Anyone who follows my blog through either facebook or twitter will have noticed a rapid succession of posts appearing this morning, each one containing prayer and fog in the title. These three were the result at my grappling with the current place in my life where the answers I am looking for are not there; that is not to say that God is not doing what I want, but to acknowledge that I am forced into a time of waiting, a time when I do not know and cannot see what is coming, and the only recourse I have is to wait.
This place is uncomfortable and challenging, it is requiring me to trust, to accept that I can do nothing and to wait. Religious platitudes do not help, and frankly if you offer me one I hope you can run fast (well faster than me which won't be a problem for most folk!). The fog this morning seemed to me to be a perfect picture of life at the moment, it required me to slow down, to be vigilant, and to become more aware of my surroundings. I was pondering this when I read Isaiah 64: 1-9, where that impassioned plea; "Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down" gave rise to my second prayer.
I read the Isaiah passage as part of my preparation for preaching this Sunday which is the first Sunday in Advent. The passage itself is part of a larger communal psalm of lament, it is spoken by the post-exilic community of Jerusalem, who are pondering God's response to human sin. Over at Working Preacher Elna.K. Slovang says this:
"...the lamenters do what they said no one does: call upon God's name and attempt to take hold of God. They appeal to "our Father" and "our potter." They confess that they are all filthy and faded (verse 6) andthey claim that they are all offspring and product of God's creative activity (verse 8). On the basis of this latter connection, the lamenters make one more request: that God's anger and memory of their guilt not last forever (verse 9).
Laments are not formal arguments. They can employ faulty reasoning and they are one-sided. The lamenters in Isaiah 64 never make the clear and contrite admission of culpability that they might be expected to offer in order to receive the divine consideration they request. Laments are poetic protests against pain and appeals for intervention.
In Isaiah 64:1-9 the pain is brought on by the consequences of the people's iniquities, experienced most deeply as anger and alienation from God. Their appeal is for God's intervention -- to heal the alienation and to halt the damage of their sins. The people's pain is clear. How God will respond is not."
That last sentence really struck me;" the people's pain is clear, how God will respond is not" ; all is uncertain, and they are facing the unknown. That sense of facing the unknown also comes out in the Gospel reading for Sunday, where the people are encouraged to remain vigilant, to keep awake even though they do not know what is coming. These dual themes of expectation and uncertainty call us into a liminal space, a threshold we are not yet to cross, peering ahead we will find only fog, and looking back will not do us much good either.
In this uncomfortable place it would be easy to loose hope, to give up and to turn away, and I must be honest all of those things have seemed very tempting in recent months, but there is hope, and for me today the hope was held out in Paul's letter to the Corinthians:
Now you have every spiritual gift you need as you eagerly wait for the return of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will keep you strong to the end so that you will be free from all blame on the day when our Lord Jesus Christ returns. God will do this, for he is faithful to do what he says, and he has invited you into partnership with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. (1 Corinthians 1:7-9)
The place we sometimes find ourselves in, the place I am currently in may be uncomfortable and challenging, I might see no clear way forward, and the way back may be closed to me, but God IS with me. He will and has provided me with every spiritual gift I need, he will give me the strength and the courage and the wisdom to wait upon him. And so I hold my hands out in the gloom and wait for him to fill them...
