Text: Isaiah 35:1-10

Isaiah writes his great hymn of hope to a people living in exile. They are far from the land they love and hope is hard to come by. Home is becoming long ago and far way. In an alien place, generations are being born that have never known the Promised Land. In a great Psalm of the exile, the people poignantly lament:

By the rivers of Babylon -
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps .
For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"

Their achingly heartfelt reply is:

How can we sing God's song
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy.
(Psalm 137:1-6)

The questions echoes down to us today, "How do we, any of us, sing God's song in foreign places, strange lands, difficult times, alien atmospheres, in broken bodies, with spirit spent, and hope only flickering intermittently on a far horizon, when loss threatens to overwhelm us and we see no way out?"

"In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
in the bleak midwinter, long ago."

Even the landscape seems desolate. The wind chills to the bone. In many places the countryside itself seems to have lost hope and given itself over to frozen wasteland. The light shrinks day by day and the cold increases accordingly.

The holiday season can be difficult for those who have known significant loss. I remember when my 23 year old nephew died on Thanksgiving Day a few years ago. I sat at my desk trying to dredge up stories of hope and joy, of love and peace, appropriate to the season, and they all seemed hollow and pointless. They turned to ash in my mouth. How could I proclaim Christ's story in the face of senseless death? The songs of the season stirred the pain and brought tears instead of inspiring joy and bringing mirth. How could I sing God's song in this strange land that seemed so suddenly empty?

The irony is that all around are the signs of celebration - happy holidays, merry Christmas, joy to the world. It is a strange land in the face of illness, brokenness and death. How can we rejoice? The headlines report the devastation of war, the fatal consequences of enmity; mass murder in a mall full of holiday shoppers; the deathly unsilence in the streets of Bethlehem; arrogant acts of greed and violence, perpetrated by the rich and powerful, too often in the name of God. We look around to find poverty, homelessness, addiction, pain, abuse, terror, lies, mistrust, bigotry. How bleak can the winter become? How can we sing God's song in such a land? How can we rejoice?

I know, most of you didn't come to church today expecting to be brought down by such a dreary word. We come to this place looking for words of hope, seeking to celebrate the goodness of creation, longing to love, in the name and in the ways of the great Lover of the universe, but sometimes that's hard. The masks we appropriate to make it through one more holiday season weigh heavily on our faces, frozen smiles and rote holiday greetings drag us down, sometimes without our awareness. The truth, friends, is that we cannot honestly celebrate Christmas, the coming of God to live among us, if we are not willing to open our eyes and look around. Take a good, hard look at the world into which we invite God this Advent season. It is not a pretty picture. The glitter of our decorations, the beauty of our carols, the cheeriness of our greetings, the presents piled under trees, cannot cover completely the pain and brokenness, the destruction and death, all around us. How can we sing God's song in such an environment? How can we rejoice?

How did Isaiah come to pen such a hymn of hope in another time of terror? Where did he find the faith and the courage to sing such a song of life in the face of exile, brokenness and pain, death and destruction? Can the ancient prophet show us a way out of the bleak midwinter? Isaiah's text is a text of transformation. It is the promise that, though not fulfilled in this very moment, God is already present and at work, transforming creation in many marvelous ways. In the midst of our hurting, in the extremities of our lost and lonely wandering, in the bleakness of our winters, in the deserts of our despair, God is there, working wonders of which we are not often aware.

My friend, Mark Liebenow, lost his beloved wife, Evelyn, to a sudden heart attack at age 40. Mark is a writer, a theologian, a clown, a liturgist, of great gifts, but this loss was overwhelming. Among the places he turned for support, for life, really, was the church community, Yosemite and the Psalms. I owe him a debt of gratitude because of his dogged determination to hold out for hope precisely when he felt utterly hopeless in the face of his loss. He rewrote many of the Psalms, using contemporary language and his own experience. They are songs of rage and lament, in which he also asserts his intention of waiting out his loss and pain until hope is felt and joy returns. Above all, Mark has taught me to wait and watch. For to those who will work to keep some corner of their heart, some atom of their being, open to it, God will come as surely as the days will lengthen, light will increase and spring will follow the bleakest winter. Waiting and watching is the work of Advent. If we can convince ourselves, teach ourselves, allow ourselves, to wait and watch, miracles may still occur, stars may still appear above stables and cattle and kings and shepherds and peasant girls may find themselves face to face with the great God of the universe.

