Tear Open the Heavens
Isaiah 64:1-9 Mark 13:24-37
I suppose, taking the opening words of Isaiah from our reading, I might
have titled this sermon, “Come on down!” but some might find that a bit
frivolous when the heart of today’s lesson is in fact, most serious.
These people for whom Isaiah speaks are hurting. They are
desperate. They know the stories of olden days, the days when God
did come down, when his presence caused the very earth to shake and no
one questioned the hand of the Lord at work. But now, now there
is pain everywhere and a sense of abandonment. The Light of the
Lord no longer shines and the people sit in a great darkness.
There is a darkness which overcomes us at all from time to time and it
is so universal that it has been described in many ways, by many
storytellers. I will this morning, after all, be so frivolous as
to tell you, a fairy tale -- a somewhat condensed version of a tale
called The Moon written by the Brothers Grimm. This story
as so many from two centuries ago came from a culture where the Bible
was known and images from the Bible were recognized in common usage.
[Once upon a time] there was a
land where the nights were always dark, and the sky spread over it like
a black cloth, for there the moon never rose, and no star shone in the
obscurity. At the creation of the world, the light at night had
been sufficient. Four young fellows once left this country and
arrived in another kingdom, where, in the evening, when the sun had
disappeared behind the mountains, a shining globe was placed on an
oak-tree. The globe shed a soft light far and wide and, though it
was not so brilliant as the sun, everything could very well be seen and
distinguished. The travelers stopped a local who was driving past
and asked what kind of a light that was. “That is the moon,”
answered he; “Our mayor bought it for three thalers, and fastened it to
the oak-tree. He has to pour oil into it daily, and to keep it
clean, so it may always burn clearly. He receives a thaler a week
from us for doing so.”
As he drove away, one of the men said, “We
could make use of this lamp; we have an oak-tree at home as big as this
that we could hang it on.” The second said, “We will fetch a cart
and horses and carry away the moon. The people here may buy
themselves another.” “I'm a good climber,” said the third, “I
will bring it down.” The fourth brought a cart and horses; the
third climbed the tree, bored a hole in the moon, passed a rope through
it, and let it down. When the shining ball lay in the cart, they
covered it over with a cloth, that no one might observe the theft.
They carried it safely home and placed it on
the high oak. Old and young rejoiced when the new lamp shined its
light over the whole land. Dwarfs came forth from their caves in
the rocks and tiny elves in their little red coats danced in rings on
the meadows.
The four took care that the moon was
provided with oil and cleaned, but they became old men. When one
of them grew ill and saw he was about to die, he asked that one quarter
of the moon, should, as his property, be laid in the grave with
him. When he died, the mayor climbed the tree, cut off a quarter
with hedge-shears, and placed it in his coffin. The light of the
moon decreased a little. When the second died, a second quarter
was buried with him and the light further diminished. It grew
weaker still after the death of the third, who likewise took his part
to the grave, and when the fourth was borne to his grave, the old state
of darkness returned. Whenever the people went out at night
without their lanterns they knocked their heads together.
However, when the pieces of the moon united
themselves in the world below, where darkness had always prevailed, it
came to pass that the dead became restless and awoke from their
sleep. They were astonished when they were able to see again; the
moonlight was quite sufficient for them, for their eyes had become so
weak that they could not have borne the brilliance of the sun.
They rose up and were merry and fell into their former ways of
living. Some went to play and dance, others to the public-houses
where they got drunk, brawled, quarreled, and beat on each other.
The noise became greater and greater, and at last reached even to
heaven.
Saint Peter got on his horse and rode
through the gate of heaven, down into the world below. There he
quieted the dead, bade them lie down in their graves again, took the
moon with him, and hung it in the heavens. The End
This little story is, on one level, about the
phases of the moon – but on another, it goes to the heart of the
experience of a people whose light has gone, who ‘knock their heads
together’ because they sit in darkness, because they have lost their
vision. Death claims the light and it becomes little more than
distant memory. And yet – the great Biblical “and yet” - it
speaks of the impact of the light which descended into the darkness,
was raised up again, ascended into heaven and became light for all.
Perhaps ours is a different darkness. The glare of lights, the
blare of sound, the deadening of our senses through overload, can
create an inner darkness that blinds us to the presence of God as
surely as if there were no God present with us and at work among us.
When the cancer shows up in the lab tests, or when it recurs after the
tests showed remission; when our life savings are eroded to the point
where the future that looked secure becomes doubtful; when our children
and grandchildren suffer; when hope flies out the window and we feel
abandoned to the whims of a meaningless future, that is when we want
God to “Tear open the heavens and come down. But perhaps God
comes and we miss it.
One of my favorite preachers is Will Willimon, chaplain at Duke
University. Will had something worth hearing to say about this:
If you look directly into the sun,
you will only be blinded. You must see the sun indirectly, in its
reflection. Maybe it’s mostly that way between us and God.
If God is most often known in a whisper rather than in earthquake and
fire, then it must be easy to miss God’s voice when it comes to
us. If God stands aside in the shadows, flirting with us,
appearing among us only indirectly, then it must be easy not to see
God’s appearances among us.
Our Director of Music refuses to sit in a
crowded, loud restaurant. He takes earplugs with him to Duke
basketball games. He explains, “When your life is music, when
your main tools are your ears, you must be careful. The
difference between making good music and making great music is often
the difference between the slightest variations of sound.
Therefore, I must guard my hearing.”
We modern folk are rarely free from the blare
of the TV or the radio. We are constantly bombarded with sounds
and sights, so much so that we become numbed, blinded. Sensory
overload leads to a kind of numbness.
So maybe that’s why the church, in its wisdom,
has the season of Advent in the weeks before Christmas. If we are
to see the fragile light which dawns among us in Christ, we must sit
awhile in the darkness. If we are to hear the songs of the
angels, we must first be silent. What could you do (or, perhaps
more to the point for us, what could you avoid doing this Advent?)
which would make you better able to see God’s subtle incursions among
us?
I daresay that when many people first saw the
babe at Bethlehem, they saw only another poor baby. Yet for those
who were listening, leaning toward the light, here was Immanuel, God
with us.
“O that you would tear open the heavens and
come down!” begs the prophet. But the living, loving God rarely
does. More often God comes to us in a glimpse, a whisper, a
shadow moving in the darkness, and we, whose lives are so full of
noise, sights, and sounds, lights and thunder of our own creation, miss
heaven’s opening up for us.
If only we could refocus our sight, retune our
hearing, re-sensitize that which has become dull and numb, perhaps we
could know God with us, not so much in quaking mountains but in
humility, not so much in the loud shout but in the quiet of a whispered
prayer of thanks, not so much in churning, boiling water of the raging
river as in the gentle stream of a tear lightly sitting on the edge of
an eyelid of one who cares about the hurting, empathizes and offers a
hand in service to the poor, the lonely, the neglected.
Advent is here; light is about to shine forth into our darkness,
filling us anew with the love of God, the fellowship of Jesus Christ,
and the power of the Holy Spirit.
Will we hoard that light, claiming it as our own, or will we bear that
light into the world and “cast away the works of darkness, and put on
the armor of light” giving witnesses to his mercy and love; not only
through our words, but also in our works? I invite you to prepare
a place this season in your heart and in your home for the soon coming
Lord of Lords, and enter now into a blessed Advent. And then we
can joyfully say, “Lord, come on down!”
The Rev. John Dryden Burton
Eureka Springs, Arkansas
November 130, 2008