Advent 1

Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews

 ‘Drop down, ye heavens, from above’, we sing, making our own words of entreaty over 2500 years old. From exile in Babylon, the people of Israel had mourned the loss of their land and the destruction of the temple. In a strange land they had wept and lamented, recalling the gracious acts of God in delivering his people in former times, and praying that God would once again bring salvation. To a people on the edge of despair prophets spoke of a new day dawning – of the darkness before them being turned into light (Isaiah 42.16b). And with that flickering flame of promise the people mustered courage and hope as they were allowed to return to Zion.

 But their hopes of restoration foundered in the face of reality. The holy city was in ruins. The Jewish community descended into factionalism. Drought and crop failure brought hunger, inflation and social unrest. Corruption festered. The great vision of Israel as a light to the nations turned into hostility to foreigners and an inward-looking nationalism. The promise of darkness being turned to light seemed a foolish fantasy to a people who had grown accustomed to the gloom.

 ‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!’ cries Isaiah. It’s a plea for deliverance from a people who have reached the end of their hope. In it we hear the Advent cry for a salvation that comes from beyond ourselves. Isaiah’s voice batters the heavens, seeking to reach the hidden God. Most of the words of the Advent Prose come from this chapter of Isaiah. Drop down, ye heavens, from above, we plead. Do not remember our iniquities for ever. This is the Advent posture, peering into the dark, shaped by the contours of God’s apparent absence, stubbornly refusing to relinquish the hope of a light you can’t see.

 And there is courage and truth in Isaiah’s cry. The plea for God to show his face is a plea for judgement and deliverance, and what Advent helps us see is that we can’t have one without the other. Isaiah’s cry brings with it an acknowledgement of the people’s sin – the iniquities which, like the wind, carry them away from God; the knowledge that even their righteous deeds are like filthy cloths when good intentions are waylaid by selfishness, and hope has turned bitter with disappointment.

 ‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!’ cries Isaiah. Come down, into the midst of our suffering, into the places of our sin. Come down with your light and scatter the darkness of our world, our communities, our hearts. Come, with your justice, and deliver us.

 Deliverance is a big thing to pray for. It’s the prayer that forms when you know you’ve come to the end of your own capacities or resources; when you have no power of yourself to help yourself. It’s heard most often from the oppressed and the desperate. Perhaps you know this sort of prayer from the inside: from times when bad news has knocked you flat, or when fear gnaws at you in the long empty hours of the night, or you’ve felt stuck in a situation you can see no way out of.

 And when we pray for deliverance, it is always for deliverance from something. Deliver us from evil, we pray daily in the Lord’s Prayer. I’ve prayed every day for most of this year for deliverance from the pandemic. Deliverance is prayed for from the hands of oppressors, from situations that are intolerable, from futures we are afraid of and from pasts that still haunt us.

 And what are we asking when we make such a prayer, when we join in with the Advent refrain of ‘drop down ye heavens, from above’? We’re asking for God to act, for the hidden God to reveal himself, for justice to be vindicated, and for a way to be opened where we’d seen only a dead end.

 When Isaiah prayed for God to tear open the heavens and come down, he knew that such a visitation would require a truthful account of the people’s situation. The light that dawns in the darkness brings illumination, and reveals what many prefer to keep hidden. This is why we often fear judgement: we expect it to lead to condemnation.

 But God’s judgement is an aspect of his love. Theologically speaking, you can’t separate the divine attributes. God does not contradict himself  - his judgement is not in opposition to his love. They are but different manifestations of God’s action towards us in saving and delivering us. We need God’s judgement because God loves us too much to leave us in our sin.

 And this is what gives Isaiah the courage to pray. For all that his prayer acknowledges that God has delivered the people into the hand of their iniquity, for all its willingness to speak truthfully about their situation, it is God’s faithfulness in which he trusts. ‘Yet, O Lord, you are our Father’, he says, ‘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 for ever. Now consider, we are all your people.’

 That’s what Isaiah pins his hope on: God’s faithfulness to the covenant to which Israel has been faithless. It is God’s faithfulness, and not their sin, which will have the last word. The light of God’s judgement will dawn, but it dawns to bring salvation not condemnation to those who will respond, because it invites repentance. Sin does not get to determine the identity of God’s people. Only God can do that.

 And so we can take courage and faith to make Isaiah’s words our own. We can look truthfully at the situation we find ourselves in – a world stalked by pandemic, blighted by injustice and poverty, a world in which Uighur Muslims are held in concentration camps and teenagers are trafficked for sex, where hunger and loneliness tighten their grip, where the shadow of death has been cast over all of us like a pall – we can look at all of that, truthfully, and not despair, because God does open the heavens and come down.

 And he comes down to join himself to us. Not, in his first coming, in quaking mountains or flames of fire as Isaiah had begged, but in human flesh, in poverty and humility, the hidden God coming unnoticed by most of us. This is God’s answer to our Advent prayer, the heavens raining down not thunder and lightning to smite us, but righteousness and mercy to save us.

 This year has already had something of the character of an extended Advent. We’ve waited, sometimes with hope and sometimes without. Some of the injustices of our society which had been hidden have been revealed. Absences and privations have taught us more of what it is we truly desire. We have tasted something of what it means to ask for deliverance. And as well as what we hold in common, we’ll all have our own griefs and sorrows and fears that issue in the Advent prayer: Drop down, ye heavens. Do not remember our iniquity for ever. Thou hast hid thy face from us.

This is the sort of truthfulness Advent permits, even encourages. There’s no pretence in Isaiah’s words: the situation is dire. They can’t save themselves. But nor can they discern God’s presence. There is only the cry that breaks heart and heaven for the hidden God to show himself, and save his people.

 The Advent Prose makes this a model for our prayer in this season. Unflinching, honest, a plea for God to make himself present. And God does. In the Advent Prose, as in our lives, the last word is with God, and it’s words he spoke to an earlier generation, in the trauma and despair of exile. They’re words in the darkness that assure us that morning is coming. They’re God’s response to our plea for deliverance, and they’re addressed now to you and to me.

 Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,
my salvation shall not tarry:
I have blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions:
Fear not, for I will save thee:
For I am the Lord thy God,
the Holy One of Israel, thy Redeemer.