Dec. 3, 2023

I speak to you in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

As I was thinking about my sermon this week, the movie The Shawshank Redemption popped into my mind.  Many of us will have seen the movie – but if you haven’t, here’s the premise in a nutshell:  Andy Dufresne is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit and faces unrelenting cruelty and institutional evil in Shawshank Prison.  And yet, through all his waiting for justice, somehow Andy holds on to his hope.  And it makes me wonder – if I were in a place of hopelessness, what would I hold onto to maintain my own hope?

Our reading from the Prophet Isaiah this morning has a lot to say about waiting and hope.  This portion of Isaiah – part of what’s often called “Third Isaiah” – was probably written after the Persians allowed the Jews who had been banished from Jerusalem during the Babylonian Exile to return.  In some ways, their hope had been fulfilled. 

But much that they had hoped for didn’t happen.  After 70 years away the returnees faced some serious problems.  They came into conflict with those who had remained in the country and now owned the land.  There was disagreement over what kind of government there should be.  But these – and other problems – all had the same root cause.  Society as they knew it had been obliterated during the Exile, and the returnees had come back to a place that was fundamentally changed.

This prophetic text gives us deep insight into how the hearts of those who had returned were troubled.  Poetry is especially good at that.  “Tear open the heavens and come down so that the mountains would quake in your presence.”  “Make your name known … so that the nations might tremble at your presence.”  These phrases recall what God did at Mount Sinai when God revealed himself to Moses and gave the Law.  The prophet wants God to come as divine warrior.  As all-powerful ruler.  Isaiah speaks for a people who want God to act in the ways they’ve known God to act before.

We also hear in this text the returned exiles’ profound disappointment.  God has not acted in the ways they expected.  They’ve been freed from captivity, but life is profoundly different for them then it was for their great-grandparents before the Exile.  God isn’t being their divine warrior or powerful ruler – God is simply hidden and absent.  They speak, and God doesn’t seem to answer.  So if their hope – what they’ve held onto in the face of their own hopelessness and cruelty – is that God will act exactly as God did in the past?  Well, this reading shows the heartbreak and despair that comes from misplaced hope.

Waiting is hard.  Holy waiting – waiting on God to act – is even harder.  And I think this is sometimes difficult because of the words we use to describe God.  We describe God as “Almighty”, because we believe in a God for whom nothing is impossible.  But that often leads us to think: if God is all-powerful, then God should come and bring justice and peace and health to a world that desperately needs it.  And in many cases, what we want God to do is deeply personal.

If we perceive divine silence in our own waiting – if our own experience of God is different from the God who delivered the Israelites from slavery and to the Jesus who healed the sick and raised the dead – we might start to wonder the same things that the Prophet Isaiah did.  Why doesn’t God do what God did before?  Why has God hidden his face from us?

The problem here is that – like so many of the inmates at Shawshank Prison – we’ve reached out for hope and found the wrong things to cling onto.  When we think like this, we put our hope only in God’s All-Mightyness.  And then we’re tempted to put all that hope in the idea that God will think and feel and act just like we do.  And then when God doesn’t act in the ways our ancestors in faith experience, the waiting begins to feel eternal, and our hope starts to, as the prophet says, “fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”

I think the hope that can sustain us as we wait for the return of the Christ Child – is grounded in God’s character as God.  Even when God seems nowhere to be found, our prayers and our pleadings aren’t an effort to get God to show up and be what God has been before.  No.  They’re our effort to get God to be true to a character we know to be unique. 

The story of our faith – from Genesis to Revelation – tells us that God is righteous.  That God seeks justice.  That God cares for the outcast.  That God has not abandoned the creation but continues to care for it throughout all of time.  That God is not only All-Mighty but is also Always-Present – always seeking to be in relationship with us. 

The Good News for us this morning is that we can put our hope in God’s unchanging character.  God doesn’t always do things in the same way, but God does not change.  And so, through Jesus, we see that God relates to us in new ways than God did before.  Through love, and not through kingly force.  By being ever-present, rather than through being the all-powerful warrior.  But God is still always working to bring about the righteousness and peace and justice that is the character of his kingdom.

As we practice Holy Waiting during this season of Advent, we know that our lives are different than they were 5 years ago, or ten or twenty.  But if our hope is rooted in God’s character – if that’s what we pick up to hold on to – then we can trust that we, and the world around us, are still being shaped by the hands of the ever-present potter.  As we await the return of the Christ Child, our hope is in knowing that God – whose mission it is to redeem the Creation – is faithful to us, now, and always.  Amen.