Advent 1B – November 30, 2008

Isaiah 64:1-9; Mark 13:24-37

“Heartbroken”

St. Giles Church, Northbrook IL – The Rev. Cynthia J. Hallas

What breaks your heart? 

Think about that for a brief moment….what is it that makes your heart break?

There is much to be heartbroken about these days.  Most of us are still haunted by events and images from September 11, 2001, and by the global changes that have resulted from them.  Maybe the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places trouble you as they drag on and on, with reports of more violence and death every day; maybe it’s the upheaval in the Congo. And just this week we saw and heard the horrible reports and images that came out of Mumbai.  It’s heartbreaking.

Perhaps what breaks your heart is the physical and emotional violence that’s closer to us, on the streets and in the homes of the Chicago region.  Youth corrupted and recruited into gangs;

innocent teenagers and younger children caught in cross-fire exchanges or mistaken for someone else; infants and toddlers abused, sometimes fatally, by adults who were supposed to care for them.  Spousal abuse.  Surely that breaks everyone’s heart.

Is your heart broken by things like ethnic cleansing and genocide? – think of Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia.  Think, too, of pandemics, like those of HIV/AIDS and malaria that kill thousands every day.  Natural disasters have taken many, many lives over the last several years; they’ve left our cities and our landscapes devastated; they’ve left us feeling compassion fatigue.  The region of the world we call the Holy Land is fractured by religious, political and military conflict.  Heartbreaking?  Oh, yes!

Could be that more personal worries concern you.  Maybe you’ve seen your investments dry up as the stock market plunges; you’ve watched your children’s college savings or your retirement income diminish. You’re worried about how you’re going to pay for everything.  You’re worried about how the church is going to pay for everything.  Or maybe there are health issues that you or a loved one are facing – perhaps mortality is staring you down and you don’t want to face that prospect but there it is. 

There is no end of sorrow and suffering in our world that’s fit to break our hearts.  And so often, along with it, there are those nagging questions that we’re reluctant to voice, even though we may be thinking them: Where is God in all this?  How could God let this happen? Why doesn’t God interfere in all these crises and put a stop to suffering and make the world a better place?  When will God offer a comprehensive sign of healing?  Sometimes, when our hearts are broken, we lose sight of God altogether.  Those moments can be the most heartbreaking of all.

We don’t usually think of the season before Christmas as a time to be heartbroken – it seems unnatural, counter-cultural, inappropriate – so if we’re heartbroken, we do our level best to hide the pain.  After all, none of us wants to ruin the party.  The truth is more people are heartbroken this time of year than at any other, in spite of or more likely because of the tremendous pressure to be happy and celebrate.  But still, heartbreak abounds.

2500 years ago or so the people of Israel were heartbroken.  Their temple – their holiest site – had been destroyed.  They were in exile, in the Babylonian captivity.  Like their ancestors in Egypt, they are strangers in a strange land.  Worst of all, they had no idea where God was. 

That is to say, they no longer felt God’s presence or saw God’s face or heard God’s voice.  They blamed God’s abandonment of them for the fact that they sinned.  If God had been present, accessible, surely they would not have strayed into iniquity and transgression.  But God was absent, as far as they could tell, and without divine guidance how else could a Deity expect a people to behave?  Our hearts are breaking without you, they call out to God.  Tear open the heavens; do something dramatic, something awesome, something ‘God-like’; show our enemies your power, just like in the past; make the very ground we stand on shake in fear. 

O God, we’re so tired of waiting.

The prophet Isaiah stands as the hinge between God and the people.  Prophets, as we know, don’t foretell the future so much as they interpret the present – here’s what going on, here’s why, and these are the consequences.  Prophets tend to hold up a mirror to people and tell them the truth – usually a truth they don’t want to hear - and as such are seldom very popular.  But Isaiah takes on an intercessory role, as well as a prophetic one.  Wherever God might be, he is still their God.  There is no other on whom they can depend.  And so the prophet pleads, we are the work of your hands, we are all your people.  And so there are the children of Israel: heartbroken, and waiting.

And that’s where the beginning of Advent 2008 finds us: heartbroken, and waiting.  Waiting

for violence and war to stop, for diseases to be cured, for the economy to improve, for nature to calm down.  Waiting for the heartbreak to end.

“God works for those who wait for him,” Isaiah reminds us.  Don’t let Advent fool you. Our liturgical calendar can really mess with our heads.  We try to put all the pieces of the Christian experience and the life of Jesus into a 365-day period, reliving it over and over, and sometimes it gets a little bit crowded in there.  Or the church seasons don’t jive with our personal experience.

So if the meaning of Advent is nothing more than “four weeks to get ready for Christmas”, someone has missed the point.  Advent, properly observed, reminds us that we’re always waiting.  The gospel tells us that no one, not even Jesus, knows the day or the hour that the fulfillment of God’s reign will occur.  You’ve heard the phrase “already/not yet”.  We’re always waiting.  We can wait impatiently.  We can wait in fear and frustration.  Or we can wait in hope, and faith, and trust, even as our hearts continue to break.

Because the truth is, the hearts of those of us who wait aren’t simply broken.  They have been torn open, by human tragedy and human sin. We are shattered so that we can be rebuilt, reshaped, as the potter shapes the clay. And that experience of true heartbreak allows us to be open to a new revelation of God’s presence, a renewed hope for the future, and most of all it prepares us to receive Emmanuel – the gift of God with us.  Not “God-far-away-that-we-pray-to”.  Not “God-who-made-us-and-then-abandoned-us”.  Not “God-who-mocks-us”.  God with us.

God doesn’t promise that all the problems of the world, or the problems of individuals, will be solved just because we’re faithful.  God doesn’t promise that anything will get better before it gets worse – the people of Israel knew that, those to whom Mark’s gospel was addressed knew that, believers throughout history have learned it as well.  The promise of God, the promise that we see renewed each year at this time, never to be forgotten, is the promise of a loving God who has come to redeem us not in some spectacular form or supernatural vessel, but in our own frail and flawed humanity.  A God who would live like us, and who would die for us.  A God whose heart, like ours, is capable of breaking.