“In Spite of Reality”

Isaiah 64: 1-9

Sunday, November 27, 2011

First Sunday of Advent

First United Church – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

This is a story about longing.

A five-year-old girl sits by her front window on Christmas Eve. Her dad makes dinner in the kitchen. She knows her mom won’t be home for Christmas this year. She knows that she is in Iraq. But she twirls her hair, pulls her stuffed dog closer, and wishes – in spite of reality – that her mom car would come around the corner and pull into the driveway.

This is a story about longing.

Amid the hustle and bustle of a crowded retirement center, a man quietly pulls the door to his apartment closed behind him. He will celebrate his 85^th birthday tomorrow. He knows that his only daughter would come if she could. But she just can’t get away from work this year. He knows he will eat dinner with his friends, drink wine, laugh and tell a few jokes. But he wishes – in spite of reality – that he could see his daughter’s face.

This is a story about longing.

Hiding behind the wall of the church’s courtyard, the 46-year-old woman who looks like she’s 65 pulls her jacket tighter around her and whispers a prayer against the cold. As she waits for the homeless shelter to open for the evening, she allows her mind to wander. She dreams of the day when she’ll have a key to a door. A toilet that’s all her own. A refrigerator with food she can open at any hour of the day. She doesn’t know how she will get there, but she hopes – in spite of reality – that she can one day know what it’s like to have a home again.

This is a story about longing.

Noticing that it’s ten after five, the 33-year-old business executive curses loudly and snaps his laptop shut. Grabbing his coat, he flies out the door. Late, once again, to pick up his son at daycare. As he races across town he allows himself the small indulgence of self-pity. He is thankful for his job, thankful that he doesn’t have to worry about how to put food on the table for his family. And yet, there is always a part of him that wishes – in spite of reality – that he could spend more time with his children.

Longing is at the core of the human experience. It flies in the face of reason. It expands beyond the boundaries of time. Newborn infants long for the breast. School-aged children long for their parents when the monsters come at night. Teenagers long for a kind word as they walk through the cruel halls of their school. Adults of all ages long to be understood, cared for, appreciated, to make a difference, to be real. And as we near the end of our lives, we long for all the hopes that have yet gone unfulfilled. We long for a passing into the next world that is peaceful and kind.

As a society, we seem to be very comfortable with wanting. “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth….” Or maybe a new Kindle Fire.

Wanting sounds more sterile to me. When you want something, you put it on a wish list. You write it down and seal it up in a letter for Santa Claus. You whine about it when you don’t have it.

But, for some reason, longing has a different feel. A hushed quality. These are desires that go unspoken because they are too deep to share. These are the memories we have of the past that fill us with that palpable feeling of nostalgia that is so powerful. These are the hopes we have for the future that are so wildly unimaginable that we do not speak them aloud – not even to ourselves.

As a culture, we’re not as comfortable with longing, are we?

When someone expresses the deepest – and most unrealistic – desires of their heart to us, we’re not quite sure what to do. Unable to fix the problem or check the item off their wish list, we flounder. We’re not sure what to do with longing.

The original hearers of the today’s passage from Isaiah knew about longing. Recently returned from exile, they gathered together to tell stories about their experiences and to dream about their future. Perhaps there is no longing quite as deep and true as the longing of exile.

I’ve been reading a non-fiction book called The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan. This is the epic tale of two families – one Israeli and one Palestinian – whose lives are bound by a common home.

In 1948, the Khairi family was forced to leave their home in Al-Ramla, Palestine – never to return. A young girl, Dalia Eshkenazi, and her parents later moved into the home. As a child, Dalia was told that the former owners had run away and abandoned their home. But she always wondered why they would do something like that.

Years later, as a young adult, Dalia has the chance to find out when Bashir Khairi shows up on her doorstep, asking to visit his childhood home. In the backyard is a lemon tree, planted by his father, Ahmad. Bashir brings lemons from the tree to Ahmad, still living in exile in Ramallah.

One night, many months later, Bashir hears a noise in their home in Ramallah and tiptoes into the living room to see his elderly father standing next to their bookshelf. Ahmad has removed the lemon from the shelf, where it’s been sitting for almost a year. He is standing there, in the dark, holding the lemon to his nose and inhaling its scent.

Longing. A longing for home. A longing for return. A longing for things that can’t even be explained.

Something about being a refugee crystallizes desire. Having the space to ponder what it is you’ve lost, you gain the ability to actively hope for the future.

It is that in-between space – that quality of belonging neither here nor there – that makes longing so acute.

