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The Luminous Imperative of Waiting
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 14, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 9:1-7; 40:6-11 Luke 1:39-56
What song have we been given against the winter’s darkness? What shall we sing as the proud gather in the imaginations of their hearts, as the mighty still ascend their thrones minus one this morning and those of low degree are put down, as the hungry are sent empty away and the rich are filled with good things? A carol’s sweet sentiment cannot compete with world politics nor “should religion meddle in the affairs of state.” We have been told this from cradle to courthouse. Never mind a continent perishing of AIDS or the terror whose soldiers are legion stalking every continent or violence erupting with regularity near the little town of Bethlehem or poverty-made-flesh with no place to lay its head only blocks away and worlds apart from our tidy lives. ‘Tis the season for charity to begin at home and peace to be postponed abroad, while we wait only for the relatives to arrive and the goose to be cooked: while we exist within the confines of the present tense. “Future tenses,” writes George Steiner, “are an idiom of the messianic. Take away energizing anticipation, the luminous imperative of waiting, and these tenses will be end-stopped. ‘Life expectancy’ is, then, no longer a messianic…projection, but an actuarial statistic.” “If” has disappeared imperceptibly from common speech. We need no longer teach our children the conjugation of the verb “to be.” Rather we content ourselves “with the morning that separates/And with the evening that brings together/For casual talk before the fire…” a people resigned to dwell in the present tense. Not coincidentally and in spite of everything we have been told about Israel’s messianic expectations, the people who walked in the darkness of the 8th century B.C. in Judah, who dwelt in the land of deep darkness under the siege of Syria and Israel, were also a people whose future tense had been eclipsed by present politics. When Isaiah first spoke light into their darkness, no doubt the words were heard to ignite, at most, a present hope: that Hezekiah would be enthroned king over Judah from David’s line. “Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David, and over his kingdom, to establish it, and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness,” proclaimed Isaiah. But Isaiah said more, insinuated upon the impending political arrangements another tense. This tense we have taken as the crack in the door of Israel’s hope that ultimately warrants our running with haste to Bethlehem, but there is half a millennium to wait before the darkness of that silent night descends. For the present, for our present tense, we are as exiles addressed by the words of Isaiah. He speaks first in the past tense of present reality [the people who walked in darkness…where we walk still]; he declares, from out of the depth of that same darkness what an exile could never imagine, declares in past perfect [the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light…we must have blinked]; and then as though the dawn were revealing an unforeseen syntax, he exclaims in present perfect [to us a child is born, a son is given…for Judah a king and for us, well, we are still debating]. Yet even the present perfect will not contain the news he has to tell. Only the future tense will do: “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, from this time forth and for evermore, will reign! The zeal of the Lord of hosts will accomplish this.” David’s line does reign again in the land of Judah, but darkness ultimately descends and the eclipse of hope is complete a mere one hundred years later: “the failure of Jerusalem, the end of its hegemony, the deportation of Israel, and the reality of exile, [mark] a dismal ending that was the termination of all old faith claims,” says Walter Brueggemann. “The public, institutional life of Judah came to an end. But beyond that Israel made the theological judgment that Yahweh had now abandoned Israel and had nullified all the old promises.” The God of Israel fell silent and only the sound of weeping could be heard in Babylon. Ezekiel moved “among the deported as a pastor, listening to them complain that God was not fair.” Jeremiah spoke judgment, then comfort to the people, assuring them in the midst of exile that the uprooted would be planted again. Yet among these prophets of old, Isaiah’s words still pierce the winter darkness with their promise. In the presence of a silent, dormant, invisible God, Second Isaiah speaks hope to Israel’s despair, promise to her pessimism, consolation to her sadness. “Future tenses,” said Steiner, “are an idiom of the messianic…every use of the verb to be is a negation…of [death]…every use of an ‘if’…tells of the refusal of the brute inevitability of the despotism of the fact. Shall, will, and if, circling in intricate fields of semantic force around a hidden center…are the passwords of hope.” The scene brings to mind another whose insistent hope in the face of God’s silence must only astound and humble us. Elie Wiesel “tells of the beadle of a small synagogue in Eastern Europe, who would rush to the synagogue each morning before the services began and shout, ‘I have come to inform you, Master of the Universe, that we are here.’ The Jews began to be massacred, but he would still rush into the synagogue and cry at the top of his voice, ‘You see Lord, we are still here.’ After the last massacre, he found himself all alone in the deserted synagogue. The last living Jew, he climbed the bimah one last time, stared at the Ark and whispered with infinite gentleness, ‘You see? I am still here.’ He stopped briefly before continuing in his sad, almost toneless voice: ‘But You, where are You?’” For a generation, the exiles lived in the silence, and despite every effort to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land they fell into silence too. Adopting the present tense of Babylonian discourse, they neither remembered nor repined, they neither wept nor waited. They existed at the zero point where memory and hope are eclipsed and the present tense is sufficient for the day’s troubles. All flesh, in other words, is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades…the people is grass. They “Maintain themselves by the common routine,/Learn to avoid excessive expectation,/Become tolerant of themselves and others,/Giving and taking in the usual actions/What there is to give and take. They do not repine.” [T.S. Eliot] Present tense. Then into the silence, a voice says: “Cry!” “The divine word piles up imperatives: comfort/speak/cry/make clear/make straight/preach/get up/do not be afraid/ speak.” [James Limberg] “What shall I cry?” asks the messenger of God, and the syntax of future promise sets in motion the scroll of Second Isaiah. Cry this: “The word of our God will stand forever!” The tense of hope literally explodes before a people whom he believes are headed home: “He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arm and carry them in his bosom.” Soon with joy, they journey up to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple (oh how this tempers the news of the morning!), they embrace a new beginning only to fall victim to economic oppression, to political occupation, to religious syncretism and, once again, to the present tense of merely human horizons. This is their human destiny (and ours…all flesh is grass) unless the God of Israel were to enter in, were to rule God’s people, once again, in the person of a king descended from David’s line. “In the sixth month,” Luke tells Theophilus a few hundred years later, “the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David (can you not hear the hope barely contained in this detail!)” “Behold,” said the angel to Mary, “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son (the future tense being an idiom of the messianic), and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end.” This Luke wrote after the destruction of the second temple, after the fall of Jerusalem, after the defeat of the Jews that issued in Palestine’s expropriation by Rome, after the one they had hoped would redeem Israel had been crucified, dead and buried, after he had been raised and made known to them in the breaking of bread, after he had sent them out as witnesses with God’s promise upon them. This ancient hope so tied to the fortunes of one nation and one people had been revealed for all peoples and all times in him whom Mary now cradles in her womb. “Future tenses,” I tell you once more, “are an idiom of the messianic…every use of the verb to be is a negation…of [death]…every use of an ‘if’…tells of the refusal of the brute inevitability of the despotism of the fact. Shall, will, and if, circling in intricate fields of semantic force around a hidden center…are the passwords of hope.” What song shall we sing against this present winter’s darkness? Sing this: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…for he who is mighty has done great things and holy is his name.” But wait, for the tense of Mary’s song has one final surprise: he has shone, has scattered, has put down, has exalted, has filled, has sent. “It is most striking,” writes Fred Craddock, “the lines that clearly refer to God’s establishing justice and mercy in the future, in the end time, contain past tense verbs, not future tense verbs. Why?” Mary sings in the past tense (aorist) of the Greek language, proclaiming what is true for all time: “past, present and future without differentiation. So sure is the singer that God will do what is promised that it is proclaimed as an accomplished fact.” We live, my friends, as those sent out in the winter darkness, conjugators of “to be,” purveyors of “if,” because for all time the God whose silence we cannot bear has spoken (aorist) and thus speaks into our every silent night the flesh of him in whose Word our hope resounds forever: “Blessed is she who believed there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” Thanks be to God! Amen. |