Isaiah 64:1-9, Mark 13:24-37
A Sermon by The Rev’d Canon Jenny Wilson
In the name of God, creating, redeeming, sanctifying, … Amen.
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down …
The prophet Isaiah cries out to God.
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down …
On this Sunday, Advent Sunday, and all through this season when our Cathedral is dressed in purple, the prophets are our poets, the writers of our prayers. The prophets express our longings and Advent is the time for sitting with longing. For woven into that for which we long is the voice of God. Woven into the prophets’ voice is the cry of humanity for God’s presence. The prophet articulates the conversation between us and God. And woven into the prophet’s voice is a stark and honest confession of what it is to be human. How we try and how we fail. How we thrive and how we fall apart. How the challenges of living in a physical and finite world at times enliven us and at other times bring us to our knees.
It has been said in so many circumstances and in so many ways this year. Last Advent Sunday we could not have known what lay ahead for the world. We could not have pondered the existence of a virus that would take its sinister and deadly hold. We could not have seen a world in which we would experience a week like last week, when one day all in our state was cautious optimism, and three days later we were confined to our homes allowed out only for essential supplies and not even for a walk. And yet we know we are the lucky ones. We wake each morning to news stories showing healthcare workers across the world their heads in their hands “stressing out, striving and even dying in alarming numbers on the Covid front line.”[1] To quote one online newspaper. We wake each morning to Covid statistics that have us shudder in horror. We are the lucky ones and we are rattled by this.
And so we remember that in Advent we look to the prophets to speak on our behalf.
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
2 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!
Isaiah opens this passage expressing our longing for God’s presence, God’s action, God’s healing, and then the prophet speaks of us. Confesses, really, about us. Tells the harsh truth of what it is to be … us.
But you were angry, and we sinned;
because you hid yourself we transgressed.
6 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.
The prophet knows about prayer. Knows how we must address God. Prayer needs confession, needs a deep honesty about who we are and how we are. Prayer needs to come from the truth.
Also prayer needs to glimpse the one to whom, in whom, we pray. We cannot see God, and so we need the prophet’s poetry. The prophet uses, in this passage, the image of a potter for this. The prophet describes the closeness of the creator with the ones created …
O Lord, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand…
The prophet knows about prayer. Prayer needs to come from the truth.
The writer C. S. Lewis put it this way. He speaks of our attempts at prayer.
“The attempt is not to escape from space and time and from my creaturely situation as a subject facing objects. It is more modest: to re-awake the awareness of that situation. If that can be done, there is no need to go anywhere else. This situation itself is, at every moment, a possible theophany. Here is the holy ground; the Bush is burning now.
“Of course this attempt may be attended with almost every degree of success or failure. The prayer preceding all prayers is, ‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.[2]
It is more modest: to re-awake the awareness of [our creaturely] situation. If that can be done, there is no need to go anywhere else. This situation itself is, at every moment, a possible theophany. Here is the holy ground; the Bush is burning now.
Jesus, in this morning’s gospel reading from this year’s gospel of Mark, is saying a similar thing. He is speaking about the Son of Man coming and he uses all sorts of strange language to describe this. In the end, though, Jesus is clear about us and what we are to do– he says, simply, really, to us, “Keep awake.” There is to be an arrival, there is to be a profound change. He urges us to work and to watch. A devout Jew, Jesus has learnt from the prophets, he uses language as a prophet does. He exhorts us to watch as, for example, we might watch nature changing –
From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. 29So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates.
There is to be an arrival, there is to be a profound change.
Jesus then uses another image.
It is as if, he says, a man is going on a journey, and he puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. But they do not know when the master of the house will come home, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, and he may find them asleep when he comes suddenly. In this story, Jesus has us feel the urgency, the necessity of keeping awake.
Jesus helps us to feel the possibility of an arrival, to feel that there is to be a profound change.
All we are to do is to weave our lives with prayer. So let’s look a little more at what C. S. Lewis says. Jesus says “Keep awake.” It is his Advent exhortation. C. S. Lewis tells us
to re-awake …
to re-awake the awareness of [our creaturely] situation. If that can be done, there is no need to go anywhere else. This situation itself is, at every moment, a possible theophany. Here is the holy ground; the Bush is burning now.
Wherever we are is the place to pray. In the stuff of prayer.
Here is the holy ground; the Bush is burning now.
And beautifully, C. S. Lewis says we are to pray in this way:
The prayer preceding all prayers is, ‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.
No games, no trying to make ourselves what we are not. No trying to imagine what God is not. We long for the real Thou. But God longs too. God longs for the real us.
‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.
Each year we begin again, tell the story again. Each year we reflect on our story held in God’s story. We look back at a year unfolded and we look ahead knowing that the following year will have its place in God’s creating, redeeming love. Each year we allow the prophets to speak for us; each year we hear Jesus remind us to keep awake, to pray.
Each year in Advent we imagine waiting for an arriving. For the Christmas story to be told. But our longing for God is written on our hearts. And who wrote this longing there? God made our hearts, created our hearts for Advent. God was here before us, do you see? There is paradox in the spiritual life. The one for who we wait is the guide of our waiting. God is always arriving. The one we exhort to tear open the heavens and come down is with us. Or as C. S. Lewis wrote, Here is the holy ground; the Bush is burning now.
[1] Guardian report Nov 25
[2] C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcom: Chiefly on Prayer (Harcourt, 1964), pp. 81-82.
