All These Jagged Shards--December 4, 2023

All These Jagged Shards--December 4, 2023

"O that you would tear open the heaven 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!

When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect,

     you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence." [Isaiah 64:1-3]

There's something wrong with the world.

Not just "quirky," or "not my particular cup of tea," or "an acquired taste," but something deeply wrong with the world--the world in which we live, and the same world of which we are a part.  I don't think there's any way around that assessment. Not if we're paying attention, at least.

Sure, there are plenty of lovely and good things in the world as well--don't get me wrong.  This world, the only place we've ever found life, by the way, is brimming with beauty and nobility and excellence, too.  Our little planet has deep blue oceans and bustling cities with a kaleidoscope of humanity.  We have skies full of stars and trees that bear apples and peaches and pears just by drinking in the rain and the sunlight.  We have the smell of lavender and the taste of coffee.  We have poetry and music and art.  All these things are true.

But this is also a world sometimes overflowing with tragedy. We keep inventing new ways to kill each other, but haven't solved the problem of hunger.  We poison our drinking water and nurse hatred against people who are different from us.  We pave over our fields and forests, and we mass-produce artificially-flavored junk food in factories that leave us feeling sick and lethargic.  We look for distractions on screens to help us ignore the suffering of real human faces in neighbors near and far. We use terror and torture on each other, and we sacrifice our children to the tools of violence, power, and greed.  All of these things are true as well.

And the longer I live, the more I am convinced that it is an essentially human thing for all of us (as well as fundamental for people of faith in particular) that something inside us longs for all that is wrong in the world to be put right.  There is something that cries out at the injustice of a starving child or a parent who has to pull a son dead from the rubble of a bombed-out building, or who waits for news about whether their captive daughter will be released safely.  There is something that grieves over the number of people who take their lives because they are convinced they are a mistake or unlovable, or feel utterly alone even in a crowd.  There is some part of us that groans at the realization that neighbors closer than we realize who have to decide whether to pay the electric bill or buy groceries, or whether to get medicine for a sick spouse or shoes for their kids that don't have holes in them.  And there is something within us that aches and rages at the brutality of warmongers or the cruelty of despots clutching to power.  To see these things in the world and not to be outraged is to be somehow deeply un-human.  

And so, when we are brave enough to be honest, we recognize how much is wrong with the world (which also means seeing that we may well be infected by the wrong-ness and part of the problem ourselves!), and we call out for it to be put right.  We may not have a good idea for how things should be fixed, or what exactly it would look like to be mended.  We may not have the power to solve things ourselves or the wisdom to know how to make it work.  But even our unspoken dissatisfaction with a world in which evil so often seems to win and the vulnerable so often are harmed is a kind of silent prayer of lament, pleading for justice to be done and the lowly to be lifted up.

I want to suggest that this is exactly where our hope for Jesus begins.  We long, even if we cannot quite put that longing into words, for creation to be restored and for all that is wrong with the world to be set right. And as we cry out for the restoration of the universe, whether we realize it or not we are declaring, "This isn't how things are supposed to be!" like we know there is a Someone who intends to put things back together with justice and goodness.  Our outcry against all that is wrong is a sort of witness of faith that God will not leave things ruined, and God will not let evil win the day in the end.  That is what hope really is, at least from the perspective of the Scriptures.  Ultimately, our hope is that the Creator of the universe doesn't leave us to fend for ourselves and abandon the world to its own brokenness, but will somehow renew everything.

If our hope for the one we call Christ is anything smaller than that, we have missed something.  The One the prophets announced, the One whom generations waited for, the same One we await coming in glory, the One called "Messiah" and "Christ," is the One on whom all those universal hopes are pinned.  And our hope for God to "tear open the heavens" is the hope that God won't leave a broken world in all these jagged shards, or the bullies to win the day, or cruelty and death to get the last word.  Our hope for God to do "awesome deeds that we did not expect" is about the restoration and rectifying of all creation.  In other words, the hope we place in Jesus is always about more than just "how we get to heaven when we die" but about how God sets right all that our deepest selves know is wrong with the world.  Our hope is not for God to whisk us out of a broken world and leave it broken, but to heal the world in new creation, including all that is diseased within us and our souls as well.

I want us to start here, in this new church year's focus on Meeting Jesus, because so often we settle for too small a hope or reduce Jesus' coming to being a matter of religious sentimentality.  Jesus' coming--even in the manger--isn't just because babies are cute and it's nice that God can be cute, and it's not just for God to take a field trip to experience human mortality or existence.  Our hope for the promised Messiah is for a world to be mended where it is broken.  Jesus hasn't come simply to offer us an escape hatch out of a world that is sinking like the Titanic; Jesus' coming is about God refusing to give up on the world and insisting on making all things new.

So today, every time we come face to face with some new fact or realization about what is wrong in the world, perhaps we can also see our lament as a prayer of trust calling on God not to leave the world broken, and not to let death or evil win the day. And rather than turning away from all that is wrong or rotten, our first step in meeting Jesus is to lift up all that pain and to say in prayer, "This is what we need you to heal.  This is where we need your help."  All of that, honestly, is what we mean when we pray, "Come, Lord Jesus."

And so we pray it: Come, Lord Jesus.