Most of us have not been a refugee in the way Ahmad Khairi was. But all of us have been a refugee in one way or another. All of us have found ourselves separated from something we once held dear – a relationship, a place, a way of being, a version of ourselves we once cherished, an understanding of God that once gave us strength and joy.

I think that’s why this passage from Isaiah grabs me and won’t let me go. There is a lot here that doesn’t ring true to me. This community’s understanding of God as a vindictive deity who hides from the people – that doesn’t work for me. Their belief that God has punished their ancestors and their contemporaries for their uncleanliness – that doesn’t work for me.

But in spite of my key theological disagreements with the author of this passage – and in spite of the 2500 years between us – there is still something here that I understand completely: their longing for God.

“Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence.”

The desire that consumes all other desires – that longing to truly know and feel God’s presence. In our times of deepest despair; in our times of wilderness wandering; in the loneliest hours of the night, that one longing that eclipses all other needs is the longing to know and be known by God.

That – I understand. Some things don’t change – even with 2500 years of human evolution.

I also understand, on a gut, core level this desire to be claimed by God. After all the tumult of their relationship. After feeling abandoned by God, shut out, chased away. After believing that they have been punished for their sins. Still – after all of that – they say, “YET, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are the work of your hand…now consider, we are all your people.”

This is what it means to live in a covenant. To be claimed forever with no ifs, ands, or buts.

The covenantal relationship between God and the Creation is unlike any other relationship on Earth. Romantic love fades. Even the relationship between children and their parents can be irrevocably damaged. But if we are willing to allow it to be so, that covenantal relationship with the Holy continues forever. Even death is unable to separate us from the love of God that we find in Christ Jesus.

That – I understand.  Some things don’t change – even with 2500 years of human evolution.

As we move into this season of Advent, we are waiting and watching for the birth of the Christ Child. It is my hope that we will allow ourselves to be in touch with longing.

We are a culture that celebrates wanting at Christmastime. We teach our young children to write out Christmas lists to send to Santa in the mail. But have you noticed that sometimes items of longing sneak onto those lists? Who hasn’t seen a list from a child that included a desire for peace in the Middle East? Or for a beloved cat to come back to life? Nestled there between the wants of iPods and fire trucks and dress up clothes we see a child’s deepest longing written on the page for all to see.

As adults, we tend to lose touch with our longing, I think.

It’s not cool to long for things.

When we whisper our deepest desires – the impossible ones, the silly ones, the ones that exist in spite of reality – when we whisper those things, we are usually shut down. Our friends shift uncomfortably in their seats and glance away. We feel badly for sounding like a whiner or a hopeless romantic. We feel ashamed that we have desires. We feel embarrassed to admit that there are parts of our lives – no matter how good they seem – that we still wish could be better.

A few years ago, I attended an all-day training session for clergy on professional boundaries. One of the things I greatly appreciated about the presenter was that she gave us permission to have desires and needs. She stated that the need to be affirmed, to be loved, to be relieved of stress, to rest….there is nothing wrong with any of those things. We clergy are human, just like everyone else. We will do ourselves no favors by pretending like we have no desires.

Where we get ourselves into trouble is when we seek to have our needs met in the wrong places or when we ignore our needs until they bubble over in destructive ways.

We have to constantly be vigilant and know what our desires are and then get them met in healthy ways. As a human, I have a need to be listened to and loved. I will do myself no good if I ignore those desires. But I need to get those needs met outside the context of my work as your pastor. I need to have a strong network of family and friends that I can turn to when I need someone to love me. If I fail to do that, I will get myself in trouble because I will depend on my congregation to do those things, which isn’t helpful for any of us.

There is nothing wrong with having a desire – with having a longing. Where we get ourselves in trouble is where we ignore these longings – shut them away – laugh them off. They don’t go away. They are a part of what it means to be human.

God blesses our longings, no matter how silly or impossible they may be.

And what was true for the Israelites 2500 years ago is still true today: God is the one place we can take those longings at any time. God will never laugh at us or dismiss us or make us feel guilty for longing. Now this doesn’t mean that God can magically fix everything, either, or make the impossible come to be. But it does mean that God can hold our longings, bless them, and hear them. It does mean that we can let them out and that we don’t have to bear them by ourselves.

Advent is a time of great longing. We long for the impossible. We long for the things that we wish could exist – in spite of reality. We wait and we watch for things that we know may never come. And that’s okay. God blesses our deepest desires and hears them – even when we speak them only in our hearts.