Dancing Under the Bombs.

Isaiah 64:1-12.Advent 1

I.

One of my favorite war movies is The Longest Day.  It is about the D-Day invasion of France in 1944.  Perhaps the most powerful scene in that movie, at least as it relates to Advent, has to do with an old French gentleman who lives in a house overlooking the English Channel in Normandy.  He is very frustrated and angry that his country has been conquered and is now ruled by the hated Germans, and he longs for the day of deliverance, when the allies will come and liberate his homeland.  He wakes up before dawn on June 6 to the sound of naval artillery.  He looks out his window and he sees this vast armada stretching across the sea to the horizon.  And he starts jumping and shouting for joy that the great day has finally come.  And his exultation is not dampened in the least by the fact that his own house is starting to get hit by the shelling from the ships.  The last we see of him is him trying to dance for happiness as his whole house is in danger of being demolished by falling bombs.

In another story from World War Two, it is said that inmates of the Nazi concentration camps used to watch the Allied bombers fly overhead and fervently wish that their camps were the targets.  Can we not imagine them dancing as well with the same kind of joy even in death, if the camps ever were targeted, which they were not.

Examples like this might seem rather inconsistent and irrational to us.  After all, these people are celebrating their own death and destruction!  Is this not morbid, suicidal, and at least ironic?  Is it not even kind of crazy, insane, or a little stupid?  I mean, how can you joyfully celebrate your own death?  How can you fervently wish for the house you live in to be destroyed?  Is it not a surrender to hopelessness and despair?  Is it not a perverse form of self-hatred?  Not to mention hatred of the world?

In this part of his book, the prophet Isaiah is writing to the children of Israel during a particularly difficult time in their history.  They had been living as exiles in Babylon.  Seventy or so years earlier the Babylonians came and destroyed their country, slaughtering many people in the process.  They took away the best and the brightest of Judean society to be their servants in Babylon.  This brutal and traumatic catastrophe is reflected in many places in the Bible, including here in verses 10 and 11:  “Your holy cities are a wilderness, Zion a wilderness, Jerusalem desolate; our holy and glorious sanctuary in which our forefathers praised you, has been burnt to the ground and all that we cherished lies in ruins.” 

The opinion of Isaiah and the exiles under the boot of a conquering power was therefore similar to that of the old Frenchman or the concentration camp inmates.  They ask God: “Why did you not tear asunder the heavens and come down, that, when you appeared, the mountains might shake...?  Then would your Name be known to your adversaries and nations would tremble before you.”

II.

In these cases, folks were acutely conscious of their own imprisonment.  They knew that their lives were strangled and oppressed by an unspeakable evil, a godless and corrupt system that bred death and murder, lies and betrayal, theft and exploitation, and had spread war across the land.

The people also knew something else, something that had taken seven long, horrendous decades to sink in.  They knew their situation was their own fault.  “We sinned,” they admit.  “We have done evil from of old.  We all became like something unclean and all our righteous deeds were like a filthy rag; we have all withered like leaves and our iniquities carry us away like the wind.  There is no one who invokes you by Name or rouses himself to hold fast to you; for you have hidden your face from us and left us in the grip of our iniquities.”

They didn’t blame somebody else.  They didn’t complain about the unfairness of it all.  They didn’t say it was because of their parents, or God, or the government, or even the wickedness of the hated Babylonians that landed them in this predicament.  They said it was God’s unavoidable, righteous judgment on their own foolishness, violence, blasphemy, and self-indulgence.  They got themselves into this mess... and they confess that only God can get them out of it.  So that if they are actually delivered it will not be because of their merit or accomplishment.  It will be because God is more faithful to them than they have been to God, or even to themselves for that matter.

I understand that in Alcoholics Anonymous they know that change is unlikely until the addict has hit bottom.  And it is not enough just to realize what a mess your life is because of alcohol, and want to get out of it.  You have also to realize that you got where you are because of choices you made deliberately.  And you have to realize that there is no way for you to get yourself out of this prison, this pit of despair, by yourself.

And this is very, very hard.  Because most of the stuff we have to endure does not appear to be our fault.  Individually, personally, we did not choose the circumstances of our life: our family, our genetic makeup, our teachers, our neighborhood.  We didn’t invent or knowingly invite in the things that enslave or kill us.  And yet somehow taking responsibility for them, even if we had nothing to do with them, is an essential step to recovery.