Like Isaiah, Thomas Merton writes of pain and possibility, stirred in Advent, when God comes near in the form of a baby, the little child to lead us. His is a challenging and ultimate word of hope in a bleak midwinter, one, that if we let it, might even lead us to joy, to rejoicing in the transformation of life that is possible when God comes close. He says,

Into this world, this demented Inn,
in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all
Christ comes uninvited.
But because He cannot be at home in it,
because He is out of place in it
and yet He must be in it,
His place is with those others for whom there is no room.
His place is with those who do not belong,
who are rejected by Power because they are regarded as weak,
those who are discredited,
who are denied the status of persons,
who are tortured, bombed, and exterminated.
With those for whom there is no room,
Christ is present in this world.
He is mysteriously present in all those
for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.
It is in these that He hides Himself,
for whom there is no room.

Does it do Merton disservice to add to his eloquent lines this Advent that it is also those for whom there is no hope, those for whom there is no joy, those who feel the bleakness of the winter in their bones and in their hearts, those who ache in their brokenness, that Christ comes and enters in? This is what Dorothee Soelle calls the “strength of the weak.” There is room in the heart for the transforming power of the Christ to enter in and turn our lives around, to turn our despair to hope, our brokenness to healing, our lamentation to joy, our winter to spring, our death to life.

How can we sing God's song in odd circumstances? How can we rejoice? Frederick Buechner says this about joy: "In the gospel of John, Jesus sums up pretty much everything by saying, ‘These things I have said to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.’ (John 15:11) [Ironically, h]e said it at the supper that he knew was the last one he'd have a mouth to eat." Buechner goes on to say that "Happiness turns up more or less where you'd expect it to - a good marriage, a rewarding job, a pleasant vacation." And I would add, happy holidays. These are all good and worthwhile things. But he concludes "Joy...is as unpredictable as the one who bequeaths it" (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, p. 47).

How can we sing God's songs in strange lands? How can we rejoice? One answer is that "silently the wondrous gift is given! So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of [Her] heav’n. No ear may hear Christ’s coming, but in this world of sin, where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in." Where God is present, where Christ enters in, can hope and joy be far behind? My friend Mark speaks of waiting and watching in the mean time, in this time of Advent: “To watch is to take in. But if there is no room in the inn of my heart because I have let others fill all the available spaces, how do I let Christ in? If I am to receive Jesus' birth into my heart, I have to create an open space. I have to let go of the jealousies, angers, and self-centering plans that I hang onto to comfort me. I am not somebody because I have suffered; I am somebody because Jesus loves me. I need to watch and allow room for this love to enter and lead me toward wholeness" (R. Mark Liebenow, Prepare the Way, p. 8).

This means I must let go of something, something large or small, to let go of my pain, my loss, my grief, my despair, my frozen ground, my hopelessness, my brokenness - things in which I may even find perverse comfort, in order to make space for Christ to enter in and begin the work of healing me, of transforming me, of making me new. This is no easy thing. Transformation is not without challenge and struggle, without questions and doubt, without fear and anxiety. What do you, what do I, need to do to let go of the bleak midwinter and make a little room for the power of the Christ to transform life? So that you, so that I, may come to rejoice and sing a song a hope with Isaiah?

Our words of preparation say tell us that “Isaiah…speaks of hope.” Who knows why, yet here they are. Jim Hopkins tells us that Isaiah’s “hope is that all creation will see God’s glory. His hope is that the weary exiles, those whose hands are weak from forced labor, those whose knees tremble from exhaustion and fear, those whose hearts know terror and anger, will be restored, redeemed and renewed. Isaiah’s promise is this – ‘Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.’ Isaiah’s promise is that God’s hope is there for those who need it most. God’s hope always includes the weak, forgotten and forlorn. God’s hope is an expression of God’s love and God’s love reaches those who believe that they are broken and forgotten and of no use to anyone.”

How can we hope with Isaiah? How can we sing God's song in a foreign land? How can we rejoice? For now, we wait, we watch, we wonder.