I invite you to turn with me to Isaiah once more. We are nearly finished with our study of this Old Testament prophet after all these months. As we read this morning, I’d encourage you to have a place in your mind that recalls the “Palm Sunday” passage from Matthew that Linda read earlier.

This is not a very satisfying Sunday to preach. Nor do I think you will find this a very satisfying sermon.

A boy was ready to march into church on Palm Sunday. His job was to carry the cross, and the other kids would follow with their palm branches. He turned to his pastor and said, “I don’t understand how I’m supposed to be feeling.”

“Hosanna!” We all shouted it a little while ago. It comes in the story of the “palm parade,” Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem that is recorded in all four gospels. “Hosanna!” Literally, “Hosanna” means “Save, please!” It’s a prayer. Or maybe an exclamation. What did the people who shouted it want? “God, save the Son of David!” God, save us, please.

“Crucify him!” We all shouted it a little while ago. I don’t know about you, but it felt terrible to me. Crucify him. Literally, it means “fix to a cross.” Nail him to a cross until he is stone cold dead. Crucify him.

Hosanna! Crucify! The two words start in the same place. They both begin deep within a person, then there’s usually a cognitive decision in the brain on what the words will be and the decisive moment when one decides that speech will be undertaken.

With both words, our eyes dart around to see who might be near us, who will hear us, who will agree with us, whom will we offend. With both words, the teeth, tongue, palate, lips work together to form them.

With both words, our breath is sucked in so that when the word is mouthed it will be blasted outwards with the exhale, making the shout much louder. And finally, the words go out into the air, ringing in our ears, never to be forgotten…both words. One is about life. One is about death. One full of hope, the other totally devoid of it. And the same person gives voice to them both.

It’s a confusing day.

“O, that you would tear open the heavens and come down!,” Isaiah says.

A family on Queen Anne took their elementary-age daughter to the doctor two weeks ago because her shoulder was sore. They discovered that she has a very serious form of cancer.

“O, God, that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”

Anne and I prayed for the last six months for a family we’ve known for many years. It’s a couple in their late thirties, with three children…one with some immense mental and physical challenges who requires full-time attention. The mom developed lung cancer. We prayed for healing. She died in February, leaving a hole in a marriage and a family you could drive a truck through.

“O, God, that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”

The hard thing to figure out…is that God does come down. Isaiah says in verse 3,

“When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, YOU CAME DOWN, and the mountains quaked at your presence.”

It’s not that God never appears. The people of Israel were very good at reminding themselves (and us), at rehearsing the places they experienced God acting. The Psalms are full of the people recognizing God in His creation. They are full of the story, the watershed moment in the history of Israel when they escaped slavery in Egypt. Over and over it says,

“Remember, God brought you out of slavery from the land of Egypt with a mighty hand!”

“O, God, that you would come NOW like you have before!”

God, you parted the Red Sea!
God, the mountains themselves shook!
God, you defeated our enemies!
Come again, come now like you have before.

I have a couple of different people in my life that I love to get together with. They are collectors…collectors of stories. God-stories. Oh, they’re normal people with difficult places in their lives just like you and me. But they also collect stories, and so when we are together, we talk about the places…small and large…that we have seen and heard of God at work. Often I leave those conversations with a light heart, rejoicing, reminded again, “God, you came down!”

Yet…we live in a world that seems to have an endless supply of people willing to blow themselves up, and take the lives of scores of innocent people…even people of their own nationality, religion, city, neighborhoods. We live in a world with adults who will teach hatred to the young, who will strap explosives to a 14-year-old boy and instruct him to go blow up others.

“O God, that you would tear the heavens and come down.”

And then…I talked to a man this week who is thirty-six, and has lived his life in poverty and addictions. He’s been clean for three months, he met Jesus and his face glows with a kindness and a wonder that life could be so different from how it has always been.

“God, you came down.”

And when God comes, it feels so right.

I suspect that on that original Palm Sunday (actually, for much of history the church has called it Passion Sunday) I suspect that people thought everything was about to be set right. It seemed that God had finally torn open the heavens and sent his long-awaited Messiah.

And this Jesus had proven himself. He’d done awesome deeds they did not expect, miracles, healings, exorcisms. He had stood up to the authorities. Surely he had come to set things right. The Roman oppressors would finally be overturned, the economic injustices righted. Israel would be put back in the hands of its own people, it would again be a land flowing with milk and honey. Surely God had come down!

But something happened between Passion Sunday and Thursday night. God coming down…didn’t look like they thought it would. Jesus wouldn’t do anything. Wouldn’t strategize, wouldn’t organize, wouldn’t pick up a sword…let himself get arrested, and hardly even spoke a word in the middle of it all. So confusing.

