Let it be

You may want to read Luke 1:26-55 before reading this post.

Audio of this post is available.

You may not think of yourself as an artist, but if a little boy asked you to draw him a picture of Mary, you wouldn’t refuse, would you? You’d find a piece of paper and a pencil and start drawing.

What scene would you choose? A young woman kneeling beside a baby with lots of hay and barn animals around? Or a woman standing at the foot of the cross, bent by grief? Or a young woman in conversation with an angel?

When you draw a picture of Mary, you don’t start from scratch; for centuries, artists have developed scenes from the gospels, and the annunciation – Mary’s encounter with the angel Gabriel – has long been a favorite. The angel usually stands or kneels on the left, facing Mary who is standing or sitting on the right. Often there’s a white lily in the picture, and Mary is shown with a book in her hand, one finger between the pages, as if the angel interrupted her while reading. Of course we don’t know what Mary was doing when Gabriel came to her, Luke doesn’t tell us – she may have been doing the laundry or playing with a little lamb; we don’t know.

What clothes does she wear in your drawing? Do you go through the junk drawer in the kitchen to find red for her rose-colored dress, blue for her royal robe, and yellow for a touch of gold here and there? Or do you stick with your No. 2 pencil and give her a simple long dress with some sort of veil over her head?

When you draw a picture of Mary, you don’t start from scratch because your head is full of pictures of her. If all you had were Luke’s story, perhaps you would draw a picture of a teenage girl sitting on her bed, in a room with clothes on the floor and empty cereal bowls on the desk.

What look do you see on her face? The old masters show her with expressions ranging from wide-eyed fear to questioning curiosity and unruffeled serenity. You may decide that facial expressions and drawing an angel that doesn’t look like another girl only with wings, add too many difficult details to your picture – and you end up drawing a young mother gazing lovingly at her newborn baby, which is probably what the little boy wanted to watch you draw anyway.

The annunciation is a scene in an unfolding story that begins in the days of King Herod of Judea, or rather a story as old as time that is about to begin anew. The angel Gabriel was sent by God to a small town in Galilee no one had ever heard of, to take a message to a young woman named Mary. The angel’s words sound very matter of fact: The Lord is with you. You have found favor with God. You will conceive and you will bear a son. You will name him Jesus. The Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.

This is the moment where I see Mary raise a hand in a gesture of hesitation, like saying, “Hold on, wait a minute, you lost me when you said I would conceive – how exactly is this supposed to come about? I am a virgin.” The angel tells her that the Holy Spirit will come upon her and the power of the Most High will overshadow her – a response that certainly raises more questions than it answers.

How long will she ponder the angel’s words? The atmosphere between them is charged with the history of God and God’s people: the promise to Abraham, the promises to Moses and David, the promises to the people in exile. There is fear in the room, perhaps a flicker of hope and a sense of expectation that is almost too much to bear. Mary is much perplexed, but the angel isn’t a picture of calmness either, at least in Frederick Buechner’s imagination:

She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with the message to give her, and he gave it … As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great, golden wings, he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl. Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 39

The promises of old, the whole future of creation hanging on the answer of a girl. What was it about her that God chose her? We don’t know. All we do know about her is that she was a young woman, engaged to a man named Joseph, living in the rural backwater of Galilee. Not a person of privilege or power, but nevertheless one favored by God. God chose her to be part of the drama of salvation and she could have said no, but she didn’t: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

In my late teens and twenties, I traveled to Florence in Italy several times. I stayed with a friend who had her studio there, and I enjoyed walking through the city, visiting plazas, gardens, churches, and museums. I was in love with the renaissance, you might say. No matter what else I did on a visit – borrow a car to drive to San Gimigniano or tour a winery in Montalcino – I always spent a couple of hours at the monastery of San Marco.

The cells on the second floor still look very much the same as they did in the 15th century when Fra Angelico painted the walls with amazing frescoes of biblical scenes, most famous among them The Annunciation.

