as David expresses), the despair of childlessness (as in Tamar’s situation), or the confusion of being with child and yet feeling quite alone (as I did so many years ago), when we find that there are others singing their version of this same song, then God’s presence is made manifest and hope is born.

We live in a very scarey time, too. Though the terrorist attacks of this weekend in India may seem far away, we can hear the keening of those suffering through our TV screens...and we know that it is something about western wealth and perspective that is under attack. Perhaps some of you have stayed at the Taj Hotel in Mumbai in your business travels. It brought it quite close to home for me to discover my son has stayed there ... and in the other hotel that was attacked, too, during layovers in the city. Without fanning the flames of hatred for Muslims, we need to acknowledge that in some quarters western values and culture are precisely the target under attack. Perhaps David’s prayer is not so far afield : Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel ... stir up your might, and come to save us!!! Restore us, O God!

The scariness is all around. The reports of job loss right here in this community are steady. The need for food from our Emergency Food Pantry is running about 37% over last year ... on a par with what other food distribution sites are experiencing throughout the city. The frantic race for bargains has led to the trampling death of a worker in a stampede in California. Neighborhood restaurants are closing ... and car dealerships. Though we’ve not been carried off to exile in another land ... it can feel as if we are living in exile right here in our own neighborhoods, as we stand looking into windows where we once could easily shop. O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.

But it is often hard to honestly cry out our lament. We ‘re more likely to drown out the sadness and fear with jingle bells, and instead of looking for God to break through the heaven’s we look for the bright red suit of Santa striding into our malls. But if we can stay with the lament long enough, then maybe we’ll be able to notice that God really does respond. But instead of God breaking open the heavens, we find God breaking in the back door ... in the hovels, in swaddled clothes, in the garbage dumps of Nairobi, in the bloody streets of Mumbai, amid the bankruptcies and foreclosures and evaporating jobs, we find that God is already there. God comes all the way down ... to the cross, to the grave, and gives us exactly what we need ... God with us. Emmanuel!!

The cry of yearning and lament is at least partly a song of hope. May you be blessed with this song as we wait and watch and prepare again this year for the blessing of God’s presence in our midst. Thanks be to God. Amen!!!