I love this time of year. I like it when it gets cold, when the temperature drops, when Seattle gets ½ inch of snow and the whole city shuts down. I like it when it gets foggy, as it often does in November and December, and did a couple of nights just this week. Foggy enough so that the ferry boats sound their foghorns. Foggy enough that you can see through it, but not too far, nor in too much detail.

Isaiah saw the word. That’s what the scripture says, this is what he saw.

Isaiah was, after all, a prophet. That’s what prophets did, they saw things, and they spoke. Sometimes they were things God wanted to communicate now, sometimes they were about the future. In this case Isaiah saw into the future.

“In days to come…”

I’m not sure how clear it all was for him, and I’ve often thought that he was perhaps staring intently into a dense mist or fog. He would have had to sit and wait, patiently, looking, waiting, waiting for the mist to swirl and then clear for a moment, clear long enough to get a glimpse and then wait some more.

It must have been agonizing, this waiting. Waiting usually is. Results, efficiency, quick answers, those are things we are far more comfortable with. Who wants to wait? For time to go by. For an illness to get better…or not. For an aging parent to pass. For a promotion we should have received long ago. For a baby that doesn’t seem to be coming. For an explanation, sometimes just an explanation makes waiting more bearable.

The mist swirls and clears, and Isaiah sees a mountain with the Lord’s temple appear far off in the distance…way, way far off. It’s not a little hill, not even just a mountain, but the tallest mountain, the one that all people could see from everywhere, the one that they couldn’t help but make their way towards.

The mist returns. Isaiah waits again. Oh, he doesn’t sit idle. He can’t just go to sleep until something happens. If he does, he’ll miss it. He’ll miss, in fact, the things that have already started, things that God is already doing, places God is already busy right in front of him, right under his sandals, right with his family. He’ll miss God showing up over a cup of coffee with a friend, or in the feel of a breeze on his cheek as he steps out of the house

It must have been a listening, watchful, active waiting that Isaiah practiced. Then, just for a moment again, a quick glimpse, the mist shifts and Isaiah sees an endless line of people that looks like a silver river filling the road, people from all over the world, every nation heading the same direction, a stream of people. Not armies marching to battle, but people walking side by side and hand in hand.

And the mist swirls and covers and it’s gone. Did he really see it? Isaiah is left waiting, once again. He waits, trying to sort out how it fits together. He keeps looking, keeps watching.

In another glimpse, there is a huge figure like the giant “Hammering Man” at the Art Museum downtown, the Lord, beating swords into plowshares, and the cries of war and smoke of guns slowly dissipating until there is peaceful quiet over the world. It disappears in the fog.

When Isaiah next sees, the figures are closer to him, still shrouded in mist but a little easier to make out:

-there’s a man, Zechariah, waiting to be a father until he’s too old to be.

-there’s a woman, Elizabeth, waiting to be a mother until it’s impossible.

-a shadowy figure bends down and whispers in Zechariah’s ear, but he shakes his head. There is silence.

Just beyond them in the mist there is a family, running down a road marked “ Egypt, this way,” looking terrified over their shoulders. There’s a king who stalks them. There are camels, shining with riches, three riders bent against the blinding sand and mist enveloping them. There are shepherds, the flash of a bright light…and there, in the middle…a baby. The longing of Isaiah fixates on the child, he has waited, no, Israel has waited for many lifetimes to catch such a glimpse.

And so we will wait. With all of our questions, our doubts, our impatience. We wait while hearing a promise looming over us:
I am with you always.

Jesus is the concrete expression of that promise. We wait to remember his birth. We wait also for Him to come again. And as we wait we live, work, laugh, breath, we wait for the time when our futile attempts to beat swords into plowshares happens on the bigger stage of eternity and we will join that silver river of nations moving towards the Word of God, with a sigh of relief that the time has come.

But not yet. Now we must wait. And practice waiting in our living.

The mist is thick and deep. It swirls, reveals, covers. But if we will wait, patiently, we will see what we need:

A light, a single candle illuminating a rough stable and a handful of poor people, transfixed by a new baby.

If we wait, we will see the baby as a grown man, carrying a cross silently up a high mountain.

If we wait, and look, somewhere off in the future, maybe not in our lifetimes, and yet… maybe tomorrow, we will see our Lord, coming again. Amen.