In Isaiah, when God’s absence was felt, it says the people turned away, they faded, they sinned, they quit calling out to the Lord. After all, if we don’t see God coming in his power to right our injustices… what good is he? If Jesus can’t act like the leader of the insurrection…what good is he?

So what do we do when little girls get sick, when mothers die, when people are blown up, when God seems a long way off? Sometimes, we just quit believing. Feeling that we are alone, we just look out for ourselves and quit trying to figure God out. Sometimes we do this.

Other times, we might discern that we are in the middle of a sort of training camp. God is molding and shaping us, even when we can’t see. I feel like now, at age 45, I can look back across my life and find so many instances where God has used one circumstance in my life, whether good or bad…to prepare me for the next thing in my life.

I can’t imagine (for me) ever becoming a pastor…without spending ten years in business first. I just had so much to learn about people, decisions, faith. I can’t imagine coming here to Bethany…without first being at a church in Minneapolis. Some of the hardest things I dealt with there have just so clearly been of use here. I marvel that somehow God is able to weave things together like that.

And yet…tell someone going through a tragedy, unable to find God, that they are just being trained for the next assignment. They may, quite justifiably, punch you in the nose.

Sometimes, we are just called to trust. To believe that God is present, that God is at work, that the actions of the Holy Spirit may be totally different than anything that we expected. It’s not always totally satisfying, certainly not in the moment, sometimes not even when you come out the other side.

We read the book of Job and after 41 chapters of wrestling and arguing with his friends and with God, after years and years have gone by finally Job hears God speak and Job says,

“I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me which I did not know. I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. I repent.”

That’s pretty much all we’re given.

Here in Isaiah 64, Isaiah begs for God’s presence. He doesn’t understand his apparent absence, he complains, he even hints that it is because God is absent that the people sinned…but in verse 8 eventually says,

“Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay; and you are our potter.”

You are God and we aren’t. That’s it.

So we sit here on Passion Sunday. Our lives are confused by God’s presence and overwhelmed by his absence. We are amazed that we can, and do, both sing hosanna and shout the sentence of crucifixion. We look to God, we trust in ourselves. We worship God on Sundays, and find that we sometimes worship ourselves the rest of the week. We too cry out to God:

Come Down! Here! Now! Like you have before! We need you!

And unexpectedly, God does come down…like he has not before. Never. Comes down in Jesus. Rides into the holy city on a donkey. Is arrested, humiliated, and beaten. Nailed onto a cross, cried out to God, his cries tearing the heavens open in reverse. Becoming our cries too. The very suffering of Jesus becomes the way in which we understand why he came. On the cross, Jesus says both,

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!”

and

“Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”

He comes for the innocent sufferers. And even for those who inflict the suffering. Jesus comes to be with you in your pain and also in your sin. Most of us have both going on. Jesus comes for all. And not because we have asked forgiveness, but

“Even while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

It’s hard to comprehend a suffering, a forgiveness as deep as that. Perhaps the closest we come in a human way is through the glimpses that have come from South Africa. I have told you before about Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s book called No Future Without Forgiveness. I think it is one of the most important books, and events of our day.

Tutu was the chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa in the mid-’90s. The commissions were involved with trying to bring healing at the time apartheid was officially ended. The commissions dealt both with the atrocious, heart-breaking stories of victims and families -- families, for instance, whose oldest son was taken from the house in the middle of the night, herded into the street and lit on fire in full view of his family-- and those criminals who sought amnesty by confessing their terrible crimes. Imagine those two parties coming face to face. Tutu talks about all they learned in this process:

“We were constantly amazed in the commission at the extraordinary magnanimity that so many of the victims exhibited…

…forgiving means abandoning your right to pay back the perpetrator…but it is a loss that liberates the victim.

Does the victim depend on the culprit’s contrition and confession as the precondition for being able to forgive?...Jesus did not wait until those who were nailing him to the cross had asked forgiveness.”

Jesus did not wait until we were ready to retract our shouted out words, did not wait until we were ready for him. He came, suffering to bear our pain and our sin. If we are brave enough to read the gospel story this week, we will realize that it is not we who walk with Jesus, but it is Jesus who walks with us. Even before we know it. His love extends to the darkest places imaginable.

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.

On the day that Jesus died, when he had breathed his last breath, scripture says that the curtain in the temple in Jerusalem at that moment…was torn from top to bottom.

The curtain that separated a holy God from his unholy people…tore, from top to bottom, from heaven to earth, from God to human being. In Jesus Christ, the heavens have been torn open, and God has come down.

Amen.