Isaiah 64: 1-9, Advent 1 B
Barbara Brown Taylor tells of visiting a friend at his church. He showed her through the newly built fellowship hall and then took her into the sanctuary where she saw a “curious thing sitting on the altar. It was a fat white candle, sitting in a deep dish with a spiral of rusted barbed wire climbing the air around it.” She said she first thought that is was a symbol of this church’s prison ministry. But when she asked the minister what it was, he said that is was just something he had found that really spoke to him. Reaching out to touch one of the barbs he said, “See, the light has already come into the world, but there is still work to be done. There is still darkness between us and the light.”
In our reading this morning from the book of Isaiah, we hear just such a sentiment. This passage is set in a time in Israel’s history that reflects the struggles of the earliest people to return to Jerusalem after their exile into Babylon. After King Cyrus of Persia captures the Babylonian nation around 538 BCE, he sets free the Israelites. They return home with eager hearts longing for the land and the memories of their glorious Jerusalem. They hoped that coming home to Jerusalem would return them to their former glory. But what they find is a crumbled and dysfunctional kingdom. Problems multiplied rather than disappeared; ugliness and evil continued to exist. It is into this dismal situation that the writer of Isaiah speaks.
“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!
The writer longs for God to act in history– so that the nations tremble at God’s presence. He yearns for a time when God’s people were free and they knew righteousness in the land. Isaiah 64 is a powerful lament. It is a prayer to God to remember God’s people, to not leave us alone, to come to us in a way so that all will know God’s power and mercy and so that we will all be healed. As it says in Psalm 80, “Restore us, O God of hosts; show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.”
But before we can be saved, Isaiah calls us to lament. To see the devastation that is around us. To recognize that our situation is dire. To call out to God to hear us, to see us, to come to us. To acknowledge that while the light has indeed come into the world, we as God’s people have not opened our hearts and minds to it and so there is still work to be done.
My heart and my mind are full of the tragedy of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson Missouri. I grieve with the deep anguish of my black brothers and sisters. As a person of white privilege, I cannot fully understand their pain, but I must stay in prayer with their emotional responses to this devastating event. Anger can be startling and it can certainly make us fearful. In fact it seems too often these days that the primary purpose of our news media is to highlight the anger so as to roil our emotions and so separate us by fear, that we are blinded to the still small voices of pain from those who react with anger, but are remarkably restrained from violence. And we need to remember that anger is not a sin. Anger is the right and just response to inequity and inaction. When our brothers and sisters express anger and frustration regarding the racism they experience, the worst thing we can do is dismiss or try to explain away their suffering so we can return to the safety and comfort of our own emotional cocoon.
Desmund Tutu said, “true reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking, but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.”
When we see an image of young black people looking into a camera with their hands in the air we are being challenged to look honestly at the reality of racism in this country. As a nation and an economy founded on the back of slavery, we must recognize that what happened in Ferguson is not a single incident. In 2012, more than 300 black people were killed by police, security guards, or people acting on their own volition out of a seeming fear for their own safety.
In the United States, African American men are incarcerated at nearly six times the rates of white men. Racial minorities are more likely to be arrested than white Americans, once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted; and once convicted, they are more likely to be sent to prison.
And data compiled by a task force in a recent Connecticut study showed that although blacks make up only 7.9 percent of the population, they accounted for more than 14% of all traffic stops. Drivers who are Hispanic, which are now 9.7% of the state’s population, made up 11.8% of all traffic stops. The cars of African Americans were also searched at a rate of 5.7% while vehicles driven by white persons accounted for only 2.65%.
And even closer to home, as a mother of three sons, is that as my friends and colleagues who have black children tell me they live in fear that their son or daughter may be next. So they are forced to give their children, “The Talk” warning them that because of the color of their skin, they will be treated differently by authority figures and society at large and so they must go into the world in fear being constantly aware that they are being judged by the color of their skin, regardless of the content of their character. It is not an uncommon incident that black men whether they are high schoolers or neurosurgeons are frequently denied access to benefits as citizens that we take for granted—like shopping in a store without being followed by store personnel, like hailing and being able to ride in a cab that stops for us, like going out at night with a group of our friends without causing alarm.
