Sermons

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The Longing
First Sunday of Advent November 30, 2003
Pastor Dan Baumgartner
5th in a series “Images from Isaiah”
Isaiah 2:1-5, Luke 21:25-36

As I looked at this Isaiah passage this week, it reminded me of one of my favorite Psalms, Psalm 63. The first part reads like this:

“O God, you are my God, early do I seek you
my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”

I think I like it because of this deep intensity it expresses. Such a longing, something between utter desperation and painful endurance.

Last week, someone asked a small group of mine the question:

“What do you want?”

What do you want? There should have been an easy answer to this, there really should have been. So why did we all sit there for a while? Why did our minds spin and sputter, picking up possible answers, rejecting them and searching for others. What do you want? What do you long for?

The easiest answer, and probably the quickest one to come to us in this culture is:

I want someTHING. It could be lots of things. I want a car, a new house, a stereo, new clothes, whatever. I want someTHING which is exciting to get, and it makes me feel good and it gives me something to talk about and maybe compare favorably with my friends on. But there is, of course, something odd about things. They are a little like drinking a can of diet pop when you’re really thirsty…they don’t totally satisfy. They feel good, they taste good. But when all is said and done…there is still something missing. What do you want? What do you long for?

Sometimes I would answer the question: I just want to get away for awhile. Give me some space. That’s all I want. And I do long for it. Sometimes if I have a half hour drive or so to make, and especially if I’m a little too busy, or tired, my mind says: What would happen if, instead of driving out to Issaquah…I just kept driving east on I-90? No preparation, no destination, just kept on driving. Sometimes that sounds so very appealing. What doesn’t sound so good is the phone call to follow:

“Hello, honey? I know I said I’d pick up the kids tonight…but I find that I’m in Missoula, Montana!”

The outdoors can have a similar appeal for me. There is something about being out in God’s creation, away from signs and cars and emails and phones. Just hiking, one foot in front of the other, in total silence…so I’m almost insulted when I spot some other hiker with the nerve to walk on MY trail.

This weekend we were up at Whidbey Island, and walked out on the beach, and it’s just so wide open. Pounding waves, the wind in your face, the smell…and the view. No houses in front of you, no buildings, nothing…just wide open, horizon to horizon. Oh, sometimes I long for that. Just to be away, with no limits in front of me. That’s what I’d want. Still…even as renewing as it can be to be in the silence of your own mind, and realizing you are part of something much larger than you…those are very, very good. But still, there’s something else. What do you want? What do you long for?

Perhaps your longing is tied to a place. I can still remember arriving at my grandparents' home in Genessee, Idaho, a small farming community. I can tell you what it smelled like in different times of the year, usually tied to whether the wheat was being harvested, or whether it was growing, or whether the fields lie fallow in even rows of dirt.

I know what the squeaky screen door on the back porch of their house sounded like. I remember how the grandfather clock in the dining room ticked and tocked, echoing through the house until you didn’t even notice it anymore. I remember how the staircase going upstairs to the toybox creaked, and how a slight musty smell came wafting down the stairs as you started up. When I think of those things, I can almost remember being a child. Innocent, absorbed in play and the moment…not in what was coming next. So simple, and uncomplicated. I can find myself longing once in a while to go back to being a boy. And yet, going backwards to a different place or time…wouldn’t seem to answer the longing either.

And maybe in a similar way, your longing is tied to a person. Maybe there’s someone whose memory or presence draws you into a time that is tender and comforting.

Anne’s grandmother Thora died just a couple days ago…the last of either of our grandparents to still be alive. She was almost 93, and just a remarkable lady. And these last few days Anne and I have talked about different things about her. She was a person who was very present for Anne her whole life, and for me as well after I met her when I was sixteen or so.

We were driving home from Whidbey yesterday, and who comes on the radio but Perry Como, golden oldie, singing O Holy Night…Perry Como was Grandma Thora’s favorite. I think she would have married him if she could! We heard that rich voice, and it took us right back to that good feeling of having Thora’s sparkling eyes smiling at us. And for a time…you think, “Oh, if I could just turn back that clock a bit. Soak in more of who she was.” There’s a longing inside you…and yet, even if you could…it wouldn’t have that “completed” feeling about it. There is something still more.

What is it, then…that we want? Really? What do we long for? Isaiah’s vision in chapter 2 says “In days to come…” meaning “in the latter days” or even “at the culmination of days”…things will be different than they are now. Part of our unrest, our longing is that we recognize – pretty easily – that things are not now the way they should be. Nation wars against nation, race against race, religion against religion. The world groans, from the environment to the millions of hungry to the homeless, the world groans and we groan along with it. Justice and righteousness are mocked, and everyone is out to take care of themselves. You can’t trust anyone. It was happening, you see, back in Isaiah’s day every bit as much as it happens today.