In one of the cells, there's another, remarkably simple rendition of that scene: you see Gabriel on the left looking at Mary on the right, who is kneeling on a wooden bench. Nothing in the painting clearly indicates what has or hasn’t been said between the two; they look at one another, both holding their arms close to their chests, both with apprehensive expressions in their faces. I like to think of the picture as a snapshot taken at the moment right after the angel has spoken: this angel didn’t just come to deliver a message and return to heaven. This angel is waiting for Mary’s answer. The promises of old, the whole future of creation hanging on the answer of a girl. It is easy to imagine sun and moon and stars standing still and all the angels in heaven waiting in breathless suspense. God had chosen her, an ordinary girl in an ordinary town, for reasons she didn’t understand, to be the mother of one who would be called the Son of God – what would she say? And Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

When Fra Angelico painted The Annunciation on the wall of a cell at San Marco, he used perspective and the layout of the room to make it look as if the scene was happening then and there in that very room. The person who prayed and slept in that cell didn’t just have a religious painting on the wall. The painting served and continues to serve as a vivid reminder that we live and pray, work and sleep between God’s promise and call and our own willing response to be part of the drama of salvation.

The Gospel opens with this story not just to tell us something about the miraculous circumstances of Christ’s conception. Luke invites us to read the gospel, listen for the word of God, and respond – with Mary as our model: her receptiveness for the promise of Christ and her courage to follow the divine lead make her the first disciple.

With the birth of Jesus, God has initiated the redemption of humanity and the salvation of the world: the rule of God in Christ is transforming the world into God’s realm. Through the proclamation of the Gospel, God invites us, like Mary to receive the word and be part of God’s mission in the world.

Growing up, I had a part in the annual Christmas pageant for years. I was a sheep and a shepherd, I was an angel and one of the wee three kings, one year I got to play Joseph, a lantern in one hand, a staff in the other – but I never was Mary. I appreciate that the casting directors didn’t ask a little boy to play a girl – the other kids probably would have called me Mary for a few weeks, and I don’t think I would have liked that.

But Luke gives us Mary because he wants us to play her part; he wants us to listen attentively and respond with courage to the call, making room in our lives for the promise of Christ.

The angel says, “Do not be afraid.” The angels know we respond with fear and apprehension to God’s call to give the Word room to grow in us. Mary shows us how to say yes to a life we did not necessarily intend to lead and how to live by a script we didn’t write ourselves.

When you draw a picture of Mary, I suggest that you draw an ordinary young woman from your neighborhood. Everything else is hard to render in a drawing: you can show her surprise, her fear, her hesitation, or her courage, but not all at once. Perhaps you draw her just after she said, “Let it be with me according to your word,” and then you tell the little boy the story of an ordinary girl in an ordinary town who received the word with faith and gave birth to Christ.

Whenever the good news of Jesus Christ is proclaimed, a message from God comes to ordinary people in ordinary towns: you have found favor with God, you have been graced with the word that calls forth life out of nothing, you have been called to carry Christ in and for the world – and now God and all the host of heaven are waiting, and the world longing for the fullness of God’s realm is waiting, they stand in breathless suspense – waiting for your response.

What will you say? What will you do with this life God is offering you? Will you say, “I’m sorry, I already had other plans for Christmas…”? Or will you say to the angel, not really knowing the script for your part but trusting this word that a world ruled by no other power but the love of God is not only possible but near, will you say to the angel, with courage and humility, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

This is our joy

You may want to read Isaiah 61 and 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 before you read this post.

Audio of this post is available.

Good news for the oppressed.
Comfort for the brokenhearted.
Liberty for the captives.
Release for the prisoners.
A garland instead of ashes.
Oil of gladness and a mantle of praise.
You will be called oaks of righteousness—

Like pearls on a string the promises roll from the prophet’s lips, and the oppressed lift up their heads, the brokenhearted dare to hope, and the captives imagine the prison doors flung wide open.

There have been years when I heard those words primarily as good news for others: for exiles far from home, for refugees and political prisoners, for slaves and sweatshop workers. This year, without hesitation, I join the ranks of those who long to hear a beautiful word amid the bad news, who crave a true word amid the lies, and who need a reliable word amid the broken promises of our own making.

“When life is good, our prayers for the kingdom get a little faint,” Cornelius Plantinga wrote a few years back, and I clipped his words from the magazine.

We whisper our prayers for the kingdom so that God can’t quite hear them. “Thy kingdom come,” we pray, and hope it won’t. “Thy kingdom come,” we pray, “but not right away.” When our own kingdom has had a good year we aren’t necessarily looking for God’s kingdom.

This year, our own kingdom has not had a good year. Confidently we had put block upon block, like children on the floor of the playroom, building a house, a city, a castle, and a tower, higher and higher, as if up was the only way things could go.

Now we sit on the floor and the playroom is a mess because the whole thing collapsed. We want to know who pulled the block from the foundation or who added the block that tipped the precarious balance—but we are also beginning to see that this wasn’t somebody else’s fault. One way or another, we all played along: this isn’t somebody else’s kingdom but our own, and it hasn’t had a good year.

