Sermon for November 27, 2011 - Immanuel

The Scripture reading for this Sermon was Isaiah  64:1-9

Has anyone seen the movie 500 Days of Summer?  It’s the story of a young man, Tom, moving through the 500 days of his relationship with a woman named, Summer.  It’s one of my favorite movies.  The movie starts with his desire for the unattainable girl that works in his office, moves through their relationship and breakup.  And throughout it all, it is the story of Tom longing for something beyond himself; so much so that the movie begins with the quote “Tom believed he would never be truly happy until he found the one.”  He longs for the one. 

But it is not until he discovers that there is something within himself, that things start to happen.  A transformation occurs in his life.  He begins to see a power from within making its presence known; a power that is not dependant on anything in the world around him.  It is only as he begins to discover that true self that he becomes happy, that he becomes content, and that relationships begin to flourish.

Our scripture reading for today comes the book of Isaiah; Third Isaiah as this section is called.  Isaiah was probably written by three writers, or three groups of writers, from different times in the history of the people of Israel.  Third Isaiah is often located after the Exile into Babylon, as the Jews have returned to Israel, and are undertaking the work of reconstruction.

What we heard today was actually a psalm of lament on behalf of the entire community.  All those who had returned to the Promised Land are crying out to God in one voice, all of them longing for a response.  They have wondered where God was in the midst of their Exile, and now they wonder where God is as they go about rebuilding their home.

“We hear stories,” they cry out, “stories of mountains quaking at your presence; stories of nations trembling; stories of how you meet those who serve you, who work with you, who remember your ways!  Where are you O God?!  We long for you!  Our very being yearns to know your presence!”

As with all of our most intense emotions and feelings, that sense of longing is both wonderful and painful at the same time.  I remember when I turned nine or ten, I really wanted a Gameboy for my birthday.  I longed for one, and all day I was running around the house singing the Gameboy song from the commercial.  But I also remember the anxiety that came with it.  What if I was wrong?  I really wanted one, the prospect of not getting one was at times overwhelming.

Longing can make our minds fill with excitement at a possibility, it can make our hearts soar with the prospect of romance, it can give us energy and motivate us into some sort of action.  But it carries with it the sadness that comes with something unattained, something beyond our reach.

The Jews cry out, longing to know God again, longing to feel God’s countenance upon them.  And very often this relates to our own longing for God.  There is the wondrous hope that somehow, someway we will find what we seek, that the Holy will fill our hearts and our minds. 

But in the midst of this hope, we ourselves cry out as we look at the world around us, as we see the wars, the violence, the destruction.  We ourselves cry out as we gaze within our own hearts, as we know pain, as we know anxiety and uncertainty, fear and trepidation. 

We ourselves hear stories, of a world at peace, of justice reigning.  We ourselves hear stories of those who claim to have felt God touch their hearts, who claim to experience God every minute of every day, who claim themselves as enlightened. 

We long to have something solid to grasp onto, some voice that cries out within our hearts so loud that we can literally hear it within our ears.  “Just give me a sign, O God!  Just show me where to go, what to do, touch my soul in such a way that all doubt is banished from my being and I can rest in you!  I long for you, O God.”

At its heart, longing is trying to fill a void.  To fill some sense that a piece of me is missing, and perhaps this will fill it.

The passage from Isaiah ends with a wonderful image of God as a potter.  As the community cries out with longing, wanting to know God again, the psalmist writes,  “We are the clay and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.” 

This is one of my favourite images in the bible, “we are the clay, and you are the potter.”  Isn’t that marvelous?  That image of each of us being handcrafted; every aspect of ourselves, our bodies, our hearts, our minds; our emotions, our feelings, our thoughts, our sexuality, all those things that we like about ourselves, all those things that we don’t like about ourselves, have been created and contain some indescribable aspect of the Holy.

There is something powerful in this image.  It shows us that what we truly long for, we already have; it already exists within ourselves and those around us.  As we long for a God beyond ourselves, we begin to see that God exists within ourselves.  The divine has been woven into our very being, the way a potter puts herself into her work, the way an artist puts herself into her paintings.  This is the essence of incarnation, of Immanuel, of God with us.  This is the essence of Christ that we have seen embodied in Jesus, for whom we now wait.

This is the essence of Advent, of what we are symbolically waiting for over the next few weeks.  Not the idea of a world RE-made in God’s image, but rather the knowledge that the world IS made in God’s image!  A world where we can cut through all those ideas of who we think we should be, no longer seeking solace in things beyond and see ourselves for who we truly are.  And more than that a world where we can look at others, not looking for who they should be, but looking at who they are, in all their wondrous createdness.  A world where we fill those voids of longing, with the knowledge that God exists here, in the world, and that we are a part of it.