Wheels, Wonders and Waiting

Isaiah 64:1-9 (NRSV)
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence—as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence! When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence. From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him.

You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed. We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us and have delivered us into the hand of iniquity. Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; 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 forever. Now consider, we are your people.

I hope that you had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. We didn’t have quite as many folks over to the house as Mickey did down the street, but the parsonage seemed plenty full this week as our family members came from across the bay to celebrate with us. Yesterday we were finally able to stop and catch our breath, munch on a turkey sandwich and give thanks that we had survived and that it had been such a good time. And today I have to gird myself up because today is the first day of a new Christian year and it’s a tough time to be a preacher.

‘Why is that?’ you ask? Well, today is the day when every good preacher stands up in the pulpit, stretches his or her arms out dramatically and says to the Christmas culture surrounding that pulpit, “Stop! Proceed no further! I reject your crass commercialization and unbridled materialism! I despise your tinsel-coated shopping malls and your barking dog “Jingle Bells” records. I abhor your silly little TV Christmas specials starring has-been singers and your wanton disregard for the true Christmas story. I refuse your compulsion to sing Christmas carols from the first Sunday of October and the annoying way you let everyone from Shania Twain to William Shatner sing them. I laugh at your pathetic obsession with the Grinch because you have nothing else to say about this holiday since you have stripped it of its true meaning. I…I will stand in the breach and proclaim the season of Advent. I will single-handedly bring to a halt the motion of the wheels of commerce. Hear this word, Christmas culture: God has seen what you have done to Advent and God is not happy.”

That’s what every good preacher does on the first Sunday of the new Christian year—this Sunday. But I am a different kind of preacher and, since I have often felt absolutely unheard in any Advent season of the past, this year I’m ready to say to the culture, “O.K., let’s do it your way.” I mean…Advent is a season of preparation and waiting, but we don’t know how to wait anymore as a culture so why force something on folks that seems irrelevant to them? Advent is also a season of expectation…expecting God to come among us, not only remembering how God came the first time in Jesus, but looking ahead to God coming again to set all things right, to make all things new. And who among us is expecting the imminent coming of God? Like the coming of a Wal-mart to the Eastern Shore…it’s a relic from the expectations of Christmas past.

So maybe we should be all caught up in the hustle and bustle. It’s an exciting world out there. I read in the paper yesterday about the people camping out at the doors of shopping centers on Friday morning, the day after Thanksgiving. In our home paper a few years ago they interviewed a woman who had come down for the 6 AM opening of the Wal-Mart on Black Friday. She said that being there for the event kind of put her in the Christmas spirit, except for the fight that broke out when the doors actually did open. She said she liked the sense of competition. It put a little thrill into the season.

I know that there is a lot going on in the next few weeks -- work, exams, last minute details, travel -- but surely you can handle a little more stress. You are pros at this - especially if you have kids. You can pack that schedule a little tighter with holiday parties and shopping and still be on top of your game. And all of the statistics that show that this season can be one of the loneliest times for people should not have you singing “Blue Christmas.” Or maybe it should.
Maybe it’s not such a good idea for the church to give up to the madness around us. Maybe there does need to be a voice in the wilderness saying, “Prepare the way for the Lord.” Maybe there does need to be the expectation that things will be different…that things are different. I’m just being silly really. The church needs Advent.

So the Church changes its colors to blue and purple—colors associated with waiting and royalty. And we bring out the Advent wreath. Do you know where the Advent wreath comes from? The candles come from long liturgical tradition, but the actual wreath is, (and please don’t tell anybody), pagan. Northern European. Think Scotland. Actually, think Scotland in December. It is so far north that about this time of the year the sun doesn’t rise until late in the morning and it goes down by mid-afternoon. It’s a dark place in the waning days of the year. When I lived in northern England for a winter I learned how dreary it can be.

It was strange for us, but it was even stranger, I imagine, for my early Scottish ancestors, living in the time before the message of Christ arrived, who began to wonder if the shorter days meant that the sun was starting to abandon the earth. Maybe, they might have even wondered, it was their fault that the sun was abandoning the earth, so they faced these days with guilt and anxiety. (Even though they were pagan they were still good Protestants.)

But what they did when this happened was not to let the darkness go unnoticed and to pretend that nothing was wrong. They stopped everything. They gave in to the change. They put away all their tools and they took off the wheels from their carts and wagons. Then they took these wheels into their houses and decorated them with greens and lights and hung them up on the wall. Think about that! All the vehicles come to a dead stop and the walls are decorated with wheels and it was sign that they were living in a new period. They were trying to bring the sun god back, and from their perspective this little activity worked. Every morning the sun started to rise earlier and earlier and they knew that the sun had not abandoned them and life could go on.

So that’s how Christmas wreathes got their start. Christians transformed the tradition but there’s something pretty powerful in that symbolism. Gertrud Mueller Nelson says about this tradition, “Imagine what would happen if we were to understand that ancient prescription for this season literally and remove—just one—say the right front tire from our automobiles and use this for our Advent wreath. Indeed, things would stop. Our daily routines would come to a halt and we would have the leisure to incubate…Having to stay put, we would lose the opportunity to escape or deny our feelings or becomings because our cars could not bring us away to the circus in town.”