Again we overhear the prophet’s words, and it’s like we are hearing them for the first time:

They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.

“About whom does the prophet say this?” we ask, hoping that the promise is not just for a group of people long ago, but also for us and the devastations we are facing. The very fact that we ask with hope tells us that the promise has touched us; that the words of the prophet have become God’s word for us. We are willing to consider God’s alternative to the boom and bust cycles of our own kingdom. We are willing to trust the promise and look for the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God (Hebrews 11:10).

At the beginning of his ministry in Galilee, Jesus came to Nazareth and went to the synagogue (see Luke 4:16-21). He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled it and read,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. He said to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Jesus teaches us how to read Isaiah. The words of the prophet are for us today, but not because our historical situation is comparable to that of Isaiah’s first audience or some such thing. The promise is for us because God will not rest until it is fulfilled for all of creation. Our own kingdom has not had a good year, but Jesus comes to proclaim the nearness of God’s reign and the year of the Lord’s favor.

We look around the playroom, and it’s a mess, blocks all over the place. It’s a rather discouraging view. Some of us are angry that we let it come to this. Others are disappointed that God didn’t somehow intervene more forcefully. Again others are ashamed for our part in systems that in some ways are so productive, and so destructive in others.

But God is faithful, and as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.

We hear the good word of God’s faithfulness, and if we listen well, we recognize ourselves among the oppressed in need of liberation, the brokenhearted thirsting for comfort, and the prisoners longing for the doors of our cells to be opened from the outside. The good word of God’s faithfulness is for us, for you and me, and against the fears that paralyze us, against the idols that hold us in thrall, and against guilt’s iron grip. We will be called oaks of righteousness, planted to display the Lord’s glory, because God is faithful – and God has sown righteousness.

When we decide to give ourselves to building up the ancient ruins and repairing the ruined cities, we don’t pretend that somehow we are better able to live in God-pleasing ways than previous generations of God’s people. Perhaps we will go to work with the humility of those who know how sometimes even the best of intentions will not prevent us from making terrible mistakes.

We will go to work with joy, though, because God’s promises are solid ground to stand on and have sustained generations of God’s people. Take Paul, for instance. Joy may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of him; he was a rather serious man whose writings were notoriously difficult (2 Peter 3:16). He was beaten for the gospel he proclaimed, he was imprisoned, he was shipwrecked three times, in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked (see 2 Corinthians 11:24-27).

But Paul had found something to sing about and even the darkest prison cell couldn’t silence him. “Rejoice always,” he wrote to the Thessalonians, “pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances.”

There is no indication in any of Paul’s writings that he was blissfully unaware of the conflicts within and between the churches in Jerusalem, Syria, Asia Minor and Greece—on the contrary. Paul was no pollyanna; he knew well the difficulties Christians faced every day, but his joy wasn’t determined by circumstances. Whatever conditions he found himself in, he looked at them from the perspective of God’s promises and gave thanks. Earlier in his letter he wrote,

We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.
For what is our hope or joy or crown of boasting before our Lord Jesus at his coming? Is it not you? Yes, you are our glory and joy!
How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you? (1 Thessalonians 1:2-3; 2:19-20; 3:9)

The source of Paul’s joy were the promises of God and the community of brothers and sisters who lived faithfully in the light of these promises. Paul sang because in cities across the known world men and women responded to the good news of Jesus Christ with the work of faith, the labor of love, and with steadfastness of hope.

We are sitting on the floor and we may not feel like singing at all with homes being foreclosed, jobs being cut, and companies going out of business. But Paul urges us to reach for our deepest joy and to let it determine our response to changing circumstances—not the other way round, never the other way round. Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances.

Both Paul and Isaiah knew that what we need are not more detailed construction drawings for the city of God or more comprehensive job desriptions for kingdom workers; what we need is oil of gladness instead of mourning and a mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.

What we need is the promise that gives us the courage to align our lives with God’s purpose and work in our time.

What we need is a call to get up from the floor and give ourselves to building up, raising up, and repairing.

What we need is to know one thing, and to know it with our whole being: The one who calls you is faithful. This is our joy.

Repentant and expectant

You may want to read 2 Peter 3:8-15a and Mark 1:1-8 before you read this post.

Audio of this post is available.

