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Isaiah 64:1-9 Central Christian Church

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Isaiah 64:1-9 Central Christian Church November 29, 2020 Isaiah 64:1-9 “Waiting with Isaiah” Central Christian Church David A. Shirey It’s the first Sunday of Advent. What places in the Bible do you associate with Advent and Christmas? Nazareth. Jerusalem. Bethlehem. All those are Christmas places, to be sure. But what about Babylon? Does anybody think of Babylon (present- day Iraq) as a Christmas place? Some Bible history may be in order. In the year 587 B.C the Babylonians captured Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple that had been built by David's son Solomon, stole its contents, burned the rest of the city, brought Jerusalem's walls tumbling down, and then took the cream of Israel's population captive into exile-- hauled them off 500 miles from home and kept them there for over 50 years. In this morning’s Scripture, Isaiah addresses those captives. With all due respect to Bing Crosby, they won’t be home for Christmas. They’ll be spending Advent in exile, which is not a happy thought. It doesn’t conjure up any Christmas carols, but it does conjure up what we sang at the outset of this service: O Come, O come, Emmanuel/ and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here/ until the Son of God appear. Imagine with me spending Advent mourning in lonely exile. Not having been to Babylon during the holidays, I was about to go digging into some reference books to try to get a feel for what it would be like to spend the weeks leading up to Christmas five hundred miles from home, held against my will by people who had destroyed my city, my church, and my culture, but Isaiah spared me all that work by the words he uses in the chapters leading up to this morning’s Scripture reading. Here are some of them: Afflicted. Brokenhearted. Captive. Bound. Ashes. Mourning. Faint spirit. Ruined. According to Isaiah, those are Advent-in-exile words. Most Advents, I would venture to say those kinds of words would be the furthest things from our minds and mouths. They’re so melancholy. And usually, we’re primed to make merry come this season of the year. Right? Come the first Sunday of Advent in most years, we’re fresh off all the festivities we usually mark Thanksgiving by. Travel. Or hosting others traveling to us. Adding the extra leaf to the dining room table to make it bigger or setting up the card table. Pulling out the folding chairs. Company. Festivity. Frivolity. Eat, drink, and be merry. Usually that’s from whence we’ve come on the first Sunday of Advent. But not this year. I heard somebody say the other day, “I’m staying up ‘till midnight this December 31 for sure! To welcome the New Year in, yes, but mostly to make sure 2020 leaves!” Amen? Maybe this year more than previous years in our collective memory we’re able to identify with Isaiah whose words are addressed to people of faith spending Advent in exile. After all, isn’t life this Advent 500 miles from anything we ever would have imagined it would be? Do any of Isaiah's words ring true to you? Do any of them bring any people or circumstances to mind? I’ll read them again: Afflicted. Brokenhearted. Bound. Ashes. Mourning. Faint spirit. Ruined. Isaiah’s not alone in exile this Advent. He's got company. But consider this. Advent is supposed to begin in Exile. Advent doesn’t begin surfing the web for bargains on Black Friday or in the garage or attic rummaging for those boxes marked "Christmas." No, Advent rightly begins in Exile because by definition the word Advent means coming. Coming as in the coming of the Lord to people who are in exile. Coming as in Coming for to carry me home! But since coming means "on the way but not here yet," coming means waiting. And if what you’re waiting for is nothing less than your deliverance from circumstances from which you cannot extricate yourself by your own force of will or strength, then waiting means fervently hoping for outside assistance… Waiting for a Savior. Advent is supposed to begin in exile because Advent is God’s promise to come to people for whom things are emphatically not right to save and redeem them. Hear me when I say that when we find ourselves in Advent in exile we’re experiencing Advent in its natural habitat. And we’re looking forward to Christmas-- to the coming of a Savior-- in a whole new way! I tell you, people who find themselves in Exile in Advent have Christmas lists you would not believe! Do you have your Christmas list for Christmas 2020? Please don’t tell me you don’t want anything. My grandfather never wanted anything for Christmas. He ended up receiving cashews, black socks, and a subscription to the Wall Street Journal even year. Booooring! By contrast, Ralphie Parker wanted something for Christmas. 9-year-old Ralphie is the central character in the 1984 movie A Christmas Story. Set in the 1940s, the movie begins with Ralphie and a bunch of other kids lined up outside a toy store window. Their noses are pressed up against the glass and they’re pushing and shoving to get a better look at what’s there. Then Ralphie spots what he calls “the holy grail of Christmas gifts”: an official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot range model air rifle! Ralphie thinks that if he can get one of those for Christmas everything in his life will be perfect. But when he tells his mother what he wants for Christmas she says, “You’ll shoot your eye out.” And when he writes a paper at school on what he wants for Christmas, his teacher gives him a C+ and writes on the bottom of his paper in big red letters “You will shoot your eye out.” And when he tells a department store Santa what he wants for Christmas, Santa says, “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!” My grandfather wants nothing for Christmas. Ralphie Parker wants an official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot range model air rifle. How’ bout Isaiah? What’s a prophet want for Christmas? In chapters 61-64 Isaiah's Christmas list appears and it’s a doozy. Hey Isaiah, what do you want for Christmas? Isaiah says, I want God to tear open the heavens and come down. I want to hear some good news for the poor. I want the brokenhearted to be comforted. I want those in bondage to be set free. I want people who are tasting ashes to be anointed with the oil of gladness. I want God's spirit to kindle a fire in the hearts of every man, woman, and child (Try to find those things at Wal-Mart for 30% off!) What does Isaiah want for Christmas? Isaiah wants God to rip open the heavens and come down in a blaze of saving grace and incandescent truth! To borrow the Psalmist’s lovely image (85:10): he wants righteousness and peace to meet under the mistletoe... and kiss. That’s what Isaiah wants for Christmas this year. Here’s the good news: God will come and deliver! If Isaiah’s words are to be believed (and they are!), then whoever begins this Advent season passionately hoping for the Lord to come and do a new thing in this world won’t be disappointed. Says Isaiah, “Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.” (Isaiah 64:4) There’s a Bible promise to wrap your heart around: God will act on behalf of those who wait for Him! Which is good news to me because as I’ve been looking over my prayer list recently I can’t help but to notice that many of the names have been there a long time. They are the names of people and groups of people who with patience and perseverance have been waiting for the Lord a long time— • Waiting for God to bring release from pain, calming of anxiety, soothing of grief, • Waiting for God to open a door where everything to date has been closed shut, • Waiting for God to impart insight into an important decision, • Waiting for an end to this pandemic, to intractable prejudice, to rancorous division, • Waiting for the Lord to bring “strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow” …and what I want for Christmas is for God to come and act on behalf of all who have been waiting for so long for God to lighten their darkness. What do you want for Christmas this year? Got your eye on something? Got your heart set on something? May I commend to you an Advent posture that came to me thanks to Ralphie Parker? At the beginning of the movie, Ralphie stands with all the other kids in front of the department store window, his face pressed against the glass, focused with a holy longing on one thing. It’s Ralphie’s posture I’m after, not the object of his longing. The appropriate posture for Advent is this: You and I standing before the window into a new year, standing beside us are all kinds of folks in all kinds of circumstances. With faces pressed against the window, our eyes are all fixed on the same thing, “the holy grail of Christmas gifts”: Christ the Lord.
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