Advent I Midweek Evening Prayer
Isaiah 64:1-9: Waiting
December 3, 2014
“The Advent season is a season of waiting. But our whole life is a season of Advent” (Bonhoeffer).
“God … acts for those who wait for him.” (Is. 64:6)
But God does not act as or when we would wish. The human being struggling in this life wants action: “Help us, for the world is filled with injustice! Help my family, for my brother, my sister is in trouble. Help my marriage, for I have failed yet again. Help my body, for it is coming undone. Help my parents, for they grow old. Help the church, divided and corrupt. Help our world, for it seems the gates of hell shall prevail.”
Isaiah cries out to God to bend the skies, tear apart the separation between God and man. If the mountains would quake, if fire were kindled, then the evildoers would turn back, and things would be set right.
But there may be an accusation in these words. Some read the Hebrew as referring to the past: “Oh that you had rent the heavens and come down!” It is like Martha, the brother of Lazarus, gushing tears all over again four days later: “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.” Isaiah, Martha, and you and I want to say to God, “Why didn’t you act?” The way God manages the world makes no sense to us. It seems so simple that He could do things differently. Why didn’t He intervene? Why do things run their course in this way?
God acts for those who wait for Him.
Then you can hear Isaiah reminding himself: “God … acts for those who wait for him.” (64.4) What is this waiting?
So much of our life is spent waiting. Not simply waiting in line, waiting in a doctor’s office or waiting to have your car inspected. There is the impatient waiting, imagining that something new is just a click away. Hitting refresh repeatedly, we wait for something new to come by email, Twitter, or a web page. Have you ever stared at the dots on your iPhone, indicating someone is reading your text, perhaps typing a reply? Hurry up!
Worse is waiting for something better; which is to say, I don’t want—I reject—my current life. The life I want is ahead. I am waiting to finish school; get married; have children; get a new house, a new job. Then I will be happy, and life will be better.
All this is the wrong kind of waiting. “God … acts for those who wait for Him.” To wait for God is having confidence that He will perform His Word. And that there is nothing else really worth waiting for.
This is incredibly liberating. I can live my life in the moment; not as a cliche, a hedonism without planning or responsibility. No, this Christian waiting for God to act means I wait for nothing else; this moment I am in, this situation, this spouse, this mess, this work, these people, this church, this city – that’s the work and the joy that God has given to me right now. Drink it in, roll up the sleeves, and do this work. I wait on God alone, for He will act in His best time.
I wait on God alone, for He will act in His best time.
This waiting on God isn’t expecting God to reward us for our efforts. Isaiah famously confesses, “All our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.” Other translations give it as “filthy rags.” They are all terribly polite; the term refers to a soiled undergarment unique to a woman – a thing rendering her ritually unclean. Isaiah isn’t going for shock value alone; he is saying, human righteousness isn’t even allowed in the temple before God; we will need mercy, not better behavior.
After a litany of his exceptional qualifications as a Jewish rabbi, St. Paul says, ‘I count it all, along with all my possessions, as human excrement.’ For Jesus Christ “I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith.” (Philippians 3:4–9 NKJV)
Everything else we count as valuable, including our own lives, are like the foliage. Beautiful in springtime, glorious as fall begins, everything is coming down. “We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” All we are is dust in the wind.
Or so it seems. From that dust God made us.
So Isaiah appeals to God on that basis. I don’t know why, but the LXX omits the line “You are our potter” from the second-last sentence in tonight’s lesson, so that it reads “And now, Kyrie (Lord), our Father are You, and we all the mud worked with Your hands.” The pottery image remains, but calls to mind creation.
This is the prodigal son coming home. Father, I am yours. Save me! You made us from the dust, we are Your people.
Father, I am yours. Save me!
God doesn’t act the way we expect. When once He came down, He rent the heavens, but He did not bring fire. He came gently, and what is more, He who created the mud became one of us mud-men, the Creator becoming a created man, taking on our flesh and bone.
For Him we still wait. And in the meantime, live the life He gives us, doing the vocation to which He call us. There’s nothing else to wait for, but the last Advent, when He repairs our shattered vessels in the Day of Resurrection.