27 November 2005

Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

The Church of the Redeemer

New Haven, Conn.

Scripture: Isaiah 64: 1-9

Hope for What?

The voice of the Hebrew prophets is a wild voice. These men roar, pace back and forth in their tents, scrolls scatter, quill tips break, pillows with little bells go flying. I’m sure the camels behind the tents rise off their folded fore legs and bellow and snort themselves at all the disturbance coming out of an eruption like Isaiah’s: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence…” (Is. 64:1)

The Hebrew prophets, like Amos, Jeremiah, Isaiah, are the voices of lions, lion kings. You can picture the majesty of the lion king in Disney’s movie, the MJM lion that used to roar before the movie started. Or you can picture Churchill, King, Coffin, either Roosevelt.

These are the voices that move large masses of humanity to epic endeavors and deep faith.

“…as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil….” (vs. 2). Such are the images that come to Isaiah’s mind. The voice of a Biblical prophet is a voice that will set a fire under you and bring you to a boiling point. As that bumper sticker says: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention!”

At its best, it is the voice of moral outrage, a cry for justice, and a challenge to God almighty: “Use a thunderbolt, O Lord, tear open the sky, and come down here, make mountains quake, and set things right!”

This is the voice of huge hope, a bursting forth of great expectations, moral outrage, and moral hopes, from sea to shining sea.

It was onto the wide plain of such Messianic hope that Jesus Christ was born. The purest and best hopes of a God-inspired people had been smoldering in a caldron of hope and despair for years and years. Nourished on the bread of tears, wept over with tears of full measure, these people wanted God back—from the bottom of their souls!

This is the voice of a hope we have heard in the past. It is a voice we need to hear. It is a voice we long for (often found in good theater). It is a voice we will need to hear again. And it is a voice, a dangerous voice, we’d better watch out for.

I saw another bumper sticker this week. Plastered on the back window of a small pickup truck was a new one for me. A new “bumper [ES1] sticker”: “Biblical Truth Not Tolerance.”

Well, without tolerance, then, I considered obliging—to park so near his rear he couldn’t get out until he was forced to come to my car and read my “Visiting Clergy” sign in my window! But that was intolerant. I decided to not practice “Biblical truth,” and to practice tolerance. To give him all the room he needed to unpark himself!

It was a real “Thomas-Jefferson” moment, for me. But I must say that a little Deistic practice of civil liberty tolerance was not nearly as emotionally satisfying as the thought of cramming my fist of Biblical truth down his intolerant throat.

I wasn’t sure which Biblical truth I wanted to cram down his throat: “God loves you, you arrogant jerk!” Seemed too ironic or paradoxical!

But it wasn’t Jeffersonian-philoso-reason I was following as much as a deeper, better reading of the Bible. A reading I’m sharing with you this morning in our Advent introductory call to messianic hope: Isaiah 64:1-9.

The nine verses evolve. They change. The lion-voice that opens the chapter is not the voice by verse nine. So were I to have entered into a conversation with my “Biblical truth” proponent, I would have asked him: “which truth did you have in mind?” Not just to be another snotty minister, but to enter the reality of Biblical truth.

For the reality is that while the verses start with the lion’s roar of messianic hope, verse nine is no where near that tone of voice, and by verse twelve Isaiah is asking if God will punish us, not them, in his great coming down out of the heavens to the earth.

To stop with Isaiah’s first cry for God to show up true and just and absolute—as my pick-up truck bumper-sticker-foe does--is to substitute an ideology for Biblical truth; it is to assume that we know, from the Bible, which ideas make up God’s truth. But if Biblical truth could be defined in some ideology, people would have stopped reading the Bible after the Jebusites defeated the Hittites—or whatever. Even an Isaiah nuts and bolts definition of the messianic hope would have rendered the Bible a dead letter after the first five year plan succeeded.

A messianic hope, a hope for a messiah and a messianic age where “messiah rules!” is a hope, and only a hope. It’s not a plan.

“Hope” and “plan” are two very different four letter words. And living by hope is a whole lot harder, and a whole lot more Biblical, than living by a plan, even a plan defined by so-called “Biblical truth.”

We all want “shock and awe” on our enemies. But it’s God’s to define in the end while we simply blunder along and muddle through. Soon, in our passage, Isaiah is talking about how God is the God who works for those who wait. And he goes on to say, you, God, you hid yourself. In other words, you did not tear open a hole in the sky and come down and quake the mountains. And Isaiah even confesses “because you hid yourself we transgressed. We have all become like one who is unclean” (vs. 6). The lion is no longer roaring. The lion is no longer roaring.

And the deeper Biblical truth surfaces. After the roaring, after the “gladly do right” moment, after the confession of sin, the prophet says, “yet.” Yet. And this is in bold, bold as a lion, but as chastened as a lamb, and yet, O Lord, you are our Father. The prophet claims not to know what is the right plan for his messianic hope. He claims his relationship with God. You are our Father. “…We are the clay, and you are our potter” (vs. 8).

The Biblical truth is that we are the ones who struggle with God; God is the one who struggles with us. We are clay in God’s hands. Our hope is not in our plan. It’s in our relationship.

The ultimate truth of the Bible and the only one that can be drawn from the evidence of the whole great book is: these people struggle with God. They hope in God. And through multiple and messy failures they both stay in relationship with each other. Our hope is in Isaiah’s claim: “we are all the work of your hand.” And Isaiah’s prayer-request: “Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord” (vs. 9)

We know, ourselves, within ourselves, the passion of the ancient Hebrew prophets. A blood-tide for justice ebbs and flows in our veins. A cry for righteousness is, sometimes, our voice as well. In our prayer requests in church, in the waiting room at the doctor’s, we have an Isaiah voice: “O that you [Lord] would tear open the heavens and come down” (Is. 64:1). From hurricanes to earthquakes, from racism to war, we give voice to the ultimate hope that God would just come down and do the awesome thing that needs to be done.

We would have a pretty tattered sky were we to have our way! And that is the legacy of ideological hope: a shredding of the sheltering sky. The radical hope that is ours is to follow a person and a set of images: Christ and His story. Advent is a new set of those images. We don’t get the security of a 5-year strategic plan. We get the possibility of fulfilling our cosmic destiny, alone and together!

Jesus Christ was born into the prophetic tradition, and there is a judgment of our world, a judgment, really, against our world, in the presence of Jesus. We can feel that judgment in the simple words: “What would Jesus do?” Apply that to Christmas: What would Jesus do? What would Jesus do for Christmas!? Absurd, no? What we do…

But the hope that follows that judgment is the new being in each of us. Christ brings no ideology. Jesus tears no opening in the heavens. Only a new bright star, and the camels—not racing around in agitation, but slowly, plodding along in reverent endurance, with gift-giving kings en route.

Amen.