Reflection for First Week of Advent

We've been joining together for weekday prayer and thanksgiving services during the three full weeks of Advent. Each service has a meditation followed by an extended prayer time, with options for kneeling, journaling, and candle lighting. Had I thought about it before now, I would have posted this earlier.

Isaiah 64:1-9

“From ages past no one has heard […of] any God besides you who works for those who wait for him” (Is 64:4).

     The word Advent means coming, and it is during this time that we begin the Christian year by waiting for Christ’s final coming in glory in which God will make all things new and dwell eternally amidst God’s creation. What a joyous event, and yet with this passage from Isaiah, we begin Advent not with shouts of joy but with moans and cries. For as we anticipate and wait for Christ’s coming, reality calls our attention back to the woes of this world – globally and personally.
      Isaiah and the people of Israel – who have recently returned from their 50-year exile – lament their present woes. Just because they’ve been allowed to return to the land of Judah does not mean they’ve returned to what was once their Promised Land. The Temple lies in ruin and their lives are in shambles. Yet, they remember their people’s history from scripture: God’s “awesome deeds” in which God led Israel out of Egypt, through the Red Sea and the desert, and into the Promised Land. And Isaiah pleads, O that you would do it again, Lord. Care for us, your people, again as you did in ages past! But what has happened instead? God has apparently turned away from Israel because of their sinfulness – sinfulness that has left Israel to approach God as all other “unclean” peoples must: with confession, penance, and hopeful waiting. Indeed, our hope is in God’s steadfast love, just as it was for Israel. Yet, it is not as likely that God’s “awesome deeds” will look the same as they once did, for as Isaiah knows, God is Father and potter, not ruthless avenger.
     Have you also felt as though God has turned away from you? Have you longed with all your being for God to act as God did in the ancient stories of scripture? You would not be alone. Yet, as Isaiah ends his lament, our hope rests on God’s steadfast love bringing us through in a new way, not the way God once chose to act. In Advent, we anticipate Christ’s coming as God’s steadfast and determined way to redeem creation. Through Christ, we see that God’s chosen way of acting in and with the world is through suffering service and vulnerable, noncoercive love. In Christ, God has answered Isaiah’s lament, and ours – just not as we expected.
“At Advent, God’s people summon the courage and the spiritual strength to remember that the holy breaks into the daily. In tiny ways, we can open our broken hearts to the healing grace of God, who opens the way to peace. […] [This] is not a season for passive waiting and watching. It is a season of wailing and weeping, of opening up our lives and our souls with active anticipation and renewed hope” (Patricia E. De Jong in Feasting on the Word, Westminster John Knox: 2008). Let us, therefore, spend these weeks of Advent seeking to open our hearts to God’s grace, which breaks into the world, daily, in unexpected ways.