Hmm…that’s an interesting concept. Staying put we would be forced to come to grips with who we are and what we have become. Advent would not be a time for distraction by the bright lights in the city, but a time to look within ourselves and see where God is trying to get our attention. What would it mean to live in Advent time instead of on the timetable chosen for us by the world, a world that has taken our holiday and turned it into something we can barely recognize as Christian any longer? What other images might we have for this season? What if we decided that the circus in town, whatever that is for us, cannot tell us who we really are?

Well, let’s try some other images. What if Advent could be represented by a dirty cloth, a withered leaf and a potter’s wheel? Those are the images in today’s reading from Isaiah.
Isaiah is always in high demand during Advent. We will read a lot from him over the next month. In chapter 64 Isaiah was talking to a people who needed to get ready for God. The people of Israel were in exile, far from the land they loved. Isaiah prays for a day when God would return in a mighty, visible way with awesome signs that would shake the mountains and rattle the hills to prove that God was still there and still powerful enough to show their oppressors who the real, one, true, and holy God is. The images are of heavens ripped open and mountains quaking. God would come down like a blazing, destructive fire to prove to Israel’s adversaries that they should tremble in God’s presence. They might assume that Israel’s God was absent or powerless because of the condition of the Israelite people, but the day of the Lord was coming when all things would be made right. Things would be turned upside down because God would vindicate those who waited and expected a better day.

But then Isaiah’s tone changes. He seems to realize that if God comes, God is going to clean up everybody’s act and, even though that could mean the destruction of the empires of the world, it might also mean the destruction of the Israelites as well. Because when Isaiah started to look around at his own nation he saw a dirty cloth used up and stained by sin. God may not have been obvious, but the people were not faithful either. All of their pretensions to holiness amounted to little more than a filthy rag, hardly a fitting covering for God’s people.

Isaiah looked around at his people and saw a withered leaf, tossed to and fro by the wind. As the life drains out of leaves and they fall and blow in the wind, so the people, because of their sin, because of their failings, because of their forgetfulness, had lost the vitality they once had. They were no longer connected to the root of their life. No, the coming of God may be bad news for their oppressors but Israel was in no condition to feel smug either.

That’s when Isaiah starts to speak of another wheel, if only indirectly. He starts to talk about pottery and we can imagine a potter at work at a wheel. Have you ever seen a piece of clay being worked on a potter’s wheel? It’s a beautiful thing to watch. It is an earthy process that involves elemental things - a bit of clay and a bit of water worked by experienced hands. But there is no way to be a potter without getting your hands dirty. It’s an intimate affair.

That’s just the image Isaiah uses for God’s relationship with us. “We are all the work of your hand,” he says. “We are the clay and you are our potter. Yes, you have the power to crush us like a stubborn blob of clay, but don’t be angry with us. Don’t remember us for our failings and our forgetfulness. Remember us for being your people. Remember us because of your promised to be with us.”

The problem for us in our day is that we’re not too good at recognizing that we are clay. We’re not too good at expecting God in the midst of the circus. We’re too independent, too busy. We’ve got too many of our own wheels spinning.

It’s not that the things we’re doing are not noble causes. We want to provide for our families and so we work. We want our children and grandchildren to have opportunities to explore their gifts and so we take them to ball practice and music lessons and school clubs. I know that scene. We want to spend time with our friends. We want our holidays to be special and our gifts to be meaningful.

But if Christmas arrives more as an achievement than as a gift, I think we will have failed. If we will have spent these weeks of Advent in frantic preparation and neglected the state of our souls, we will not have accepted the gift this season is. We need brothers and sisters to hold us accountable. We need real introspection and real community. We need meals around the table with our families, with a wheel of lights in the center. We need something besides the circus.

So the church calendar changes at just this moment to give us that chance. Advent gives us the opportunity to recognize how differently the world can look when we’re living on God’s time. In the midst of the clamor and bustle and noise of the season, Advent speaks in a whisper.

This week our family watched the movie The Polar Express, which in some ways is just the sort of thing I complained about at the beginning of the sermon - a secular myth to replace the real Christmas story. But it had some very powerful moments. The Polar Express was a train that only some could hear and see. The sleigh bell that was given as a gift to the boy who was the main character rang with music that only some could hear…only those who believed. Christmas was not a guarantee of magic and mystery. It wasn’t even contained in the glitter and trappings. Christmas was a gift to those who believed.

In this season, we should know that God has plans for us. In this season as in all seasons, we should expect that Christ is coming, not just has come, but as the Communion liturgy says, Christ will come again. And when Christ comes again, how will be found and what will we be? God calls us to lay ourselves out before the mystery of this season and to prepare for the new work God will make of us.

It’s the season. A time of bright lights and pretty paper, of study lamps and shopping carts. But Isaiah the prophet ushers it in with talk of filthy rags and leaves blowing in the wind and lumps of clay before a waiting potter. And maybe that’s the real Advent mystery—that as much as we talk about waiting on God, its really God who is waiting on us. Thanks be to God.