All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts
are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins
sweep us away.
This Advent season we're following the thread of messengers,
the people who prophesied and proclaimed the good news that culminated in a
fulfilled promise with the birth of Jesus Christ. Our Advent journey will take
us from the heartfelt prayers of Isaiah, to the rugged preaching of John the
Baptist. Then to the wondrous joy of
Mary, mother of Jesus, as she sings her song of thanksgiving after the angel
Gabriel gives her the news that God has chosen her to bear the Son of God into
the world. Finally, after the long wait,
the promise of God, Jesus the Messiah, comes to us at Christmas. A promise fulfilled.
When most of us think about Advent, we think only about
Christmas. We all know where the story ends. We all know the great and glorious
day when the God of all creation stepped out of timeless glory to put on
humanity, to be bound by time and space. Keep in mind that God became more than
one with us. God had spent
centuries, millennia, eons for that matter, expressing the desire to go back to
being one with us. God tried time
and gain to reconcile what was lost when we turned from God’s loving plans,
deciding to go it our own way. In the incarnation, God become one of us to be able to communicate God’s
infinite love in a way we just might understand.
Today, we want to dig deeper into the need for a deliverer.
Why was Jesus birth such a powerful event? Why was Jesus life such a
world-changing experience? Why was Jesus death and resurrection the culmination
of God’s promise to restore us into relationship? To put it bluntly, we failed to listen to all
God’s attempts to reach out to us. We took all the promise, all the potential,
all the possibilities in our original goodness from the very beginning and
turned our backs on God.
Believe me when I say that looking into Isaiah’s mirror
brings me pain. Believe me when I say that I would much rather celebrate the
fun passages in Isaiah—talking about the wonderful counselor and the prince of
peace. Let’s read together the painful, hurting plea of the prophet:
O that you would tear open the
heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence—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! When
you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains
quaked at your presence. 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. 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. 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. 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. Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you
are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be exceedingly angry,
O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all
your people. Isaiah 64:1-9 NRSV
The prophet, speaking for the people, cries out to God for
help, reminding God what God has done for them in the past as if to say “Do it
again, God.”
Remember the time when you tore open the heavens and called
the universe into being. Remember the time when you tore open the heavens and
poured your signs and wonders on the people of Egypt. Remember the time when
you tore open the heavens and talked face to face with Moses and gave us the
Law. We all trembled before your majesty and power. All the world heard of you
as we repeated the stories of your deliverance from place to place and
generation to generation. Do it again, God. Tear open the heavens and show our
oppressors that you still remember your people. Show them that you still care
for us.
After reminding God of who God has been in their past, the prophet
accepted that fact that the people had not always been faithful to God. In the
previous chapter, the prophet confesses in verses 8-10
He said, “Surely they are my people,
children who will be true to me”; and so he became their Savior. In all their
distress he too was distressed, and the angel of his presence saved
them. In his love and mercy he redeemed them; he lifted them up and
carried them all the days of old. Yet they rebelled and grieved his Holy
Spirit. So he turned and became their enemy and he himself fought against
them. Isaiah 63:8-10
We have to keep in mind that their theology told them that
God turned from them. They had offended God to the point that God had turned
away from them. Today, we might adjust the theology a bit, but the result is
the same. They then and we now sometimes cannot sense God’s presence or hear
God’s voice. I strongly believe that event speaks more about who we are than
who God is. I thought about that the
other night as Suzanne and I wanted a recent episode of Dr. Who. The Doctor and Clara are in the middle of a
fight. Clara tried to get the Doctor to do something we would never have
done. Listen carefully to his response.
No, he is not God, but I can hear God’s character in the Doctor’s words. [Dr. Who clip: Dark Water, season 8 time
slice 13:37-14:08 “Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me
would make a difference.”]
Let’s look in more detail about this verse of confession,
about who they were in their recent past—All
of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like
filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us
away. “One who is unclean” This has
nothing to do with needing to wash with soap and water. The Hebrew word here is
“tame,” meaning to be ethically, religiously or ritually impure. You became
unclean when you touch something unclean, such as a dead animal. Most often,
you would be considered unclean until the next day. If some cases, such as
certain illnesses, you would be considered unclean until the condition cleared
up. These people often had to live outside the camp, to be separated from the
others. Some conditions—such as leprosy—never cleared up condemning these
people to a permanent life apart from all they loved. There were as one who is
unclean. They had not lived up to the Law, often because of the simple
experiences of being human in everyday life. We can easily see how the concept
of “unclean” worked for the Israelites. They had the Law. We still label people
as unclean. We still feel unclean before God, thinking that our sin is greater
than any other, that our sin is unforgivable—even by God. We know what it is
like to “become like one who is unclean.”
