Perhaps there are times when it seems, feels, like my preaching gets preoccupied with fallen humanity—those are the times, I guess, when it sounds like I’m ranting, judging, condemning, as if I were presuming to know what was in another’s heart.  It has never been my intention to rant.  I hope you’ll believe me when I say I’m the last one to judge anyone: I don’t presume to judge.  Maybe how and what I preach may leave you feeling that’s hard to believe.  It may be that I know more about our common sorrow than about God, though I think I know something about God, too.  And I’m eager to get better acquainted.

          We are also rounding out a difficult, unhappy, frustrating year—I hope your Thanksgiving celebration was a welcome break from all that.  If all these grinding, tense months have left us feeling unhappy and frustrated, small wonder!  It’s years like these that can leave us feeling so eager for God to do something, bring a change, speak a Word, give a sign—even if it’s just the whisper of a promise.  Isaiah understood: “O, that You would rend the heavens and come down” (64:1).  Now, Lord.  Enter our lives, enter this world, now.

          We can get to feeling so unhappy, so frustrated, that we someway lose sight of the truth that God has entered our lives, is in our lives, is never out of our lives, now.  God has entered this world and is at work in this world, actively, effectively, right now.  Where?  Do we feel it?  The heavens were torn open, that day of pouring water in brilliant light, as Jesus came up out of the Jordan and God spoke: power, ability, cause, change—like the soft, white, quietness of a dove.  Awesome, earth-shaking power and quiet, humble gentleness—such is our God.

          That day on the cross, Jesus having breathed out his last God-given breath, the curtain, the veil in the Temple was torn in two; torn by no human hands, torn by no man’s will, but by the great love of God, who opens the way for His creatures, who would have us see His glory, confess His power, and praise His holy name, just as the angels, the heavenly hosts, like the stars above, singing around the throne alight with rainbow light—a song we do not hear, so easily, the song that has the power to dispel our sorrow and our gloom.  Where do we see, where do we feel God, active right now?  We want to see glory.  We want to feel peace.

          The angels have been singing their song all along.  They know the glory and power and majesty of God: a never-ending source of delight for the angels.  They are never unhappy or frustrated: can you imagine?!  Here we are, dragging our way to the end of this rough year: we’re hurting, we’re tired, we want a change.  If what we see on the TV is accurate, our society is clamoring for change, people demolishing what they can’t seem to get, businesses on fire, windows shattered, alarms sounding and no one, seemingly, responding, no one coming to help, police cars and headless statues sprayed over with graffiti.  The noise of strife can be deafening, almost as loud as the noise of our personal, inner strife.  No wonder it’s so hard to hear the angels’ song.  Perhaps we do not see the glory, do not feel the peace, because we are not hearing; how we’d love to listen like a quiet dove gliding above the brilliant waters.

          The will to act, to change, to hope, comes from God.  God is the cause.  God causes.  Creation came to be because God caused it.  We have come to know Jesus Christ because God caused it.  In the midst of great unhappiness and frustration, we are changing our lives to align them with God’s Word and will because God is causing this change, alive in us, at work in us.  Whenever those feelings of unhappiness and frustration begin to tangle your heart and choke up your mind, go to God’s fire: the flame of God’s Word, God’s love, the flame of profound prayer.  God causes change; God is the true source of true hope.

          With Isaiah, we plead with God to break through to us, to come down, to be the change, the fire to warm us and give us light, the fire that causes those far from Him to come near, that causes those who do not truly know Him to know Him, truly.  In Jesus Christ, He has.  God has sent His grace, His mercy, His love, His light, His power.  No one truly touched by Jesus can be the same, after, because God is cause itself.  When God touches, when God speaks, when God comes, change happens.  Our hope is sure.  That’s what we’re affirming, especially, during Advent: that’s why we bother with the purple of promise, with the songs, the prayers, the lights.

          Isaiah sings of God’s presence like a fire.  Fire changes things, makes things happen.  Fire has destructive potential but consider also the blessing and benefits of fire.  Fire is like coming alive: to be on fire with ignited passion is a good thing.  To be alight with interest and commitment is a joy.  The opposite is to be cool, cold, to have no interest, no passion, no commitment, unhappy, frustrated, feeling no hope.

