Sermon list

"Tearing Open Heaven"
Isaiah  64:1-12
The First Sunday in Advent	December 1, 2002
Ascension Lutheran Church	Jackson, MS
A sermon by Pastor Tom Clark

 

"O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!" says Isaiah. It was an anguished cry of a man whose people were near to giving up hope. The exiles had returned from 40 years in a foreign land. They had longed for the day when they could again stand in the temple of their God and put their lives back together. But around them were ruins.

I wished that today’s lesson from Isaiah was a few verses longer. Then you would know more clearly why Isaiah was calling on God:
“Your holy cities have become a wilderness, … and Jerusalem is a ruin. Our holy and beautiful house, where our ancestors praised you, has been burned by fire.... After all this, …will you [still] keep silent…?” (Isa. 64:10-12)

When people hit bottom, they generally lose hope in that everything will work out in the end. They don't have the luxury of a God who sets the world in motion and now stays out. (The old “God the clock-maker” theory.) They want God, and they want God now.

Isaiah wants God to help, yet he can’t see or hear God. God seems absent. Do you know what that feels like? Have you ever prayed but felt like you were talking to yourself? Have you ever stood beside the bed of a loved one in pain and prayed for God's help, but you felt like God was far away? “God, tear open the heavens and come down!”

Sometimes we get the impression that people in Bible always had God right next to them. They could just snap their fingers, and – PRESTO – God was there. The book of Acts tells the story of how Paul met Jesus in blinding flash on the Damascus Road. If Jesus was always there in a blinding flash, then trusting in him would be easy.

When he was young, Isaiah was praying in temple and he had a vision. It seemed that the heavens did open. He looked up and there was God, sitting on throne, clear as day! There were heavenly creatures flying around singing, “Holy, holy, holy!” There was fire and smoke and the voices were so loud the whole place shook. But that long time ago. Now, Isaiah was not a young man on way up, but an old man returned from exile. The city was in ruins. The temple was destroyed. Lives were a mess. And he remembers his vision as young man, standing now in same place though all around him the walls are just piles of rubble.

Can he believe again? So he blurts out, “God, tear open the heavens [again] and come down because we really need you!”

I wish God were always visible, clearly standing beside us. But my experience is that it’s rarely that way. Sometimes there are blinding flashes of light, and unmistakable voice from above. But most often God speaks in whispers, not shouts. We find God in the shadows, not in blinding light. Sometimes whispers are very low whispers. Sometimes shadows very dark shadows. Sometimes I'm not that sure what his will is for us. And even when you do experience God, if you're the only one who gets a glimpse or hears what God says, you wonder if you really saw or heard him.

Did God once communicate in a voice unmistakabley loud and clear, but not now? That almost seems to be what Isaiah experienced? How could one who once saw God face-to-face in the temple now cry, “O that you would tear the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence, ... so that nations might tremble at your presence”?

When the resurrected Christ appeared to Paul on the Damascus Road, note the difference in the way Paul heard Christ's voice compared to those who were with him. Paul clearly heard Christ's voice, so clearly that his life changed forever. But those with him heard nothing.

Some scholars suggest that the presence of God was missed because what originally happened in a rather common way was later reported in technicolor. For example, Acts 13 reports the death King Herod by saying God “struck him down, and he was eaten up with worms and died.” However, history books say Herod died of gout!

Or consider Exodus 14 says that God buried the Egyptian chariots in the water of the Red Sea. Secular historians don't even mention this. Whatever happened, to the eyes of faith God stepped in and dramatically saved the Israelites from slavery.

Maybe the voice of God, which is reported to us as a great shout, was to the unbeliever or casual observer more a whisper. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul gives his own version of his conversion. He recounts it in much less dramatic fashion than Luke tells in Acts, who says Paul had a mighty vision with blinding lights and a booming voice.

Rarely is the true meaning of an event obvious to those who were there. In John 12, Jesus had just entered Jerusalem. While he was teaching, he hears the voice of God speaking. Some standing there said it was thunder. Sometimes only the eyes and ears of faith get the message. Sometimes God speaks, but we need to be leaning toward him to hear. Sometimes, God is there, but he’s standing in the shadows. So maybe we need to be looking toward the shadows.

What kind of eyes and ears do we bring to search for God? Some saw Jesus’s miracles and still did not believe. They just said, “How'd he do that?” Rarely is God obvious. Sometimes only those leaning toward God hear. And when the faithful hear God, often it is in a whisper. Now, later, it may seem to have been a shout.

So, why does God communicate with us this way? Is it so when we do hear and say "yes", it will be a free, uncoerced “yes”?Luke 1:50-53)

We all have moments when we wish God would rip open the curtain of heaven and come among us in an irrefutable earthquake, fire, and or storm so undeniable that any fool would say, “Yep, that's God!”

Yet such moments are rare, even in Bible, as Isaiah shows. In the Gospels, almost everyone missed what God was doing in Jesus until after the resurrection. And of the few who did see who Jesus really was after they were healed, Jesus told most of them, “Shh! Don’t tell anyone.” Why? He was afraid that if they just saw the miracle without learning what kind of messiah he was they would get the wrong impression. They might, and many did, think he had come to start a revolution that would free them from the Romans, when instead he had come to free us all from an even more insidious power—that of our own sin.

Our God is not some kind of tame housepet who comes at our every beck and call. It’s not God’s job to listen to our every wish; it’s ours to listen to God’s wishes.

If you look directly at sun, it will blind you. You must view the sun indirectly, with it’s dim image reflected on a piece of paper focused through a lens. Maybe that’s the way it is with God. If God is most often heard in whispers rather than in earthquakes, it will be easy to miss God's voice. If we only have a dim image of God reflected on a piece of paper we may close our ears to what he’s saying.

Have you ever known people who have spent too much time at rock concerts? They are so used to sounds being so loud that their hearing seems damaged. They only hear shouts. We are constantly bombarded with sights and sounds. Such sensory overload produces a kind of deafness and blindness.

If you’ve ever gone star-gazing, you know you have to stay in the darkness long enough to really see all the stars. That’s why the Church has Advent. These weeks before Christmas are our time to stand in the darkness, and listen to the whispers. If we are to see the fragile light that dawns among us in Christ, we must first sit awhile in the darkness and be silent.

What could you do (or avoid doing) this Advent to better prepare you to see God's light shining, to hear God's voice calling to you? You could take time, slow down, and listen. Unfortunately, society tends to tell you now is the time to hurry up and get everything done before so that you can have the perfect “Martha Stewart Christmas” [even if Martha’s Christmas isn’t so perfect this year].

When some first saw the babe at Bethlehem, they probably saw only another poor baby. Yet for those who were listening, looking for the light, they knew differently. This was Immanuel! This was God with us!

"O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!" begs the prophet. But the living God rarely does. More often God comes to us in a glimpse, a whisper, a shadow moving in the darkness, and we, whose lives are so full of noise, sights and sounds, lights and thunder of our own creation, miss heaven's opening up for us.

 

Shh! Do you hear God calling?