Isaiah 64:1-9

Advent 1 - Year B

Thanksgiving Day

... You have hidden your face from us and given us up to the power of our misdeeds. And yet, Yahweh, you are our Father.... [NJB]

In the midst of the most difficult and strained of relationships there still remains a relationship. Sometimes it feels as though the only connection we have is that we breathe the same air. [And why don't we take care of such a precious gift but degrade it for the sake of the idol of Maximum Profit?] And yet there is never a time we are so far out of touch that reconciliation can't take place. Even when this is difficult to see, it remains something we can do.

Perhaps the most thanks we can muster today is tied up with that "And yet..."

It is something that can be built on. Will we? Will you? Will I? Let us pray so.

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2002/december2002.html

Isn't it lovely to have a God to blame for our ailments. We can speculate that God needed more needing than we needed to need. With this "need" deficit on both sides we bump into that wonderful time when we give first. Now we need to need saving. So we stand afar and cry out our need as a reverse form of praise that we might be given relief.

Verse 9 ends with, "Now consider, we are all your people." This is one of those lines that calls for a decision about how it is to be read. In the context of looking for relief from "enemies", is this a limited phrase that applies only to the oppressed feeling overrun or is this an expansive phrase that includes even oppressors?

There is an understanding here that God is not as far gone as we had experienced. Here is an available prooftext to see a glimmer of understanding that everyone is in everything together. Ourselves, our enemies, and G*D beyond either, are all intertwined.

While appreciating the need to pay attention to context and claim this as a parochial "all", it is helpful to also hear in such a limited context a seed that will later grow to provide a crack in the boundary of me and mine and expand a limited covenant between God and one people. Here I'm willing to see the variety of people that are the Israelites (those who praise "O Lord" and those who need "Father" and those that don't) and hold that as a holographic representation of, simply put, the variety of all people.

In the midst of disaster there is yet a whisper of a new way. May we be alert to the whispers in the midst of our own disastrous times and follow where it beckons - to the well-being of all.

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/november2005.html

Isaiah 64:1-9
Ps. 80:1-7, 17-19
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Mark 13:24-37

Do you remember and yearn for the Age Of Awesome Deeds? Men were men, black was black and white was white and ne'er the twain shall meet - doing right was rewarded and transgression quickly punished. Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end.

But it has been long years since a favored few could so easily justify their separation from the unlucky, the poor, the unfavored, the sick, the sinner, the other.

With this hiatus we can wait with envy to be restored to what ought to be our rightful place, a place where nothing changes. We might also find the humility to move away from these kinds of false and make-believe separations to appeal, "Now consider, we are all your people."

It is this larger view of the particularity of circumstance not being unique that needs new light to be shined on it.

When such a shining saving arrives we note that there has been a shift from a single cause to a renewed appreciation of community of an earthly creation or paradise with which the heavenly "we" is well pleased and claims is good.

So thanks can be given, not just for creator(s) but creation(s). Our wait for revelation shows creation called into fellowship with creator, not constantly manipulated by same.

Having now come through Isaiah, Psalmist, and Paul we turn to Mark to solidify our keeping awake to new connections. Fig leaves are connected to summer, not as cause and effect but as a community of revelation. In one we can now see the other.

In like manner, in a generation we can mark a moment that more clearly reveals a shift that has moved us from whatever stage of immaturity we are in to a next step of maturity. We keep awake for such connections are life as we move from bated breath to next breath. To keep awake is to keep breathing.

- - -

Whew, I have every spiritual gift.
Oh, I am strengthened to use each in its time.
Ahh, fellowship shines in remembering, in anticipating, in medias res.

Whew, I am blessed.
Oh, I am blessing.
Ahh, simply Ahh.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html

We desperately yearn for a better future to break in. This is not just a vague expectation of some change making some change that might lead somewhere better. This is a deep desire for things to be made right.

Then we pause to consider what that would do to everything we know how to do. Whoa. We are where we are because of who we are. To change the rules mid-stream would be disaster for us. What would we do without our iniquities; be they large or small?

Yet, if it takes our joining whatever new version of the CCC might be, we are still willing to go that route. We'll start at the bottom again as long as due consideration of a better future in the present would be given. It's that infernal and eternal silence that bugs us. In its face we keep on being who we are, waiting for a great mechanism to fly by and wave a wand o'er us.

As partners of G*D we might also posit that we are the potter and we are the clay. We have the authority to make the changes we know deep down G*D would make. Might we lovingly work on one another to reshape our presence into that better future that attracts and scares us. Might we?

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2008_11_01_archive.html

Do you remember “awesome deeds we did not expect”?

Here we clearly have some expectations of rescue.

Here we clearly, also, have an accusation of blame - because G*D didn’t dance to our tune (hid) we transgressed. Yeah, G*D made us do it.

Advent, ancient and future, requires the unexpected. December 25th, a known date anticipated before Advent begins, will not make it as an unexpected deed. We use the all too well known gift of Christmas to vaccinate ourselves against the very process needed to redeem Advent - the unexpected. We’ve gotten away with it for far too long, but we won’t be able to fool ourselves too much longer. Christmas has to go if we are going to get off to a good start of becoming healthy again.

Would you be willing to forgo Christmas to better wait for the unexpected resolution to our all too familiar problems?

If we do so, it won’t be long before we have become like on who is unclean, who fades like a leaf, blown away. We will be tempted to reinstitute ritual and to lose our ability to be surprised. We will call out to G*D to do all the work, including that of preparing us for a surprise. “Shape us G*D”, we call out, “shape our year, our rituals.”

We want to claim control over G*D - don’t be angry, forget the past, reconsider pleasing us (your people) - and to still be surprised. This closed circle needs an intervention.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2011/11/isaiah-641-9.html