It’s an old story. People were leaving the church because their expectations were not being met. In this case, they had come to faith in Christ expecting that his return was imminent; that soon, very soon he would come to judge the living and the dead, and reign in peace forever. They had come to faith in Christ with a sense of urgency, and that urgency began to dissolve when months of red-alert expectation turned into years of waiting, and years into generations.

Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation! (2 Peter 3:4)

Nothing has changed! Where is the promise of his coming? It’s a fair question, and most of 2 Peter is a response to it. The main argument in the letter is not new, because waiting for God’s promise to be fulfilled is something God’s people have always struggled with. The writer quotes a verse from Psalm 90, With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. In other words, our sense of time and God’s are vastly different.

More importantly, though, what we perceive to be a delay is not an indication of God’s slowness, but rather points to the character of God as patient and merciful: The day has not come yet, because God does not want any to perish, not even one. And so Advent is as much our time of waiting as it is God’s: we are waiting for the coming of God’s reign in glory, while God is waiting for all of us to come to repentance.

With frustration we occasionally raise our voices and our hands to the heavens, “Where are you? What is taking you so long? Nothing has changed!” And the voice from heaven sounds almost like an echo, without the exasperation; it is a voice of great kindness, forbearance, and patience: “Where are you? What is taking you so long? Everything has changed – when will you repent?”

What we perceive as absence, is the very presence of God’s mercy. The passage from 2 Peter we heard this morning ends with the remarkable statement, “Regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.” What we perceive to be a delay of God’s salvation, is our salvation, the gift of time for us to practice true repentance. We are being saved by a God who waits patiently.

Only days after gunmen killed more than 170 men and women im Mumbai, we know the temptation to ask God for the final cosmic showdown in which the wicked are destroyed and the righteous rewarded.

Bring an end to the violence and the hatred – where is the promise of your coming?

I have prayed like that, only to realize that I didn’t consider my own hatred and violence, but conveniently projected them on the bad guys. Phantasies of a Hollywood-style day of vengeance tell us more about ourselves and our thirst for retribution than about God’s justice. God’s forbearance allows us to recognize our own deep need for healing grace and repentance, and God’s patience with all helps us to resist our own impatience with each other.

In accordance with God’s promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

We wait, noting and lamenting the distance between our world and one where righteousness isn’t homeless anymore. We wait, not passively, sitting back and expecting others to take care of our problems, but rather patiently, actively, and expectantly. We wait, because waiting prepares us for God’s coming.

The writer of 2 Peter encourages us, “Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish.”

The things for which we wait shape who we are becoming. Awaiting a world where righteousness is at home, we strive to live in righteousness. In every dimension of our lives, we turn away from complicity with the old world and turn to embrace the coming realm. The old age is marked by idolatry, sin, injustice, and violence; but the coming realm of God is faithfulness, forgiveness, righteousness, and peace.

We live in a world that aches under the weight of sin, but also echoes with the promises of God. We know how hard it is to live in the borderlands between what is and what shall be, between the promise and the coming true. We know the temptation to lower our sights to more manageable hopes, small things within our reach.

But today we are reminded that the dimensions of our hope determine the dimensions of our lives. Diminished hope results in a much smaller life. The writer of 2 Peter encourages us to resist the temptation and lead lives of holiness and godliness, lives shaped entirely within the horizon of God’s promise and future, lives of bold hope.

In the wilderness of these days, when peace is hard to find and systems built on more manageable hopes and old-fashioned greed are collapsing around us, a familiar figure shows up. Clothed with camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist, and living on a diet of locusts and wild honey, he speaks of repentance and the forgiveness of sins.

His lifestyle embodies complete dependence on God: he only eats what the earth produces on its own, without the work of human hands. His message also directs our attention to complete dependence on God: confess your sins and be baptized. Look at yourselves and your world with open eyes and honesty, and embrace who you shall be in the world to come. He is the voice in the wilderness calling us to prepare the way of the Lord by becoming an Avent community, a community of the repentant and expectant.

The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

And just a surely as he came then, he will come again. And just as his people waited then, we wait now. And just as time was a gift then for all people to ready themselves for the inbreaking of God’s time, so it is now.

We repent: We turn from what we have made of ourselves and the world, from the dead ends where we find ourselves, to the way of the Lord and the new heavens and the new earth where righteousness is at home. We turn from self-serving phantasies, delusions of grandeur and illusions of control to the mercy of God.

