Advent 1: What are you Longing for?

Isaiah 64:1-9
Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Mark 13:24-37

As Advent begins we are confronted with the book of the prophet Isaiah. These scriptures open us up to a world of failed hope and disappointment: “We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us way” (Isaiah 64:8) and confront us with a radical acceptance of God’s sovereignty: “we are the clay, and you are the potter; we are all the work of your hands”. (Isaiah (64:8) The entire book of Isaish actually evidences three distinct authors from three distinct periods. Second Isaiah (chapters 40-55) specifically, was written during the Babylonian exile, while Third Isaiah (chapters 56-66 and from which today’s reading is drawn) was written in the period after the Jews’ return from the Babylonian captivity, and as they looked towards the restoration of the Temple. Both writers write within the context of disappointment, with a longing for God to make good on disappointment – the disappointment of exile in one, and the disappointment attendant on the return from exile in the other. Second Isaiah longs in hope for restoration, a longing with a message full of comfort and vindicaton – “Comfort, O comfort my people says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” (Isaiah 40:1-2) On the other hand, Third Isaiah expresses a “deep pessimism and sense of disappointment”; and while still presenting a vision of hope in parts, it also confronts the reality that the return from exile has not ushered in the promises made nor fulfilled the hopes expressed during the exile. The Temple been yet rebuilt, and the covenant still oftentimes goes unheed, particularly its demands of for justice towards the poor and most vulnerable. Third Isaiah extends for contemplation the possibility that perhaps longing for a return to the way things were is never as satisfactory as we imagined, that our longings need to be for more than simply a return. Indeed, the return itself disappointed. Third Isaiah longs for an utter re-shaping of the national, theological, even cosmological landscape; longs for God to do something truly new: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence – as we fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil.” (Isaiah 64:1-2a).

As we appropriate for ourselves this reading, and the contexts of the writers of Second and Third Isaiah, as well as how the writers express their sense of longing, we challenge ourselves with the question: “What are you longing for?” Isn’t longing at heart of Advent? In fact, without longing there is no Advent; and if we have no longing, then we do not need Christmas, either. Longing always comes out of crisis and disappointment, it comes of dissatisfaction and even distress; the kind of crises often encountered in exile and alienation, the kind of disappointment encountered in shattered dreams and failed hopes. In reaction to crisis and disappointmnet, we find ourselves longing for a future that is redeemed, in which our own personal brokeness and that of the world can somehow be made good on. Look at the psalm; how graphically the psalmist describes the pain and sorrow of Israel: they are “fed with the bread of tears”…they are given “bowls of tears to drink”; they are made “the derision of [their] neighbors” and their “enemies laugh [them] to scorn.” To discover what we truly long for, then we must get in touch with our sorrows, with our disappoinments, with our pain. This is difficult, and while the temptation may be to numb ourselves to all these, doing so leaves us half-dead, passionless, and longing is always about passion.

However, the question is more than simply what one longs for, but how one longs for it. Second and Third Isaiah represent two different ways in which to long. Second Isaiah longs with a view to the past, a return to the land and to how things were. Third Isaiah longs for something far more radical, for something subtantially new. The perspectives of Second Isaiah and Third Isaiah represent the difference between starting over and a new beginning. Allow me to unpack that bit. “Starting over” implies that we can return to some point in the past and start things up again, hoping that with new information we may do things differently, things may go differently. A “new beginning” implies rather, beginning from where we are, but in ways that are fresh and profoundly contexted in the “now”. This doesn’t mean that the new beginning is not informed by the past, but that its face is turned to the future, towards something new. In discerning what we long for, we must also ask ourselves if our longing is for simply a return so that we can start over – usually on our own terms, or if it is for something really new, which usually means something surprising and maybe even a little uncomfortable, something which may take some getting used to, something that if we are not careful we may miss altogether, say, perhaps God entering into history as a baby.

So what are you longing for, and to discover it are you willing to enter into the pain of your disappointments, the brokeness of your sorrows? Are you willing to be alive to them in order that your longing may be passionate? Are you willing to long for something more than a return to what you know, and brave the possibility of something completely new even if you may not fully discern it? As we long for the redemption of our disappointments and sorrows, can we trust that God will enter into our lives and situations in new ways? Indeed will we expect and allow God to do so? This is the kind of longing at the heart of Advent, and which finds its satisfaction in the surprising birth of the infant Jesus who is God incarnate. The theologian Dorothee Sölle once wrote “Theology originates in pain...Its locus is in suffering.” The same can be said of longing and desire, and as we become more in touch with our feelings of sorrow and disappointment we discern more closely what we long for, we can shape our hopes and voice them, and trust that even within them God will reveal to us their redemption and our own. Amen.