Isaiah 64:1-9
Advent Imagination
James Sledge November 29, 2020, Advent 1
On my office computer, I have files of my sermons stretching back 25 years. Often when I contemplate a new sermon, I’ll look back at those files. I’ll check to see what I said about the same passage in the past. And so I looked to see what I’d said about Isaiah 64 on the first Sunday in Advent.
Advent marks the start of a new year on the Christian calendar, and I saw that several of my previous sermons for this day looked back on events of the previous year. This year has been one we may well want to forget. The pace of climate change accelerated and climate projections became more dire. A devastating pandemic swept the globe, sickening tens of millions, and killing a quarter of a million in the US alone. Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and far too many others were murdered, in large part because black skin is still less valued than white. This unleashed waves of protest and unrest. And just to put a cherry on top of this awful year, our president seems incapable of losing with a shred of class or dignity, or even admitting he lost.
But 2020 is hardly the only year we wanted to put in the rearview mirror. My Advent sermon from 2005 noted that the previous twelve months had seen a horrific tsunami in southeast Asia, mounting US casualties and violence in Iraq, a then record hurricane season that included Katrina striking New Orleans, then shortly thereafter, a devastating earthquake in Pakistan. For good measure an AIDS epidemic was wiping out entire communities in sub-Saharan Africa.
More recently, my 2014 sermon looked back on events eerily similar to this year. Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri. Prior to that, Eric Garner died in a police chokehold as he cried, “I can’t breathe.” Is it too much to hope this will someday change?
Dismay at the state of things is at the heart of our Old Testament reading this morning. Some folks have this idea that real faith insulates you from despair, that people of deep faith do not experience God’s absence. But the writers of the Bible feel despair. Jesus feels abandoned by God.
The writer of what is often termed “third Isaiah” lived in a time when despair engulfed the people of Israel. They had returned from exile in Babylon with the voice of another prophet ringing in their ears. Thus says Yahweh… “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert… For you shall go out with joy and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” They had returned in great hope, sure that God would bless them, would once again establish the throne of David, would make Israel great and bring all her enemies low.
It had not turned out like that. Those returning from exile found life difficult. The former glory did not materialize. Drought and famine did. The economy was devastated and beset by rampant inflation. Factions and infighting developed among their leaders. The situation was dire. Hope was scarce.
Into this situation, the prophet cries out. O that you would tear open the heavens and come down… you have hidden your face from us and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity… do not remember iniquity forever. Now remember, we are all your people. And the psalm for today echoes these words, asking how long God will be angry. Three times its refrain begs, Restore us, O God; let your face shine that we may be saved.
Of course the biblical prophets do not cry out to God out of hopelessness. Their cries are filled with hope, hope rooted in the certainty that God is merciful, filled with steadfast love, and longing to bless all the families of the earth. Prophets and psalmists cry out in anguish and even anger, not because they lack faith, but because of their deep and abiding faith.
The prophet’s cry is rooted in hope born of what some have called prophetic imagination. This sort of imagination differs from wishful thinking. It envisions a future that is more than possible, that is in fact the destination of that long, moral arc of the universe. And so with familiar verses found just beyond our reading this morning, the prophet proclaims. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent—its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says Yahweh.
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Some years ago, Diane Hendricks and I decided to use Brian McLaren’s book, We Make the Road by Walking, to guide our preaching. Its chapters trace the biblical story and follow the flow of the Christian year. In an Advent chapter, McLaren makes a distinction between wishes versus hopes and dreams. He writes, “Desires, hopes, and dreams inspire action, and that’s what makes them so different from a wish. Wishing is a substitute for action.”[1]
One might quibble with McLaren’s semantics, but I understand just what he means. I may wish that I could win the lottery or inherit millions from a rich uncle I’ve never heard of, but such wishes call forth little action on my part.
How different the dream Martin Luther King, Jr. offered the world in 1963. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ …I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.”
Some might think this wishful thinking. I do not. It is prophetic imagination that envisions a future more than possible, one that is, finally, inevitable because the future belongs to God.
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As we enter Advent once again, you do not need me to remind you of all that troubles and endangers our world, of all the brokenness, pain, greed, lust for power, and wickedness that twists and distorts the world away from the good creation God intends it to be. But perhaps you do need me to remind you of the prophetic imagination that envisions God’s dream. Perhaps it may help if I encourage us to let that dream become ours and enlist us for action.
It may be that none of us are prophets, but we do not need to be. We don’t need prophetic imagination. With a little Advent imagination, the prophet’s dream can become our own. With a little Advent imagination, we can hear Jesus calling us and join him and all those other disciples who labor for the dream, who work and move toward that day when bitter enemies shall sit down to eat together, the greediest and most power hungry shall be satisfied, content, and at peace, but evil shall find nothing to sustain it. “They shall not hurt or destroy anywhere in all my beloved Creation,” says the Lord.
Come quickly, Lord Jesus! Come quickly.
[1] McLaren, Brian D., We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation (New York: Jericho Books, 2014), p. 63.
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