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The Longing
Sunday, Nov 28, 1999
First Sunday of Advent
Pastor Dan Baumgartner
Isaiah
64:1-9, Mark
13:32-37
There was a longing
in the heart of Isaiah the prophet. A longing for things to be different.
Very different. Once the people Israel had been close to God, yet now they
seemed far off. Once God had specifically led them: through Moses, through
the sea, like a shepherd. Once God had parted the waters, had protected them,
had brought them to rest. Once God had appeared in the pillar of fire, in
the Tent of Meeting. But not now. God seemed a long, long way off. And the
cry of Isaiah was for God to come close, to draw near. He longed for it,
he ached for it. He waited. He cried out to God:
“Oh, that
you would tear open the heavens and come down!…Come down to make
your name known…”
I believe that
each of us have that same longing inside of us. We were made a particular
way, for a particular purpose…to be in relationship with God. We have
been designed and wired that way…and when we are far away there is
a deep part of us that longs for God. That longs to be known. That longs
to have our soul touched at our very core. We substitute other things…we
try on people for size, looking for what will satisfy the ultimate desire…the
part of us that longs to be loved and known by God. Some of us will spend
our whole lives looking, searching, following that longing. C.S. Lewis describes
it this way:
“Even in
your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the
others are curiously ignorant of- something, not to be identified with,
but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the
workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not
all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another
human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best)
of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the
flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder
passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are
looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never HAD it. All the
things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of
it- tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died
away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest-
if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound
itself- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, “Here
at last is the thing I was made for.”
As we enter Advent,
we enter a time when the longing often strikes deep. If we view this month
as merely the countdown until Christmas morning…the disappointment
will also run deep. Surely there’s something more. The Christmas music,
the shopping and stores, the rich food, the commercials, the gifts, packages
and ribbons which we all participate in to one degree or another… everything
tries to convince us we’re in one of those beer commercials that say “It
doesn’t get any better than this.” But something inside of us
says… “it must. There must be something more.” And so
Isaiah called out, and said “Lord, there’s something empty here,
something not right. Come down, Lord, come down and make your name known.”
In Advent we live
in expectation of the coming of Christ. Waiting.
When our Jewish
friends celebrate the Passover, and gather for the meal, they do two interesting
things. They set an extra cup on the table, and sometime during the evening,
they open the front door of the house. According to tradition, the Messiah
will come at Passover…and the coming of the Messiah will be preceded
by the prophet Elijah. And so this “Elijah cup” is made ready,
and the door is opened in the hope that THIS year, after long last, Elijah
will be waiting. That God will come down.
We wait at Advent.
We live in expectation of the coming of Christ. We wait, and watch, and look.
And it seems there are three kinds of waiting. First, as Christians we “wait” for
something we know has already happened. We look backwards and remember that
the Messiah HAS come, that God HAS drawn near in Jesus, the Christ. We celebrate
this ultimate in breaking of God into the world. We celebrate that because
of Jesus, we will never be separated from the love God has for us. There
is still a longing, though. Even as we celebrate the fact that Christ’s
coming to earth is the beginning of the end of all that is contrary to the
ways of God.…we long for the culmination, because there are still
so many things contrary to God’s ways. (pause) There’s a little
white-haired woman in a nursing home in Moscow, Idaho. She’s over 80
years old, can’t really speak, and doesn’t seem to recognize
here own kids. She doesn’t eat much, and is unaware of what goes on
around her. Most of the time she cuddles on her bed with a large doll that
she is quite attached to. She has severe Alzheimer’s…and it
has robbed her of her last years of life. The woman on the bed is my grandma.
I visited her two summers ago. She’s not the grandma I know. Not the
grandma who had the guts to keep us Baumgartner boys for two weeks each summer,
not the grandma who taught us how to play pinochle, cooked us hamburgers
for dinner and watched us argue as we played wiffleball in the front yard
after the sun went down. And when I think of my Grandma, I think: “This
isn’t how you made it, Lord. It’s not the way it’s supposed
to be.” I know many of you have people and situations in your life
that are painful. At Advent when we look back to Jesus’ coming, it
reminds us that it’s not the way it always will be.
We also look to
the present…because Christ has come, and has given us His Spirit…we
get these glimpses of the kingdom of God in the here and now.
We get these “grace-filled
moments” when we see the in breaking of God, when we sense that the
longing deep inside of us has been met. We get to taste God’s love at a whole new
level…and it is good, and deep and satisfying. I don’t know
if this happens to you, but I have moments, occasionally, when I just want
to freeze life for a moment. I had one this fall.
