Searching for Peace
Read Isaiah 64:1-12:
1. Oh, that you would rip open the heavens and descend,
make the mountains shudder at your presence—
2. As when a forest catches fire,
as when fire makes a pot to boil—
To shock your enemies into facing you,
make the nations shake in their boots!
3. You did terrible things we never expected,
descended and made the mountains shudder at your presence.
4. Since before time began
no one has ever imagined,
No ear heard, no eye seen, a God like you
who works for those who wait for him.
5. You meet those who happily do what is right,
who keep a good memory of the way you work.
But how angry you’ve been with us!
We’ve sinned and kept at it so long!
Is there any hope for us? Can we be saved?
6. We’re all sin-infected, sin-contaminated.
Our best efforts are grease-stained rags.
We dry up like autumn leaves—
sin-dried, we’re blown off by the wind.
7. No one prays to you
or makes the effort to reach out to you
Because you’ve turned away from us,
left us to stew in our sins.
8. Still, God, you are our Father.
We’re the clay and you’re our potter:
All of us are what you made us.
9. Don’t be too angry with us, O God.
Don’t keep a permanent account of wrongdoing.
Keep in mind, please, we are your people—all of us.
10. Your holy cities are all ghost towns:
Zion’s a ghost town,
Jerusalem’s a field of weeds.
11. Our holy and beautiful Temple,
which our ancestors filled with your praises,
Was burned down by fire,
all our lovely parks and gardens in ruins.
12. In the face of all this,
are you going to sit there unmoved, God?
Aren’t you going to say something?
Haven’t you made us miserable long enough?
Isaiah 64 captures the spirit of Advent. Isaiah's words are infused with dissatisfaction. Isaiah longs for God's presence, he longs for the justice of God, and he longs for reconciliation. Isaiah cries out for Jesus. The burden of exile and sin has led Isaiah to rightly cry out to the only one who can truly meet his needs.
Read the first 5 verses again and answer this question. Are you satisfied? Be honest with yourself. For many of us, myself included, I struggle with this. There are plenty of reasons why I long for Jesus' coming. There are plenty of raw and wounded parts of my soul that are longing for justice and the merciful balm of God's presence. But I am also quite comfortable. I am quite satisfied in many respects, and I suspect you are as well.
This time of year, we tend to look to so many different things to satisfy our souls. The irony being, we often do them in the name of celebrating the coming of God. We claim to celebrate the arrival of God, the coming of the Lord in power, mercy, and justice. Yet we easily look to shopping (for ourselves or others), drinking or eating, and family togetherness as a path to shalom. All the while, our weary hearts continue to be burdened by the weight of their brokenness.
These things have their place and are not evil in and of themselves. Yet we seem to look for comfort in these and not in the thing we claim to celebrate. We love Christmas not because God has become human, but because we have an excuse to eat chocolate and drink Christmas Ale. We have taken perhaps the most powerful and world-changing moment in all of history and turned it into an excuse to indulge in self-medicating behavior.
We like Israel have turned from God, trusting in so many other things to satisfy our souls. So we like Isaiah confess. Reread verses 5b-7. Do you see yourself in Isaiah's words? Can you recognize your own tendencies towards self-inflicted wounding, unhealthy habits, and destructive patterns? Do you identify the subtle self-destructive behaviors and rationalized idolatry? Even the best of God's good gifts can be twisted and fashioned into mini-gods. Join Isaiah in confession. Come to God knowing that above all else, God is merciful, compassionate, and gracious. How do we know? Because in the midst of our idolatry, distraction, and apathy, Jesus came anyway. He appeared in the stillness and quiet of the night. Or as Audrey Assad says, like winter's snow. He did not just come in spite of our disinterest, He came because of it. He came to bring light to our hearts and world.
And now we find ourselves in the place of Advent, in the place of confession, brokenness, and longing. We stand alongside the prophet and lament. And so we cry out with Isaiah the words of verses 8-12. We run to God's justice and love and say "won't you save us? Won't you heal your people?" In this place of longing, we are prepared for our Lord's arrival. Our hearts are ready to receive our king in poverty and need. We are ready to rejoice in all that Christmas represents without the distraction of the trappings of the season.
This Advent, we have been challenged to meet God with longing, heartache, and brokenness. Our temptation will be to drift away from this disposition in order to find peace somewhere else. But our peace has come in the manger and will not be found elsewhere. It has come in poverty and quiet and in spite of our distraction and sin. Though we still await its full consummation, to seek it anywhere else would be a lie. So we wait, and we ask God to bend our hearts to that manger in Bethlehem where our peace first arrived. We quite our hearts, stilling them from distraction and indulgence, calming them from busyness and greed, and allowing them to ache and long for Jesus.
For the next week, as we head towards Christmas, I want to encourage you to find joy and peace in Jesus' promised presence with you by His Spirit and hope in Jesus' promised return. Let Jesus be the reason you sing, decorate, feast, and dance.
