Scripture can be found here…
We begin with this aching, desperate plea to God:
“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.”
What was it? What caused that cry to go up? What caused that prophet to give voice to a sense that nothing less would do—that the very presence of God on earth was required. NOW.
And let’s remember what that was like, for the ancient Israelites, what it meant: the presence of God. Early on in the Bible, we have stories in which God resembles the other ancient deities… a powerful guy, but a guy. Sure, God creates the heavens and the earth and everything that is in it, but God also walks in the garden in the cool of the evening, and can’t seem to find that nice couple he just made. God shows up by a river to wrestle with a favorite child, gives that guy a permanent injury to his hip, and vanishes before morning…but leaves a blessing behind, along with the limp.
That’s God in the Bible, Act 1. But in Act 2, when God shows up for the prophets—for Moses, for Elijah—then, we begin to see something that tells us, this is no human. This is a being in control of the weather, one who can self-cloak in a massive pillar of fire by night, and a pillar of cloud by day. This is one so formidable—so terrifying, actually—that you don’t really want to get a glimpse, because you might go blind, or go mad. This God passes in front of a cave, to give Elijah a peak, but only allows the prophet to see the divine back. My seminary professor liked to say, God’s presence was like radioactivity—powerful, yes. Good, undoubtedly. But if you weren’t at some level scared of God, you were a fool.
And here’s another prophet—the prophet Isaiah—and it is his considered (or unconsidered) opinion that God had better come, even though it means the nations will be shaking in their collective boots. Radioactive or no, God had better come down here, and come down soon, because Someone, with a capital S, needs to FIX THIS THING.
I’ve felt like that. I imagine you have, too. That this… whatever it was… was way, way beyond my human capabilities. That this… situation, turn of events, relationship, fear… needed nothing less than Divine Intervention.
Call it, wild hope. The prophet has it, that hope that dares to demand the Almighty to appear. The question is, do we?
What is the source of your wild hope in this Advent time? For what purpose do you long for God to tear open the heavens, and come down—to show the Divine Face to this hurting world?
In her book, “To Dance With God,” Gertrud Mueller Nelson talks about ancient peoples who enacted a ritual of wild hope as the days grew shorter, and the nights grew longer, and they began to fear that their sun god was gone for good.
Pre-Christian peoples who lived far north and who suffered the loss of… life and light with the disappearance of the sun had a way of wooing back life and hope…Their solution was to bring all ordinary action and daily routine to a halt. They gave in to the nature of winter, came away from their fields and put away their tools. They removed the wheels from their carts and wagons, festooned them with greens and lights and brought them indoors to hang in their halls. They brought the wheels indoors as a sign of a different time, a time to stop and turn inward… slowly, slowly they wooed the sun-god back. And light followed darkness. Morning came earlier. The festivals announced the return of hope after primal darkness.[i]
That, of course, is the story behind the Advent wreath. Christians have appropriated this enactment of a wild hope—the hope that we could wood the sun god, or, rather, God the Son, to come. O, that you would tear open the heavens. O come, O come, Emmanuel. O come, God-With-Us.
Things take a turn, though, in our passage from Isaiah. We get a stronger sense of what the writer is so agitated about as we continue to read. Isaiah wants the fearsome God to come down so that God’s enemies will know. They’ll KNOW. God’s people know! The passage describes myriad ways in which God has already shown up for the people—“You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways,” we read [Isaiah 64:5]. But then we come right smack up against it. The problem. The REAL problem.
It’s not those other people or, it’s not only those other people. It’s us, ourselves.
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, Lord God, because Someone, with a capital S, needs to FIX… me. Us.
Now it makes sense.
So often we are praying, and we pray to God, FIX HIM, FIX IT, HELP HELP HELP… but if we stick with it, if we keep praying, eventually those prayers change, and soften, and become something else entirely.
O, fix me. O, fix me.
O, fix me. Fix me, Jesus, fix me.
That spiritual arose in communities of enslaved people in our nation. And just to be clear, the people of those communities, who were being cruelly held and used as property, never believed that slavery was not the problem. The historical record, as well as the rich legacy of their music gives testimony. But their faith had also alerted them to the simple fact that, in order to do God’s work—including the arduous work of gaining freedom—each one must also work on themselves—or, more accurately, let God work on them. We have to let God work on us.
That’s one of the ways in which prayer works.
Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand. ~ Isaiah 64:8
Because, it’s true, what they say: prayer doesn’t change the one immortal, invisible God, only wise: it changes us, just as the hands of the potter mold and shape the clay. Prayer shapes us for God’s hands, and therefore for God’s purposes, and therefore for God’s delight.
Maybe this is the wildest hope of all, the one at the heart of this evening season of Advent: that we will have an encounter with the one to whom we sing “Gloria, in excelsis Deo;” an encounter which will, finally, change us. Fix us. Lift us. Heal us.
That’s my wild hope. That’s what makes me want God to tear open the heavens and come down… or, maybe, to just whisper in my ear and remind me that she hasn’t been hiding in heaven at all, but is already close at hand… as close as the flame at the end of the match as I light my Advent candle.
We wait for the great celebration of the birth of Christ confident that God has already staged that Divine Intervention we have been longing for, and it turns out, God came as a guy… a powerful guy, a walking, talking, breathing, sleeping, eating, smiling, shouting, healing, teaching guy. A guy both completely divine and as human as you and me. God did tear open the heavens. God did come down. Let our wild hope in this Advent season be this: that we will know it in our bones, and show it in our lives.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Gertrud Mueller Nelson, To Dance With God (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1986), 63.