Mark’s gospel begins with what sounds like a title, The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God. Scholars long have wondered why he didn’t just call it The good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God, instead of its beginning. Nowadays they are debating whether this should be read as the headline for the opening verses, after which, in verse 9, Jesus of Nazareth steps onto the narrative stage; or if it should be read as the headline for the Galilean ministry of Jesus as opposed to his passion; or as the headline for the whole of Mark’s book and what it recounts. I’m leaning toward the latter: the story Mark tells is the beginning of the good news that is meant to unfold in the lives of its hearers and readers. He tells the beginning of a story whose final chapter will open with the return of Christ.

As hearers of Mark’s gospel and followers of Jesus, we are all characters in this story, living toward the grand finale. At the beginning of the church year we go back to the beginning of the gospel not out of historical curiosity, but to find a new beginning for ourselves: to find direction and purpose amid the chaos of this economic crisis; to grow the roots of peace in the barren landscape of terrorist violence, war, and our own violent phantasies; to start over with new courage in the wilderness of faith that has lost its urgency and passion.

Uncertain whether we can be among those who carry the story forward, we return to the beginning, to the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, the baptizer who speaks of repentance and the forgiveness of sins, and announces the coming one. The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ is the beginning of God’s future in the midst of this old world. For us, it all begins again as we hear the words again, and this time we are a bit less self-assured and a bit more aware that God’s patience is indeed our salvation.

Peace enters our hearts as we encounter John again who reminds us that we need not be tied to our fears, our guilt, or our shame, but are free to embrace God’s forgiveness. Peace takes root in our hearts as we remember what we await: a world where righteousness is at home. That peace shapes our thoughts, words, and deeds as we begin again to live into the future God has prepared for us.

I Don't Care

You may want to read Isaiah 64:1-12 before you read this.

Audio of the post is also available.

Thomas Merton, back in the sixties, somewhere in Kentucky went into a drugstore to get some toothpaste. When the clerk asked him which brand he preferred, he replied, “I don’t care.”

“He almost dropped dead,” Merton later wrote. “I was supposed to feel strongly about Colgate or Pepsodent or Crest. … the worst thing you can do now is not care about these things.”

Kathleen Norris called Merton a prophet for saying “I don’t care” in one of the temples for the brand-conscious consumer.

These days, of course, it’s a lot harder to not care about these things since they tend to be everywhere. TV, radio, billboards, busses, racecars, flashing banners at every other website, glossy ads in every magazine or journal. And since all that is not enough, somebody somewhere works hard so you notice that the young hero on your favorite show drives a Ford and the villain an import. You’re told to ask your doctor if Aplex, Beplex, or Ceplex is for you, and you better make sure you get some over the counter Dementex to fight off insanity as you try to jot down all the things you need to remember for your next doctor’s appointment.

The paper on Thursday resembled the Metro phonebook in volume and weight. Most of it were high-gloss inserts with coupons for the opening of the bargain-hunting season on Friday. As a brand and price conscious consumer you are expected to spend your Thanksgiving morning reading all that information carefully to determine in front of which big box store you will spend the night, and then mapping out the rest of your Black Friday shopping trip.

On the other hand, you could just take another sip of your coffee, get up and baste the turkey, sit down again and declare with prophetic clarity, “I don’t care.”

Retail marketing and faith are both about the cultivation of desire. But where marketing is all about annual sales, brand loyalty, and the promise of fulfillment, faith leads us to question the noise and to bring our own desires in tune with God’s. During Advent this difference and tension becomes clearer than during any other time of the year.

Many voices invite us to think of this as the holiday season of santas, angels, trees and lights, shopping mixed with warm childhood memories, and all of it bathed in a nostalgic glow.

In the church, this is new year’s day, and we are invited to begin the new year preparing joyfully for the coming of God in a child and preparing humbly and penitently for his coming again to judge the living and the dead. The latter, of course, doesn’t lend itself to red-nosed holiday cheer, which is why the merchants won’t touch it.

In the church, Advent doesn’t begin with carols and pageants, but with the tears and prayers of an old man (Isaiah 63:15).

Look down from heaven and see, from your holy and glorious habitation. Where are your zeal and your might? The yearning of your heart and your compassion?

The voice of Isaiah had been with the people of Jerusalem and Judah through the unimaginable loss of the city and the temple to Babylon’s armies; his voice was an essential part of the long reflection that followed that devastating experience in exile:

The loss was God’s judgment on a people who made a mockery of righteousness, Isaiah declared. They would return to Zion, though, and their return would be glorious. The Lord would lead them on a highway through the wilderness to the land of their ancestors and the city of David, he proclaimed.

