Healing Rays of Righteousness

Read Isaiah 64:1-9

Advent 2018 bursts upon us with the impassioned cry of the prophet to God that things are not right in this world; “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you!” (Isaiah 64:1).

Isaiah gives voice to a soul-deep longing for God to show up in their midst as he did in the past.  “For when you did awesome things that we did not expect, you came down, and the mountains trembled before you.  Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.” (Isaiah 64:3-4).

Most of us have probably prayed a similar prayer at one time or another.  Like Isaiah, we too are filled with longing to see God coming down to act on our behalf. We too hunger for the transforming, authoritative presence of God in our world, church, and families.  In many ways we feel threatened by the evils of war and violence, corrupted authorities, injustices, and agnosticism. Innocent and powerless people suffer as victims of evil and selfish greed.

And conversely, people who do evil and live in disobedience to God’s commands often appear to never have trouble or difficulties.   And so, we too, with Isaiah, beg God to come down and do something about this world of evil and injustices.

From such an emotional and spiritual depth of despair, Isaiah speaks in verse 8, the most unexpected, unthinkable, and unsupportable word “Yet.”  It is a word of faith that stands up against all the apparent defeatism and gloom of the previous verses.

“Yet you, Lord, are our Father.  We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.”  The claim has been made.  God has made us, and we are his people.  In spite of all the threats, crises, troubles and tribulations, that fact of faith, pivoting on the one small word “Yet,” gives voice to the grand and glorious solid-rock truth that lies beneath and supports all other truths.

Isaiah’s words reveal to us the heart and soul of Advent. “Come, Lord Jesus” is a prayer that points both backwards and forward; that is, backward to the baby in the manger but also forward to the Lord’s continual entering into our world.

God enters our world in many ways; some large and dramatic, and others, maybe most, small and subtle.  Isaiah’s imagery about mountains falling down, valleys standing up, and unlikely people appearing on the road is not so much about a dramatic event as it is about a decisive, transforming change happening.  And that’s what happened at Christmas.

The Advent and Christmas season is all about remembering and celebrating the day God, in Jesus Christ, left the glories of heaven, and taking on human flesh, came down to earth to be one with us and to experience what human life is like in this world.

What Isaiah and the other prophets could only pray and hope for, based on God’s promise of a Messiah, we now look back on as the hope that has already come!  God, in Christ, came down from heaven to be in human relationship with us, and to be our Savior.

God did rend the heavens, not in the mighty way Isaiah may have expected, but when the angelic chorus burst forth in song at the birth, all heaven broke loose in praise.  God came down from heaven as a human baby, and lived and walked as one of us.  And the world still trembles in awe and wonder at the miracle of that birth.  God came down and through the infant Jesus said, “I dearly love you.”

Nothing pictures the surprising nature of God’s love and presence better than God’s coming in the person of Jesus as a human baby.  No one anticipated seeing God in an unwed pregnancy, in a small-town stable, in a blue-collar worker, in a family of refugees.  Yet, that is how God came, and that is how God worked in response to Isaiah’s plea for God to come down.

What we celebrate and anticipate this Advent season is the unexpected manner of God’s coming in Jesus, and the unexpected ways God is still coming to up-end and transform our lives and our world in each new day.  I invite you to meditate on God’s coming yesteryear and today, often in places we would not think to look.

During this Advent season, let us join the prophet, Isaiah, in remembering God’s mighty presence in the past and let us prepare ourselves to be surprised and amazed by the appearance of our God at any time and in any place.

“Healing Rays of Righteousness” – November 28, 2018