Sermon: Tearing open the heavens

Sermon: Durham Cathedral, Advent Sunday 2007, Sunday 2 December, Choral  Matins

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be now and always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.

Drop down, ye heavens from above, and let the skies pour forth righteousness;

let the earth be fruitful and bring forth a Saviour.

Be not very angry, O Lord, neither remember our iniquity for ever.

thy holy cities are a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation:

our holy and our beautiful house where our fathers praised thee.

We have sinned and are as an unclean thing;

and we all do fade as a leaf:

our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away;

thou hast hid thy face from us,

and hast consumed us because of our iniquities.

Drop down, ye heavens from above, and let the skies pour forth righteousness;

            Let the earth be fruitful and bring forth a Saviour.

You may recognise those words from the Advent Prose which, in its fine setting by Richard Lloyd, so adorns our Advent Procession. It comes to us from 17^th century France. The refrain, Drop down, ye heavens is a quotation from Isaiah 45, but the other words I have just read come from Isaiah 64.  And there is an interesting contrast here. For while the words Drop down, ye heavens from above and let the skies pour forth righteousness, suggest the image of falling rain, of pouring rain, making the barren earth fruitful, Isaiah 64 begins with a much more violent image:

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.

I wonder which image you prefer: the pouring rain or the violent tearing?  Both are appropriate on this first Sunday in Advent.  After all, this is the day on which we think particularly about what we call the Second Coming of the Lord.  A conviction that at the end of all things, Christ will be revealed as Lord.  It's not that he will become something he isn't already, but that ‘his glorious majesty', as we pray in the collect, will be seen and known by all.  The New Testament draws on the apocalyptic tradition in Judaism, a particular type of symbolic and colourful language and imager, precisely to show us and to remind us, that this revealing, whatever it is, is so far beyond our human capacities to grasp it, that all we can do is use a code; the worst thing we can do is to be too literalistic.  So perhaps, the Old Testament images, Drop down, ye heavens and Oh that you tear open the heavens - are the kind of metaphors that remind us that when we speak of the in-breaking of God's Day we speak of realities and hopes of which no human mind can conceive. Jesus himself in the second lesson used another image: Like the lightening that comes from the east and flashes as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.

But let me stay with those words in the Advent Prose from  Isaiah 64; a section of the Book of Isaiah normally designated to the post-exilic period.  The context suggests the shattering of hopes.   Because there was a hope that when the people of God came back to Judah and Jerusalem after exile in Babylon - that a new age would dawn; that the Lord would return triumphantly to Zion; that the Temple and City would be restored and that their glory would be seen by all;  that peace and prosperity would flourish.   But in reality it wasn't like that.  Where is the Lord? Where is the glory?  Indeed Isaiah 63 is a kind of lamenting Psalm, looking back over Israel's history, recalling their experience of God's salvation, leading to a whole series of rhetorical questions -

Where is the God who caused his glorious arm to march at the right hand of Moses?

Where are your zeal and your might?

Why, O Lord, do you make us stray from your ways?

So when we come to the beginning of Chapter 64: the great cry is: if only: if only you could be present in a dramatic and unmistakable way - if only, God, you would act -

-  then there would be no doubt that you are God;

-  then the mountains would quake;

-  then the nations would tremble before you.  If only.

But then there is the note of bitter realism.  This seeming absence of God, this non-appearance of glory, God's non-intervention is the Prophet states, because of his people's sins and rebellion:

We have sinned and are as an unclean thing;

and we all do fade as a leaf:

our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away;

thou hast hid thy face from us,

and hast consumed us because of our iniquities.

Indeed, in Isaiah's words we see a kind of conversion: if the return from exile was triumphalistic - now is the sober realisation that the hearts of the people had not changed; it was as if the Exile had been for nothing.

So side by side stand longing and deep penitence: a longing for God to come in power and glory, a deep penitence for the waywardness of God's people which made them strangers to their God. Just as Advent is a season of longing: Come, Lord Jesus, come in power and might, and also a season for recollection, a time to examine our discipleship and turn away from our sins. For the One who comes comes both as Saviour and Judge.

      O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.

And God knows, the cry resonates because we do long for Christ to come and break with his iron rod the tyrannies of sin, in this world of carnage, where the bomb and the bullet, the injustice and the inequality, the corruption and the abuse provoke daily the righteousness of the God of heaven.  And while we do look for our salvation; we also look for the world's renewal, and its healing - and because the Lord comes in judgment, we must begin now to purge our own hearts of those attitudes, those prejudices, that lack of love and compassion that ultimately, if unchecked, lead ultimately to acts of terror, and mass murder, the utter perversion of our sinful human nature.

      O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.

Isn't it all the more remarkable, therefore, that in our Christian gospel, when the Lord came - his coming couldn't be more different than this image of rending the heavens.

For when the Lord came, he came, to quote our collect again - in great humility or in the words of the beautiful medieval carol, employing imagery not far removed from falling rain:

He came all so still to his Mother's bower

as dew in April that falleth on the flower.

He came all so still where his Mother lay,

as dew in April that falleth on the spray.

And his presence in the world today is revealed in countless gifts of love and

service, the offering of lives he himself inhabits by his Spirit, as he seeks to win the hearts of mean and women, not by force or coercion, but through a gentle if compelling personal encounter.

I don't know when, to use this compelling metaphor, Christ will rend the heavens and come down, still less can I conceive of how that will be.  Will it seem violent like the image of tearing or is the image of pouring rain better or lightening - bright and brilliant illuminating the heavens? But what I do know is that my prayer today is that the desire for him encapsulated by all those metaphors will be increased in all of us - that our longing for him to be working with us and in us will be enlarged

Well, we must wait, with expectant hope for that; but at the beginning of this Advent, perhaps we can pray that we may again turn from those sins which cause God to hide his face from us, and ask that we may so desire him, that his love will be seen manifest and present in our lives. May our discipleship today prepare the way for the One whose coming is certain, whose Day draws near.