But when they returned, the shouts of joy and songs of freedom soon died down among the silent ruins of the city and the temple. Worst of all was the silence of God.

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake and the nations might tremble at your presence (Isaiah 64:1).

The old prophet gave voice to a people’s longing. They wanted to see some sign of God’s presence, some unmistakable indication that their suffering did not go unnoticed.

Advent begins with that silence. Have you ever prayed and felt like you were talking to yourself? Have you ever knelt under a blanket of silence and pleaded and all you could sense was your own yearning? Have you ever let go of all respectful restraint and cried out, “O tear open the heavens and come! Come like fire on brushwood! Do something unexpected nobody can ignore!”

The wonder of the old prophet’s prayer is that he doesn’t quit praying. He meditates on the character of God recalled and praised in the stories of God’s people. He reflects on his people’s situation in light of those stories. He admits in what sounds like a confession (Isaiah 64:7), There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you, but he sees responsibility also on God’s side, saying, You have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity. He keeps praying. He doesn’t turn away from the silence. He doesn’t let go of the relationship that has shaped his entire life.

And he says (Isaiah 64:8), Yet, O Lord.

In one little word he wraps up his people’s anguish and his own, the hopelessness of their circumstance, and their only hope:

Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are the potter; we are the work of your hand.

It is a prayer of surrender and trust. The little word yet opens the window to a future determined no longer by human failure but by the unlimited possibilities of God’s creative power.

Advent begins with the silence that makes room for us to be honest about ourselves and the condition of our world.

Zion has become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation, Isaiah prays (64:10-11), our holy and beautiful house, where our ancestors praised you, has been burned by fire, and all our pleasant places have become ruins.

And at the end his old voice turns into a whisper (Isaiah 64:12), After all this, will you restrain yourself, O Lord? Will you keep silent, and punish us so severely?

The question lingers between earth and heaven, and now everything depends on that little yet. Will you hide your face forever or turn to us with mercy? Will you keep silent or speak the word of peace? Will you remember that we are your people, and that without you we are nothing but dust?

Thomas Merton spent much time in silence, Advent silence, waiting for the revealing of God’s word and face. In silence he remembered what is worth caring about and what is not. It was silence that taught him so say “I don’t care” to the clerk’s question about his preferred brand of toothpaste. It was silence that taught him to care about the suffering of others and to desire truth and peace. Silence can make you turn away from God and toward the noise of other promises, or it can make you lean more attentively toward God.

Isaiah spoke for all of God’s people who at least occasionally wish that God would tear open the veil between earth and heaven and do something big, something that would undeniably manifest the divine presence among us, so that all of us, from the first to the last, would confess that the Lord is God and no other.

We live in a world of constant noise, and so we expect a voice loud enough to drown out all the others. We live in a world of constant distractions, and so we expect a vision bright enough to outshine all the others. We live in a world of constant advertising, and so we expect a product that promises and delivers fulfillment in an instant.

But God doesn’t shout people into belief. God doesn’t bend people into obedience or manipulate them into relationship. God calls and waits.

Will Willimon once said, “Sometimes, God speaks, but we need to be leaning toward [God] to hear. What kind of ear do you bring to the hearing?”

The same can be said for our other senses. What kind of eye do you bring to the seeing? We need to be leaning toward God to perceive. We must sit in the dark with nothing but a small candle of hope in order to see the light of Christ. We must enter the great silence and wait there in order to hear the songs of angels. We must pray patiently with Isaiah and lean toward the fullness of life in God’s new creation in order to perceive the new thing God is doing now.

One of our carols reminds us,

How silently, how silently,
the wondrous gift is giv’n;
so God imparts to human hearts
the blessings of His heav’n.
No ear may hear His coming,
but in this world of sin,
where meek souls will receive Him still,
the dear Christ enters in.

One of the great dangers in this world of sin is that we get absorbed in the noise. We see a child without food, and we say, “I don’t care, it’s not my child.” And the noise keeps getting louder.

We see a woman who can’t pay her rent, and we say, “I don’t care, she’s not my sister.” And the noise keeps getting louder.

We see a man sitting on the same bench at the mall, always by himself, day after day, and we say, “I don’t care, he’s not my father.” And the noise keeps getting louder.

And we see a baby, born between animals in a barn, and we say, “I don’t care, they shouldn’t have babies in the first place.”

Yet those who have kept the little flame of hope, those who have leaned intently into the silence and toward the fullness of God’s reign, see the baby and welcome the dear Christ.

And they tell the story of how God tore open the heavens.