Hope without God

Isaiah 64.1-9

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
   so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
as when fire kindles brushwood
   and the fire causes water to boil—
to make your name known to your adversaries,
   so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect,
   you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.
From ages past no one has heard,
   no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you,
   who works for those who wait for him.
You meet those who gladly do right,
   those who remember you in your ways.
But you were angry, and we sinned;
   because you hid yourself we transgressed.
We have all become like one who is unclean,
   and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.
We all fade like a leaf,
   and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
There is no one who calls on your name,
   or attempts to take hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us,
   and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;
   we are the clay, and you are our potter;
   we are all the work of your hand.
Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord,
   and do not remember iniquity for ever.
   Now consider, we are all your people.

Isaiah is a very common scripture for the first Sunday in Advent—but it’s usually not this one that we think of. One Bible study participant on Monday assumed, understandably, that we were going to be reading the classic Advent-hope passage—Isaiah 40—you know the one—comfort, comfort, o my people (and we’re still going to be singing that beautiful hymn, don’t worry), I will make straight in the desert a highway, every valley shall be lifted up, every mountain made low— just this beautiful message to a discouraged people! But… the passage that Linda just read is not that. Isaiah 40 was written during the Jewish people’s time in exile, and Isaiah’s prophesy was sort of a morale booster for his people during a dark time, full of so much hope, and the promise of a better world. Now today’s passage, you might be surprised to hear, was actually from the time when the Jewish people were out of exile, they were back in their homeland and working on rebuilding the temple… so you’d think this would be a happy and celebratory time, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the triumphant return to the homeland wasn’t feeling all that triumphant.

There were tons of infighting and disagreements within the Jewish community. Upon their return they were faced with famine, drought, inflation—was it the famine and drought and the economy that was causing the infighting and sinning, or did they bring the famine and drought upon themselves with their infighting and sinning? It’s not totally clear, it kind of feels like a chicken or the egg situation, but regardless, things were not going well, and Isaiah has no qualms with venting to God.

This passage is really interesting to me, because it strikes me that Isaiah is wrestling with a lot of emotions, a lot of confusion, and a lot of contradictions right now. He’s first begging God to come back and make Godself known like in the days of old; then he gets real bold and actually blames God for the fact that his people are messing up—“because you were angry…we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.” Then there’s a sort of confession, admitting that they’ve become “unclean,” that their iniquities are taking them away from God—then he blames God again, but after that, we get a 180, and we have Isaiah saying we know you’re our God, we are the work of your hands, your people, and he pleads for God not to be so angry. It’s a real emotional roller coaster.

But you can’t really blame him. His prophesy has… kind of come to fruition. Yes, they’re back in their homeland, they’re building the temple, but it is not the joyous return that was promised. He got his original prophesy from God, so surely it makes no sense to him that things aren’t going as promised. And you know, despite the contradictions in this passage, and despite the fact that it seems a little crazy to be blaming God the way he is, it’s sort of refreshing.

In American culture and Christian culture too, we have a real problem with toxic positivity. I’ve said this before, but my least favorite Christian cliché is “It’s not for us to question or complain,” which is just wild to me, because as we can see from this passage, as we know from Job, as we know from other Old Testament prophets, there is a lot of valid questioning and complaining and venting! Whenever anyone says they shouldn’t question, my response is always “well, our God wouldn’t be much of a God if they couldn’t take a few questions or doubts or complaints.”

I think one of the biggest disconnects here is that in rabbinic tradition, there’s a real emphasis and encouragement on questioning and debate that unfortunately isn’t as present in a lot of mainstream Christianity. But questioning, and not taking things at face value is so important to have a healthy faith life. And I think that’s what Isaiah’s doing here, he’s really wrestling with how and why things have gone wrong, he’s not bottling it in—he’s letting it all out, and what he comes back to is a submission of sorts—that God is God and God’s people have to let themselves be molded by God’s ultimately loving and protective hands. There’s hope there—because hope can only come from struggle—as the Dreyers read in our Advent reading. We don’t need hope if everything is perfect. We won’t need hope when that day of paradise finally comes…

…which is why it’s so strange to me that hope has become so cheapened. I think it’s a concept that’s been sort of overtaken in the mainstream by that toxic positivity that’s so rampant in our culture—there’s this idea that hope means just taking for granted that God will make everything okay—it’s in line with the idea that we’re not allowed to question, that hope means we remain cheerful and upbeat no matter what obstacles come our way.