We cannot begin to heal our community until we lament for this injustice. We cannot begin to love our neighbors as we are called to do, until we weep as Isaiah does when he says,
“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;
A lament is a prayer that cries out to God from the midst of desperate grief, pain, or any circumstance that seems out of control. It vocalizes the hurt to God with the conviction–the faith– that God can and will bring relief.
A lament is not just the venting of frustration, but it is a profound statement of faith in God from the midst of utter human hopelessness. The significance of a lament is that the worshipper prays in the midst of pain, believing that God cares about our condition and with the faith that God can be trusted with the outcome.
But Isaiah reminds us that God works for those who wait for Him. God meets those who gladly do right and those who remember God in God’s ways. God calls us to remember our opportunity to grasp God’s hand in this time of pain and walk into the hope that is our future.
If we sitting here today are perplexed by the happenings in Ferguson–if our hearts break over the loss of a young person, but are bewildered by its cause and its remedy–it might be worth asking ourselves why? What is it about our own life experiences that separate us from entering into the context of our brothers and sisters in Ferguson and in other cities in our country? What can we do to truly lament and begin to enter into a time of reconciliation?
One thing we can do is learn more about the lives of God’ children who suffer from racism. Our brothers and sisters at Multicultural BRIDGE regularly offer conversations for us to open our hearts to the sin-riddled systems at work in our society. We may want to enter into a time of study, reflection, and prayer with our community. Here in the Berkshires we live and work alongside people with whom we can learn much. It will require us to listen carefully, to accept that some of this listening will be painful, and to be faithful so that we do not turn away from the light that gives us life.
The text from Isaiah cries out to God who is angered by the sins of the people. Because of their iniquities, the people have no right to ask for God’s “awesome deeds.” But in Verse 8 we hear the depth and persistence of Israel’s faith. With the word, “Yet” in our reading from the NRSV or “But now” in Hebrew, the prayer turns to the confidence that despite all that has happened, God is our Father. God will not turn away.
Yet, O LORD, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand.
The whole focus of the prayer turns to God. What now becomes the center– is our foundational relationship with God who is seen as “our father.” Who despite all that has been revealed is “our potter.” It brings us to the realization that we are completely dependent on God who has created us and who holds us in the palm of God’s hands molding us and forming us, making us new. God remains steadfast.
With God we are not stuck forever in iniquity. This is our prayer.
Walter Brueggemann in an interview about the work of lamentations in the Old Testament, says that they are an expression of grief, but they are also an expression of hope. They are an insistence that things cannot remain this way and they must be changed. They are an address to God, but they are also a communal resolve to be faithful and take transformative action…The transformative function of such prayers is that it transforms anger and rage into positive energy.”
As we step into this season of Advent, we are reminded that while we do not have barbed wire around our wreath here at Grace Church, the spacing of the candles reminds us that while the light has come into the world there is still work to be done. There is darkness between us and the light. We are entering into a time of the year when everyday the dark comes sooner until December 21, when on the shortest day of the year, we spend barely nine hours in light. One thing we know as people of Advent, is that it gets darker before it gets light. Each week, as we light one more candle, we know that the darkness will increase.
But we also know that the sun will come back, just as we know that God will be born in a stable in Bethlehem. We know the One who is coming into the world, is someone who comes in love. These are sure facts of our life. As we begin our walk in Advent—as we wait and watch in hope for the One who is coming–let us together pray that God our Father who molds us and makes us will help us do the work that needs to be done so that all of God’s people may be saved.
Other resources for consideration:
https://www.aclu.org/racial-justice/driving-while-black-racial-profiling-our-nations-highways
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2012.