“all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth” The Message
puts it this way, “Our best efforts are grease-stained rags.” Our son-in-law
John works in the gas fields with various sized engines. Some are the size of
the engine in our little car and some engines are bigger than a full size
pickup. When John tears down an engine, he sometimes makes a mess. He can go
through a basket of shop rags on a nasty job. Each one of those rags simply
does its job. Being a shop rag simply means that you will get oily or greasy or what every “y” is
needed. Afterward, the rags might be laundered and reused or more likely tossed
with the rest of the trash. The point here is that the state of the rag is not
a matter of judgment but a matter of fact. Our righteousness, by its very
nature, is impure. This is not so much a matter of judgment but a simple fact. We
cannot be righteous by our own effort.
“we all shrivel up like a leaf” A leaf is a leaf. It opens. It does its work
for a season. It reaches the end of the cycle and drops from the tree, vine, or
bush. There is no shame to the leaf. There is no judgment to the leaf. When we
take this image and apply it to people, we usually have one critical difference
in mind. As people, we sometimes, somehow, some way cut ourselves off from the
source of our livelihood, from the source of our vitality. Jesus uses this
image when he describes himself as the true vine. As long as we are connected
to the vine, we have life, we can be fruitful, we can bring joy to the vine and
to others with our fruit as long as we abide in the vine. For the prophet to
confess that they are shriveled up like a leaf is to confess that they have cut
themselves off from God. They have turned away. This is not the uncleanness of
daily life, this is not the messiness of the shop rag. This is full blown turning
from God. This confession is not about understanding our humanness. This is
about confessing our willful nature. We turn from God. They did, we do.
Finally, we come to our
iniquities taking us away like the wind. I heard a preacher say once that
sin will always take you farther than you wanted to go, keep you longer than
you wanted to stay and charge you more than you wanted to pay. Sin lies. Using
archery as an image, I see sin like this. Simple sin is our humanness, we miss
the mark. Try as we might, in our own efforts, we cannot hit the bull’s-eye
every time, intentionally. Sure, we hit the mark on occasion and often with
some consistency. But we cannot do it perfectly every time. When we step up to
the next level, rebellion, we get so frustrated with our lack of success that
we try to keep anyone else from hitting the mark. We try to change the rules.
We try to change the goal. We try to hide the target, the bow and the arrows.
At our worst, we fall into wickedness. We get so caught up in our inability to
hit the mark that we go beyond changing the rules. We go beyond hiding the
tools. We begin to destroy the target. We begin to tear down and attack other’s
efforts to accomplish the tasks that demonstrate our own failure. We are blown
away by our sin.
We come back to the question of Advent. How does this
confession wrapped in a plea for deliverance tie to the birth in Bethlehem? How
does Israel’s cycle of faith, forgetfulness, faithlessness, and failure reflect
on our lives today? The prophet cried out
because they were in need of a savior. We cry out because we are in need of a
savior. When we strip away all the trappings our culture has piled on to the
commemoration Jesus birth, we find the same cry from the prophet. God, tear
open the heavens and do it again. God, help us be whole again. Help us to be
reconciled to you like you did before. In Bethlehem though, God did not come in
signs and wonders. God did not come in the parting of the seas, in the billowing
smoke on the mountains. This time deliverance came in the noisy humbleness of a
child. This time deliverance came in the obedience of a young couple giving God
their first born in a way that had never happened before or since. This time
deliverance came in a way unheard of and unexpected.
This time deliverance came by the water and the spirit. This
time deliverance came in the cup and the bread. This time deliverance came when
Jesus faced down the unjust systems of this world and refused to be compromised.
This time deliverance came when God conquered death to restore us into
relationship.
As we start the season of Advent, we must be mindful of our
plea, God, do it again. Show us your power, your majesty, your passionate love
for us. As we start the season of Advent, we must be mindful
of the promise that the God who created us to love and be loved will bring us
back into relationship with God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
Thanks be to God.
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