Isaiah’s vision starts with a place, the mountain of the Lord’s house…the place where God dwells, where he lives. In days to come, it will be the highest spot, and people will flow to it like water flowing uphill, drawn like magnets because they are drawn to God. Instead of hallowing human ingenuity, instead of making the wisdom of humankind the most sacred value…they will go there, climbing the hill that they might be taught God’s ways, and be instructed by God’s word. No longer will the means of war (swords) nor the practice of war (lifting up swords against others) nor the mentality of war (learning war) rule the day. No, these are signs that not all is well. But in days to come, plowshares and pruning hooks will rule the day. Enmity and hatred and strife will cease and the tending of gardens and fields will return. It’s almost an image here of a return to the garden of Eden, people in right relationship with God…and therefore in right relationship with one another.

In New York City, the United Nations Headquarters building has a garden with a number of sculptures and art pieces in it. One bronze statue, donated by the Soviet Union in 1959 shows an artisan swinging a hammer at a sword and turning it into a plow. The inscription under it is these words from Isaiah 2, “they shall beat their swords into plowshares.” It symbolizes the human desire to put an end to war, to convert the means of destruction into helpful tools for humanity. For now, though, it is a silent and mute testimony only to our inability to do such a thing on our own. It expresses only the longing.

How will this come about? A different president, a better system, a world government, better rules, a stronger army? No. Isaiah’s vision says it will happen because people will return to worship the one God, and please him. Then things will be different. Then the world will be reordered.What do you want? What do you long for?

Something different. A different world. And yet I believe we long for something even deeper.

This summer I read Fyodor Dosteyvsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov. There is a wonderful little vignette in it about a man named Zossima. Zossima is an old and wise Russian monk. But he tells a story about himself when he was a young man of good upbringing, and an officer in the Czar’s army.

He was unhappy, because while he was away on a trip another man married the woman he was in love with. He challenges the man to a duel, not an unusual thing in that time and place. The night before the duel, Zossima flies into a rage at his servant, Afanasy, and strikes him twice brutally in the face…again, not an unusual thing in that time and place, and very much within the rights of an army officer. But when Zossima gets up the next morning, on the day of the duel, he feels fine about the duel and notes the beauty of the morning. But there is something wrong inside of him.

And so, as he’s about to leave, he makes an excuse to go back to the house, and goes to his servant’s room:

“Afanasy,” I said. “I gave you two blows on the face yesterday. Please forgive me,” I said.

He started as though he were frightened, and looked at me, and I saw that it was not enough, and on the spot, in my full officer’s uniform, I dropped at his feet and bowed my head to the ground.

“Please forgive me,” I begged.

Then he was completely aghast.

“Your honor…sir, what are you doing? Am I worth it?”

It seems to me that here is our longing expressed so well. It is not a material thing, not free traveling, not the wide open horizon, not a place or a person, not even a different world that is our deepest, most profound longing. But a longing to hear an answer to this question “Am I worth it?” Not just from a person, but from the God of the universe.

If we could hear the answer…then everything would be different. If we knew that God would answer the question by saying unequivocally, “My son, my daughter…you are so very much worth it,” then everything would be different. Perhaps the swords would be turned into plowshares, not just on a UN statue but in every nation of the world.

Isaiah says, “the word of the Lord will go out.” It will be like a magnet, drawing people to God. Many peoples. And so it does. The word goes out into the silence. It lands in a suburb of Jerusalem called Bethlehem. The Word goes out in God’s Son, Jesus Christ, but it eventually lands back in Jerusalem. And then just outside of Jerusalem, on a hill they called Golgotha, the Word still goes out. The nations and governments opposed to Jesus thought that they had silenced the Word when they put him on a cross, but never did the Word go out louder or more clearly than in the person of God hanging on a cross, and answering our longing: Am I worth it? Oh yes, you are worth it.

Frederick Buechner writes about our search, and labels it the longing for home:

“the first thing the word HOME brings to mind is a place, then the next and perhaps most crucial thing is people and maybe ultimately a single person.”Buechner himself went to a church in 1953, in mid-December and listened to the preacher George Buttrick ask the congregation the simple question Are you going home for Christmas? – and asked it in some sort of way that brought tears to my eyes and made it almost unnecessary for him to move on to his answer to the question, which was that home, finally, is the manger in Bethlehem, the place where at midnight even the oxen kneel…Home is where Christ is.”

Home is where Christ is. And so in our time in this world, everything is different. Everything. Our longing is answered in Jesus Christ, and so it is different…and yet still hard. Still hardships remain, still the world is violent, still the statue stands frozen in New York trying to beat a sword into something peaceful, something useful. But things are different. And the light that broke brilliantly into the world in Jesus Christ glimmers. It bursts forth in the most unexpected of places, and never can the darkness put it out.

It is this same Jesus who will come a final time.

“Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.”

With the second coming of Christ, God will say to us: Enough. It is done. It is finished.

In this Advent, we look ahead to the birth of Christ. But even as we rejoice in what his birth, life, death and resurrection have meant…we keep looking ahead to when He comes again. In the meantime, Isaiah says to us:

“Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”

Amen.