This sermon was preached at Peace Hill Christian Fellowship on December 3rd, 2017

In this first Sunday in Advent we long for God and for the promises of what we believe God will do. We hope for the return of Jesus Christ to judge evil, to heal the world and our mortality, to bring about the eternal Kingdom of God that makes all things new. And yet, we acknowledge that this has not happened yet, and so we celebrate this Sunday with a sense of longing and mourning.

Scripture intends to train and shape our longings. Isaiah 64 is a prayer, full of longing, from a person who is in Exile, far away from his home. He is someone who is living in a land where the God he has always known as the One True God is now just one deity among many. He is frustrated by the fact that even his fellow Jews seem to have forgotten God – and God seems to be absent.

O that you would rip open the heavens and come down, that the mountains would quake like boiling water and tremble like twigs consumed in the fire. Come down and make your name known to those who despise you, so that they tremble before you – just like you did before when you did amazing things we were not expecting. You came down and the mountains shook. Since the beginning of time no one has known of…  no rumor has been heard of… no one has seen any God like you. You act to help those who wait for you. You help those who want to do what is right and who pay attention to your ways.

But we have continued in our sin – and you have been angry with us. How then can we be saved? We have become disgusting (unclean) and every good thing we try to do is tainted – it shrivels up. Our failures and faults sweep us away and no one even calls on you for help anymore. This is happening because you have hidden yourself from us – and have let us waste away in our sin.

But you – you are our Father! You are the potter (the craftsman) and we are the clay to be shaped. You made us and we are the work of your hands – the product of what you are doing in the world. Do not be angry with us forever – beyond measure – without end. Look on us with compassion – because we are your people.   – Pete’s paraphrase

There is Great Benefit in Practicing the Absence of God.

The Absence of God Can Awaken Our Desire for God: This morning is communion. Communion is a sign of Christ’s presence with us. And yet, we should not lose sight of the fact that the presence of Christ, in the bread and wine, also accentuates the absence of Christ. Bread is bread and wine is wine.

And for many of us Jesus, though a familiar name, and a wise teacher, is a stranger. I was struck by this in a meditation this week in Mark, where Jesus came into a synagogue and began to teach with authority that none of those listening had ever heard before… where Jesus used that same authority to cast out a demon. I can read about that, and I can pray to Jesus, and study his life. But I have never shaken his hand, nor do I know what he really looked like, or what his human voice sounded like. He is here in Spirit… in the bread… in the actions and words of this community… but not in human body. We know Jesus, but we do not know Jesus. He is both present and absent.

This is what the writer of Isaiah 64 is experiencing. He is praying to God – but in his prayer, speaking to the Almighty and believing the Almighty can hear him, he is complaining that the Almighty is absent. You can hear his longing. He is pouring out his heart to God because God is absent.

What Does God’s Absence Awaken in You?

We talk about the presence of God and experiencing the presence of God as a way of knowing God and being changed. But there is no true understanding of the presence of God unless we first are aware of how un-present God is. We do not practice either presence or absence – we practice both together – and as we do so certain desires and questions emerge…

The Desire that God’s Name Should Be Known:  This, in essence, is the core of this prayer. The prophet says, “Come down and make your name known” and mourns that “No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you.”

When we practice the absence of God, we become aware of how invisible God is to people who do not know, do not care to know God’s love and healing for them – who seem completely unconcerned to lay hold of God. We become aware of the fact that most of humanity has no thought of the mighty God who made the world and will judge it – before whom we will all stand and given an account of how we have lived our lives. Even many Christians have no notion of the “great Day of the Lord” so often mentioned in Scripture. This is what the prophet longs for in his frustration –  “O that you would rip open the heavens and come down.”

The Question of God’s Hiddenness:  God’s hiddenness is a theme, even in the Gospels with Jesus. God, in a sense, hides himself. This is not to say that God doesn’t want to be known – but there is a sense that God must be sought out… “Seek and you will find, Ask and it will be given, Knock and the door will be opened.” This is why Jesus taught in parables – so that in order to understand people would have to think about and search out what he was saying.

This is part of the lament of the prophet, “… you have hidden your face from us and made us waste away because of our sins.” This question is also at the heart of this prayer – God, why don’t you rip the heavens open and let people see who you are? Even your own people are turning away and because you have hidden yourself. That’s not meant just to be an interesting fact – it’s a problem that begins back in Genesis 3 where God sends human beings out of his presence – and the result of God’s absence has been disastrous!

The Question: What are You Doing? The absence of God is practiced as we recognize how fallen, how broken this world is. We practice the absence of God when we realize that the great problem of our world – its persistent evil, violence, impurity, falsehood, greed, injustice, racism, hatred, and arrogance – has to do with the fact of the absence of God.

This should raise the same question for us that it raises for the prophet – “Yet, O Lord, you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand” – God, what are you doing? The problem we struggle with is not that God is out of control – the problem is that we believe God is in control. God is the one who shapes us and our lives and cares for us and loves us, and we are his people. Why do we experience the evil we experience? Why do we persist in struggling with sin? Why are so many people in this world starving? Why do evil dictators rule whole countries and do violence and seemingly go unpunished?

These are the questions that we ask in this first Sunday in Advent, as we prepare for God himself to rip open the heavens in order to be born into our same helplessness as a human infant.

This morning, as we prepare to come to the tables and receive communion, I want to encourage you to struggle with the absence of God as you experience the presence of Jesus in the bread and the wine.