"Not Without Hope"
Sermon Presented November 27, 2005
Isaiah 64:1-12 (Read 63:19)
First Sunday of Advent
Two years before Mom died, when she was still painting, I took her to a frame shop in St. Joseph to have a picture framed for her granddaughter. While she was choosing a frame, a mixed media painting titled: "Not Without Hope" caught my eye. The title seemed incongruous with the subject matter. It was an abstract drawing of an AIDS ribbon.
I couldn't get the painting - or title out of my mind. When I took Mom back to pick up her picture the following week, I purchased the painting as a gift for the woman who chaired our North East Area Kansas AIDS Task Force. While the transaction was being completed, I commented about the effect the painting had on me. I discovered that I was speaking with the artist. As I looked at him more closely, his appearance spoke AIDS. I wondered how he happened to give that title to his painting. Did he hope for a cure for AIDS in his lifetime or did his hope lie in God to sustain him in his suffering? What was his story? Why the title: "Not Without Hope"? I wish I had asked!
Everyone needs hope, but not everyone has it. People who are seriously ill decline quickly when they lose hope. Those who are lonely become more depressed when hope for a sustaining relationship dies. People in the Gulf Coast who continue to live in hotels or temporary housing have diminishing hope. A loss of hope can result in suicide or a serious accident because the hopeless feel as if they are locked in a block of cement and unable to emerge.
Everyone needs hope, but how do we find it? Where do we place our trust when the trials of life overcome us and bring us to a place of perceived hopelessness? Do we place our hope in a medical staff or pharmaceutical company and then when good health isn't forthcoming, give up hope? Do we give up when the government or our employer fails to deliver on a promise? Do families living in turmoil give up hope of peaceful relationships and disintegrate - or do they act in ways to regain health and hope? Do people in financial crises seek help or do they give up hope? Do those seeking hope pray for resolution and when problems accelerate, give up, or do they look elsewhere?
What is hope? Where do you place your hope and why? How do we renew our hope when circumstances look bleak? What does the Bible say about hope?
The OT prophet Isaiah wrote a great deal about hope. Our text this morning is a prayer - a lament - a cry to God for help at a time of great need. I will begin with the last verse of chapter 63 and then read our text: Isaiah 64:1-12.
This prayer for the first Sunday of Advent begins with abrupt and urgent speech. There's no lead-in with unfeeling words of praise or thanksgiving, but it begins with a plea for God to get moving! It appears that for the prophet, it is the sluggishness of God's heart that's in question. God's heart needs to be stirred into action!
If Advent prepares us for a fresh coming of Christ, then it's time to acknowledge the ways that we need God's anointed to come. Despite all the brightness of the commercial Christmas season, the world is cold and in need. God doesn't seem to be present in ways to dissipate the darkness - at least not enough! This is the worst time of the year for manifestations of depression. Memories of happier times compound grief at the absence of a loved one, loneliness, unmet expectations, too few financial resources, cold and darkness.
Isaiah prays, "O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence!" If only the heavens would open wide so we can see God's overriding glory, justice and grace revealed to us and to a world torn apart by wars, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, death and human violence. If only we could even envision all children and the elderly with full stomachs and adequate housing and healthcare. If only the heavens would open and goodness pour forth into our world. If only all that's wrong with this world would be corrected and God would reign. If only….
But the heavens don't open - at least not that way - and history continues to play out its recurring tragedies. Even now we aren't so different from the prophet of old and all the others who have prayed this way before us. We address the silent heavens and call on the distant Lord whom we cannot see. We plead with God and receive no response. And thus we enter into the drama of yearning and waiting - of waiting and yearning!
Isaiah's people, as we, have witnessed God's activity in the past. Were it not for that, we might not be here this morning. We desire to have God present now as God was present in the past. "God, just give us a sign of hope so we can keep going!"