You can’t preach this to people from outside.  You can’t tell someone this is the way they ought to do it.  You can only do it from inside.  You can only say, This is the way my life got turned around.  When I stopped blaming someone else, when I let go of the anger and the resentment, when I truly felt the sorrow and the pain, that is when something new happened.  And when the ships appeared on the horizon to blow apart my prison, I danced for joy.    

III.

Jesus teaches that you have to “take up your cross.”  He says you have to lose yourself.  He even talks about “hating” your own life.  By this he means our imprisoned, enslaved, chained-up, crushed, oppressed, and exploited self, the hard shell of an identity that we begin developing even before we are born.  We have to give this up, not caring if it is destroyed, even exulting in its destruction.  Because it is our attachment to this old existence that is holding us down and keeping us from the true, eternal, full, and blessed life that God intends for us.

Isaiah writes, after recounting the disasters and admitting responsibility for them: “Yet, Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, you the potter, and all of us are your handiwork.”  To lose the old self is to release and liberate and set free the new self, the original self, the true self within us, the self that God carefully made us to be in joy and goodness.   

This is the attitude of the martyrs, people who died for the faith in every age.  They don’t care about themselves; their only concern is the triumph of God in human life.  The destruction of evil is a good thing, even if they sacrifice their mortal lives in the process.

This sort of thing happens all the time, does it not?  Evil is always collapsing in on itself, it is ever imploding, ever crumbling into nothingness.  And all the things that seem so ferocious and threatening to us, all the things that mangle our lives so profoundly — disease, failure, loss, weakness, inability, fear, pain — they only have the power to destroy our old selves.  They only damage the dungeon that incarcerates us. In a sense, God has transformed them, and they become sure indications that the prisons that bind us are crumbling and we are being set free. 

Why else do we stand at the grave of one who has died and sing, “Alleluia!” if it is not to proclaim victory?  Another soul is liberated!  “‘Death is swallowed up!  Victory is won!’  O Death, where is your victory?  O Death, where is your sting?”  Death and hell and evil are left holding an empty carcass; their energy continues to drain away, while another soul is free.

For, in the coming of Jesus Christ, the heavens do get torn asunder and the Lord does come down.  Christ is about the end, the destruction, of the demonic principalities and powers that rule and structure our world and our very selves.  His birth proclaims their doom as both Mary and Herod knew well.

IV.

Now we have a choice.  Will we live in the dying, collapsing, crumbling edifice of the present world order, will we attach ourselves to the things of this world, will we remain loyal to our jailers?  Will we cherish the past and wallow in memories of former glory?  Will we idealize and idolize a sanitized and sentimental version of “the way things used to be”? 

Or will we realize that things were not so great back then.  There was injustice, violence, and oppression; greed and fear ruled our lives.  Will we let go of that and align ourselves with the unlikely Victor who is coming: Jesus?  Will we dance for joy even in the bombardment, even as institutions, traditions, habits, dreams, privileges, values, and allegiances we once depended on fall apart? 

The season of Advent is when we pay particularly close attention to this aspect of the Scriptural witness.  It is when we read these difficult passages about the end of the world and Christ’s return.  We look back to God’s dramatic entry into our world in the Nativity and forward to the glorious fulfillment of redemption on the Last Day.  We anticipate the turning into smoke of the whole apparatus and superstructure of oppression, exploitation, and pollution; when God will deliver and heal, liberate and redeem us from all evil.   

This future, which is certain, will only look bright and glorious to us if we see things from the perspective of our trust in Jesus Christ.  It will only be good news to us if we realize and trust that he, and not the world order we have had imposed upon us, that we have imposed upon ourselves, is the future. 

In the meantime we see the way the Spirit is revealing the truth of a new world among and within us.  Instead of trying to fix the old world that is collapsing, we have to be about discovering the new world that is coming into our experience.  It is when we let go of the old that the new is disclosed to us.

This may seem like discouraging days for the church.  But in reality these are the most exciting times we have seen in centuries.  God is opening up something new!  Here and now, among us and within us, God’s new world is being born!  Let’s participate together in that!

For, in Jesus Christ, God does finally tear open the sky and come down to us.  In him God reveals the truth of our lives, that he, the love of God, is our destiny.  He is our life.  He is our salvation.  And he, his love and goodness, is the true end of the world, and the true purpose of everything.

+++++++