          Consider the wonder of fire—we have just a little sample of it, here, yet it has beauty; it is warm: there is comfort here, attraction.  Fire is for light, for warmth, physically, spiritually.  If you start a fire, I guarantee you, people will gather.  In my home growing up, it wasn’t long after my father started a fire before my mother was there, then my sister and I, even the cat and the dog, stretched out, dozing, peaceful.  Beloved, if cats and dogs can get along in front of a fire, and brothers and sisters too, then there is indeed hope for us all!

          God who causes, God who is our sure hope, is God who does “awesome things that we did not expect” (64:3); He is God who comes down.  He comes to be among us as our friend, the One who seeks us when unhappiness and frustration have got us mostly immobilized, paralyzed, crippled, blind, deaf, mute, possessed, impoverished, thirsty, hungry.  God surprises us.  Suddenly we see; suddenly we feel.  Jesus Christ is God’s surprise party for us.

          God’s Word had been telling us to expect Him, to expect His coming among us. We did, but we didn’t.  Do we expect God, now?  People weren’t expecting Jesus.  Many, too many, don’t expect him now, expect him to be anything or mean anything or do anything for them.  They sit with the cold of their unhappiness, the darkness of their frustration: they see that!  They feel that!

          Isaiah proclaims there is no God besides our God, “who acts on behalf of those who wait for him” (64:4).  O come, O come, Emmanuel!  O, that waiting!  The waiting is long.  It can be very frustrating.  We get through it by the grace of God who causes, as we hope in God who acts on behalf of those who wait for Him.  Our faith and our hope are God in action, who removes the barrier between us and Him, who causes a light, a fire to guide and to cheer us, who acts for those who wait for Him, who does things we did not expect—God enlarges our hope as He grows our faith.  Have you seen that?  Have you felt it?

          “It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old”: the angels, singing their eternal song.  Now, that song has been heard here below; it comes as quite a surprise.  What were the shepherds expecting that night when the song at long last was heard?   It was cold in those quiet, darkest hours.  I imagine a fire, the shepherds gathered around it; they weren’t talking much, just trying to stay warm, to stay awake, watchful.  What we hope for and what we expect are woven together.  I suppose, if you asked them, the shepherds would say they were expecting more of the same: more long, cold, nights.

          Joseph was expecting life with Mary.  Work.  Then the news that she was pregnant, the unhappiness, the frustration.  Then the dream: an angel speaking.  Don’t be afraid; God is at work.  After that, Joseph had one clear expectation, knew one thing, clearly: he knew to expect God.  But how do you expect God?  With faith, I suppose, and hope, patience, and humility.

          And Mary?  She, also, was expecting life with Joseph, and work.  They both had been raised to work and knew work well, by then.  But work has to be for something, for the sake of something more than the work itself, something more than survival.  Isn’t work for building, for growing, for hoping?  God’s Word taught them to work to be blessed and to give blessing.  They worked, they hoped, they tried to have faith.  Mary expected no angel, no message.  Such things didn’t happen, to people like her, anyway.  Strange, how we have such meagre hopes—a way of insulating ourselves against disappointment, I suppose.  If our hopes are small and weak, no harm if they come to nothing.  Then, maybe by the soft, warm light of an oil lamp, or perhaps by the light of the cooking fire outside, God’s messenger came to Mary.  The light, the warmth of the fire took on new meaning, then: power for change, which is the power of hope, which is the blessing of faith, faith that is answered by God, who comes down, like a fire, who acts on behalf of those who wait for Him, doing things for us that we did not expect.

          What are we expecting?  To talk about God who surprises us requires some consideration of why it is that we’re surprised.  If God is a God of surprises, it may be because our expectations have become cool and dim, because God seems so distant and heaven far away.  “[W]ith the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long.”  It grinds us down, leaves us rough, tired, unhappy, frustrated.  The words of that old carol seem to ring as true, as powerfully true, today, as they must have when first written: “And you, beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low, / who toil along the climbing way with painful steps and slow, / look now, for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing: / O, rest beside the weary road, and hear the angels sing.”

          Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!  Amen.