Several years ago I went a day early to our Central Region Women in Ministry retreat at a Swedish bed and breakfast in Lindsborg, KS. Once in town, I discovered that there was a free lecture that night at Bethany College, and I went. The lecture topic was "Good vs. Evil", and along with Susan Sontag and Elaine Pagels was Terry Waite - the Anglican envoy who went to Lebanon to obtain the release of Western prisoners and was himself held hostage in Beirut for 4 ½ years. Waite spent 4 of those years chained by his hands and feet to the wall in solitary confinement with only 1 trip a day to the toilet. Even when it seemed God was absent - that God had forgotten him - Waite knew he had to maintain hope. It was 3 years before he convinced a guard to get him some reading material. Because the guard couldn't speak or read English, the first two books he brought him A Manual of Breastfeeding and Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care. Waite knew that he had to live his life within so that he didn't lose hope! He had to find God in his personal hell. He had to find God, even when God appeared to be absent. He succeeded!
Nelson Mandela, Viktor Frankl, Corrie ten Boom and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, all political prisoners, recognized that they had no control over their external conditions, but they could maintain inner control through a close relationship with God. They received energy through the extraordinary power of hope.
C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity questioned God's existence when his beloved wife Joy died. He wrote: "Where is God? …go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slamming in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence!" When Lewis wrote these words, he seemed a man without hope, and yet he kept searching for God! He found God.
In our text Isaiah asks God to rip through the barrier that separates the people from God. "Let us sense your presence, God!" Isaiah realizes that sin is their barrier! He longs for God to break into their lives and shatter the effects of their sin. Even in their desperate aloneness, there is a desire to rekindle their hope and a bold confident trust in God. How do we know this? Because the prophet calls God "Father" and "potter." The prophet affirms that in the end God has total responsibility for Israel. God fathered Israel and now shapes Israel as a potter shapes the clay. According to the prophet, it's now time for God to act like a loving father and skilled potter and come out of hiding.
Sin can interfere with our ability to hope. When we clutch our sins to our chests as a sleeping child clutches a Teddy bear, we lose touch with God. God is present, but we pull away because we don't feel comfortable in God's presence. It appears to us that God has abandoned us because of our sin. "And yet," says the prophet, "you, God, are our Father; you are the one who shapes us, so come and help us!"
The biblical understanding of hope is that hope doesn't doubt even though it never sees what it hopes for. Hope faces reality head on, discerns that situations are going from bad to worse, and knows that no matter how reality presents itself, ultimately all will be well. And this isn't a Pollyanna outlook! Hope keeps us from identifying the hidden ness of God as the absence of God. "God, I can't find you, but I know you're here!" Our hope is based on God and not on us!
Let's face it, none of us can prove to anyone - sometimes not even to ourselves - that God is real and is reliable. Today, as in the past, we hear these words: "If there is a God, prove it! Give me scientific evidence that God is real and that God loves me."
We can't prove the existence of God in the same way we can prove a forest fire or a volcanic eruption. Some people will point to the Bible as proof, but if a person doesn't believe in God, she or he won't believe the testimony of the biblical writers. There is no empirical proof we can give for the existence of God.
However, when we seek God with our whole hearts, when we ask God to become real to us or when we humble ourselves and ask for help in finding God, God will come to us - but perhaps not as we expect or on our time schedule. I believe God exists because I have experienced God in my own life - time and time again. I believe God exists because I see God in God's people. I believe God exists because God has radically changed my life and the lives of people I know. I have hope because God loves me and lives in me. Because I have hope, I keep knocking at the door and battering God with my pleas!
The generation taken into captivity in Babylon died in exile. Moses didn't reach the Promised Land. Millions have died in concentration camps, as political prisoners, in ethnic cleansings and because of the poverty in which they lived. Good people experience business failure, marriage failure and parental failure. Innocent people are seriously injured, raped, traumatized, abused and killed. Jesus was crucified and all but two of his disciples were murdered. Bad things happen to good people. Life isn't fair! But no matter what the situation, we have hope because our hope isn't in the circumstances but in God, who loves us, continues to shape us, and lives in us.
Our text is a lament - a prayer prayed by an aging prophet crying out to God in an attitude of hope. He believes that life lived in God's presence will bring a complete transformation of the circumstances. That is the hope in his prayer.
The season of Advent isn't about Christmas but it's about waiting - waiting for the coming of Christ's reign on earth. Advent is a time to be concerned about our alienation from God and the consequences of our sinfulness and to take time to get right with God so that barriers can be torn away. We can hope for this coming because of God's faithfulness in the past. We have hope that the Christ who came 2000 years ago still comes today. You see, the Christ has come, and still comes.
