First Sunday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
When the Dust Settles
Isaiah's very powerful and poignant plea to God to split the sky, shake the earth, and settle the score is such an earthy and familiar request.
I’ve been there. Often.
Honestly, have you looked outside at the unjust state of the world lately?
People literally and figuratively get away with murder. All the time.
The rich devour the poor. Oppressors kneel on the necks of the oppressed.
Church leaders, who should know better, offer tangible support and explanatory cover for wrongdoers.
Crowds gather online and in- person to silence, gaslight, and justify the suffering of victims.
Most days the status quo feels eternal and impermeable. All attempts at change seem to end in frustration.
To make matters worse sometimes God appears to be sitting this round out. How is that God allowed to get this bad?
These are well-worn paths in my mind and heart. If you can’t tell, I am often cynical about the prospect of things ever changing. Judy Wu Dominick recently tweeted, “The hardest kind of cynicism is justified cynicism. It exposes the limitations of human love & power to transform our sin-sick world. But it reminds us of why divine love & power have to continually intervene—to bring revelation, deliver, save, & enable repentance & forgiveness.” Isaiah is good company for the justifiably cynical. I look forward to starting off Advent season every year with a fiery reading from Isaiah. Advent is a season about longing. Longing for a better world. Longing for a world that runs on justice and not the blood of innocence. It isn’t wrong to want to see the score settled. It’s a good place to start every Advent season with the question, when God gonna clean up this mess?
Because I so profoundly associate Isaiah with the sense of longing for justice each Advent it’s not hard for me to imagine Isaiah full-throated singing,
Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother;
And in His name all oppression shall cease. (O Holy Night)
or belting out,
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight. (O Come, O Come Emmanuel)
I think Isaiah could round out any choir that wants to burn the whole house down with fiery Christmas carols. Even though Isaiah never got to see a Christmas himself, his prophetic demands for justice are what make Christmas so meaningful. His words are the foundation for Israel’s hope for a coming king. In today’s reading, Isaiah paints a powerful picture of a Zeus-like Yahweh: splitting the sky and cleaning the clocks of the ungodly with lightning bolts. Put that on your next family Christmas card. I dare you!
As Isaiah's prophetic imagination unfolds in this passage this beautiful revenge fantasy starts to falter as Isaiah has second thoughts. God meting out global justice is a truly terrifying thought. Be careful what you wish for. After the dust settles in his vision Isaiah asks who would be left standing? God’s people are as implicated in the injustice as anyone else. Well when you put it that way Isaiah, I’m so sure I want God splitting the sky anymore.
Many of my actions, truth be told, look best draped in slimming black and viewed from an off angle in a poorly lit smoke-filled room. In the searing holy light of God I’m as guilty as anyone else. If God gave out the kind of justice I would fall under God’s blows too.
My clothes are too soiled.
My intentions are too shifty.
My righteousness is too slanted and self-serving to ever hope to survive.
Straw men are unwise to cheer for prairie fires.
Realizing this Isaiah moves us along. A new image presents itself. That of the potter working with clay. In God’s skilled hands his people are shaped. This still involves God exerting God’s will. Clay left to its own devices never becomes a pot, plate or bowl. It requires a potter applying pressure but not too much. It requires shaping but not beyond the limits of what clay can do.
Zeus’ lightning bolts can only pulverize.
God’s hands can give shape.
Zeus’ method creates dust.
God’s work repurposes dust.
And this, as it turns out, is the way that God brings about justice in a sin-soaked world.
The work of justice begins first by being shaped by the hands of the potter.
It is a process of remembering and repurposing.
It is taking the willfully forgetful and misshapen submitting to being made into something new.
So now let’s consider the world we are reading these words from here at the start of Advent 2020. Something significant has already split the sky. No need to wish for it. It already happened.
Economic mountains are trembling.
The world has been brought to its knees by a tiny invisible Zeus.
Not only has it unleashed unprecedented death across the globe it has also unleashed a hell storm of vicious polarization.
We are people torn apart.
We are caught between competing views of justice.
To make matters much worse the church has gotten its clothes dirty and torn in the tussle.
Dressed in filthy rags few look to us as a source of moral courage or as a community of justice.
What do we do now?
Shall we try the hands of the potter?
Shall we turn to the one who can still work with the dust and dirt of this world and reshape it into something new?
Shall we remember God’s ways?
Re-submit ourselves to the true religion of care for the least of these?
Shall we allow our lives to be reshaped into the likeness of the one Isaiah longed for but never met?
Shall we enter into apprenticeship under the one God sent?
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One of the ways we have been connecting online since the pandemic pushed us online is through our Learning Centre, a weekly interactive Zoom call on a topic with a Canadian voice of wisdom. For the season of Advent, we will be featuring a few of our writers and making space to reflect together on the Advent Reader articles. Join us for the interactive sessions on Thursdays at 1:30 pm (Eastern time) or sign up and view the recordings of the sessions afterwards.