It was a Saturday,
and the leaves were falling all over. We packed up the kids and our bikes,
and went down to ride on the Burke-Gilman trail. And we were riding along,
and I looked up in front of me, and the sun was shining down on the color
of the leaves, the bike tires were crunching the ones which had fallen. The
air was sort of cool on my face, my best friend and wife Anne, whom I’ve
know since she was 16, was riding just in front of me, and then ahead of
her, Jesse, Nick and Dana riding, laughing, racing…and making other
people on the trail fear for their lives! And this deep passion welled up
in me, and it was so good…so right…I sensed God in that moment,
right there. And I wanted to just freeze the moment, and stay there. We get
these little grace-filled glimpses. (pause)
In Minneapolis,
a long-time member of our church, Manley Wilcox, was in his 70’s when
I met him. Manley had been a big, strapping man, a lineman on the Minnesota
Gophers’ football team years ago. He had miraculously made it through
a severe stroke…but he was in tough shape. He was in a wheel chair.
He couldn’t do much with his arms. They had to amputate one of his
legs. And his speech was severely affected. He could only get out a word
or two before he would get locked into a stutter that stopped him from completing
any thought. I went to visit him with another man from the church, one of
his old college teammates named Howie. We talked, mostly Howie and I, and
Manley would say “yes,” or “no” and nod his head
a little. He understood what we were saying, but just couldn’t communicate
much at all. After about 20 minutes, we thought we’d better go. We
wanted to pray with Manley, so the three of us held hands and bowed our heads.
First Howie prayed. Then I prayed. Then, just as we were about to say “Amen,” Manley
began to pray. Deep voice, heartfelt prayer pouring out of this mouth that
normally couldn’t finish a sentence…and not a stutter. Not one
stutter. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. (pause)
We get these glimpses,
these moments of grace…and we look at Christ’s arrival in the
here and now...a taste of what it will be.
And then, in Mark’s
gospel, Jesus reminds us…that we look to the future. We look for Him
to come again. We look for the day when things will be totally set right,
when grandmas don’t curl up on beds, when parents don’t leave
their kids, when there are no wars, and no more violence. We look for the
second coming of Christ. And we don’t get side-tracked in calculating
which day or hour it will be…only God knows, Jesus said. Especially
now, at the end of a millennium, we don’t get side-tracked. Y2K may
well present some technological challenges, even some disasters…but
the second coming? We just don’t know. Only God knows, Jesus said.
Yet, in every single age, every generation there have been those who have
said “I know. This is it. I’ve calculated it all out, I know
exactly when the Lord will come again, when the Last Days will be here.”
1993 was a big
year. A well-known Christian radio evangelist sold some 50,000 books on the
premise that the end of time would be, my memory says, April 10, 1993. The
date came and went, of course. And when asked later, this person said simply “I
guess I was wrong.” Yeah. He’s not alone. Go through every age.
The founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Charles Taze Russell, gathered
quite a following with his teaching that 1914 would be it…the end
of time. The Witnesses even had a famous slogan for 1914: “Millions
living now will never die.” Russell died in 1916. Every age thinks
they know. Jesus says “you don’t know….so you need to
keep watch. You need to be ready. You don’t want to be sleeping. Be
on guard! Be alert!” The God we follow is a God of the unexpected.
Isaiah remembered that God did surprising things… “…when
you did awesome things that we did not expect.” Certainly the whole
world was caught off guard by the first coming of Christ…not at the
head of an army, not as a political force, but as a servant, as an offering,
as sacrificial love. We don’t know the hour that we long for…we
only know we long for Christ.
What if it was
tomorrow? Would it change anything? Would you live differently? Jesus WILL
come again. And soon. And so we are told to live as expectant people. We
pursue our longing to know intimately the One who has come, who is here,
and who will come again. And we live in the confidence that Jesus longs to
know us too. Brennan Manning tells the story of a priest who went to visit
a terminally ill man in his home:
As he entered the
bedroom, he noticed a chair at the man’s bedside and asked him what
it was doing there. The sick man replied, “I had placed Jesus on that
chair and was talking to Him before you arrived. For years, “ he continued, “ I
found it extremely difficult to pray until a friend explained to me that
prayer was simply a matter of talking with Jesus. He told me to place an
empty chair nearby, to imagine Jesus sitting on that chair, and to speak
with Him and listen to what He says to me in reply. I’ve had no difficulty
in praying ever since.” Some days later the daughter of the sick man
came to the parish house to inform the priest that here father had just died.
She said, “I left him alone for a couple of hours. He seemed so peaceful.
When I got back to the room, I found him dead. I noticed a strange thing,
though: his head was resting not on the bed but on an empty chair that was
beside his bed.”
God longs to know
us…intimately.
A longing to know
and be known. An extra cup on the table. An open door to the house. there
surprising arrival (Advent) of the Son of God. Glimpses of grace in the here
and now. A prayer from lips long-sealed. An empty chair. We live today…THIS
day, in expectation. We look today…THIS day, to the past, the present,
the future. And with the Church throughout the world, and through the ages,
we echo the words that close the book of Revelation, that close the New Testament,
that close the Bible: “Marantatha! Come, Lord Jesus…Come.”
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