In an interview with psychologist and scholar Susan David, who writes about toxic positivity, theologian Kate Bowler (if you can’t tell by our call to worship and Advent reading, I’ve been on quite a Kate Bowler kick lately), who is a stage IV cancer survivor says,

I felt like I was supposed to be a very cheerful and grateful cancer patient…and a part of that was gender, part of it was religious prescriptions, that I had absorbed a version of Christianity that was always just positive…that God was going to make up the difference, you know, no matter what.

And this is the opposite of Isaiah, right? If Isaiah were in today’s world, maybe he’d be sitting there, surrounded by infighting and famine, like that famous cartoon meme of the dog, sitting in a living room while everything’s on fire around him saying “this is fine.” But thankfully for Isaiah, he feels comfortable embracing the lack of fine-ness. He feels confident that God will listen to him and that God can take his complaints and his questions and his pleas. And we should feel that way too—that’s the only way we can actually have true hope, real hope that things can improve. The only way we can really bring about an earth as it is in heaven is if we wrestle and question and struggle. The only way hope can happen is through struggle.

In the first Sunday of Advent, I always quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he explains that Advent is a season of waiting, but that our whole life is an Advent—we are always waiting and working and preparing for that day when paradise will be here on earth… but this Sunday, I’m going to use a different Bonhoeffer quote. For those who aren’t familiar, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran minister who was part of the resistance against the Nazis during WWII—he  was martyred when he was executed just before the end of the war. In one of his writings from prison where he was waiting to be executed, he wrote,

Before God and with God we live without God. God allows Himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which God can be with us and help us. Matthew 8:17 (he took up our infirmities, and bore the burden of our sins) makes it crystal clear that it is not by his omnipotence that Christ helps us, but by his weakness and suffering.

This is the beauty of what we wait for in the season in Advent—we wait for Christ to be born to us, a vulnerable human baby, born in the absolute humblest of conditions. Our savior did not come to earth to be praised, but came to serve, and to experience all what we experience. It feels like blasphemy to refer to God as weak, but what else is a human baby but vulnerable and weak? This is the only way our God could come into the world—not the way Isaiah pleaded for—making mountains quake, making bushes spontaneously burst into flames, tearing open the heavens—but subtly, quietly, and humbly. Because what greater hope is there than that of a newborn baby?

It's funny to me these days that it seems that it’s radical to think of God as something other than a clap of thunder tearing open the heavens when our religion revolves around a divine birth of an infant. It’s especially funny to me now that I have an infant, to imagine a savior in the form of a loveable, helpless baby who’s still developing the core strength to sit up on her own. So I wonder then, if part of the reason God can seem so far from us sometimes is that we forget where to look, or what we’re looking for. We’re looking for the small, the humble, the weak. We’re looking for the powerless and the oppressed. That’s where we find God.

God may not feel present in our lives sometimes. It may sometimes feel like God is ignoring us, forsaking us, but God is always there. Later in Isaiah, in chapter 65, God chastises Isaiah and makes it clear that it wasn’t God whose back was turned, but rather God’s people. By turning our backs on God, by creating our own divisions and violence on this earth, we make God invisible to us. It’s our doing.  

And I wonder if for us today, God seems invisible because we simply don’t know where to look. We’re looking for miracles, big shows of strength and power, but if the birth of Jesus is any indication, we’re looking in the wrong places. We’ve been conditioned to think in these black and white terms, and conditioned to think that God is only present in one way and in that same way, we’ve been conditioned to think that we hope only comes in the form of cheerful, unquestioning faith that everything will be okay. But God comes to us in the form of a poor infant born to wandering refugees. And hope comes to us out of the gritty, frustrating struggle.

Real Advent-hope isn’t about blind faith and looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. It’s about deep, contemplative soul-searching, questioning, and figuring out how we can allow ourselves to be molded by God’s potter’s hands; real hope comes to us, not in shallow, unquestioning assuredness, but rather in a perceived absence of God, in perceived absence of strength. It comes to us when we need it most, when we have to really think and be intentional about how we go about making this world better. Real Advent-hope comes to us in the form of a poor, helpless infant.