Rend the Heavens, and Mold the Clay

By Jared Warner

Willow Creek Friends Church

December 03, 2023

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Click to read in Swahili

Bofya kusoma kwa Kiswahili

Isaiah 64:1–9 (ESV)

¹ Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence— ² as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil— to make your name known to your adversaries, and that the nations might tremble at your presence! ³ When you did awesome things that we did not look for, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence. ⁴ From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides you, who acts for those who wait for him. ⁵ You meet him who joyfully works righteousness, those who remember you in your ways. Behold, you were angry, and we sinned; in our sins we have been a long time, and shall we be saved? ⁶ We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. ⁷ There is no one who calls upon your name, who rouses himself to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities. ⁸ But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. ⁹ Be not so terribly angry, O Lord, and remember not iniquity forever. Behold, please look, we are all your people.

We meet once again. Another day to worship and according to the church calendar today marks the new church year. As Friends we do not usually follow the traditional church calendar, at least not as a whole. This is a tradition that I do not always follow. I like the church calendar. I like that people from other denominations can come visit our Meeting and hear the same scriptures being read that would be read at theirs, and that similar themes will be presented. I say similar because the things I see in the pages of scripture and will speak about are not always going to be the same as someone else.

I began using the lectionary when I started ministering among you here at Willow Creek. I did this primarily because it gives our various volunteers a list of scriptures months in advance so that they can begin to prepare and practice songs that might go with those passages. I do reserve the right to venture out of that traditional framework.

The interesting thing about the lectionary. It is a three-year cycle of scriptures that correspond with various church seasons. The beginning of the year is Advent, followed by Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, and ordinary time.  This list of scriptures within this three-year cycle often contains books and passages I rarely think about, and yet even though this list was compiled decades ago, each week the suggested scripture I have used has been the right one for that week.

According to the church calendar, today is the beginning of the new year. I have considered this over the years. I have wondered why the new year does not begin with Christmas, the day we celebrate the birth of our Lord? Why do we start the year a month before Christmas?

After many seconds of research on google, I began to understand. Advent means, the beginning of an event, the invention of something, or the arrival of a person. I sat thinking about this as I was praying, Advent is the beginning of an event. It is the period of time waiting for someone to arrive.

It is fitting that the new year begins with advent because that is how life works. I sat sitting in my blue chair thinking. I had just finished reading Albert his devotional for his Jesse tree project and I sat thinking about my life as a dad. I thought about all the various moments we have shared as a family. And how the events we share this year had a time of preparations months or years in advance. Albert plays goalie for his team now, but seven years ago I remember his first game. He would be sitting on the bench waiting for his turn to play, he would stand up to go onto the ice and his little helmet could just barely been seen over the top of the boards. His coach had to lift him up over the boards because the step going in and out of the players bench was too tall for his little legs to manage and yet he wanted to be out there.

Seven years we have waited to watch him today. But this all started before that. Some people have asked me why I allowed my son to play this game so early in his life. To be honest I cannot tell you. Since the day he could walk he has wanted to play hockey. David and Vicky even brought a hurling stick back from Ireland to give to him because he has always had a hockey stick in his hands. I laugh as I look through his old pictures because in nearly every one, he has hockey gloves on and a stick in his hand. Even his doctor has sat in the office playing hockey with him from the time he could walk.

Events build up to this moment of time. Every one of those events is part of the process. They build upon each other, compounding together until the moment arrives. And each of those events continues to build on into the future until the time of fulfillment.

When does life begin? I know that this has become a political talking point, but I want us to think about it. When did your child’s life begin? When did the life of your niece, nephew, or grandchild begin? We celebrate the days they were born, but what happened before that day? I cannot speak for everyone, but I do remember that Kristy and I spent many hours getting the room prepared. We built a crib, hung cute little pictures, and built a changing table. We organized baby clothes, bought baby clothes. We had diapers nicely stacked ready to use on the day this long expected baby came home for the first time. For nine months we prepared and waited in anticipation. Albert was just as much a part of the family in those moments as he is now. And for those of us who have experienced a miscarriage we can often mourn the loss of that child just as dramatically as we would any loss of a child because they are already part of our family.

Advent, the beginning of the event. The waiting for the arrival. Anticipation or as I have often called it Holy Anxiety. Anxiety is an emotional response, a feeling of fear, dread, or uneasiness. Usually when we speak of anxiety it is in a clinical sense when those feelings of distress do not go away, or they prevent us from participating in our daily lives. I like the concept of Holy Anxiety because I do find it fitting.

The past couple of weeks for us have been difficult. Yes, part of this is because of the loss of my grandfather, but for Albert it has been particularly rough. The Independence Community Ice had an unscheduled maintenance problem, so he was not able to play hockey. The first few days were not bad, but after a week he became irritable and fidgety, he even said it is boring without hockey. Now you understand why I spoke so much about this silly game today. We have just spent the past two weeks trying to explain something we do not understand. I have a deeper understanding of the words of that classic Christmas song “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.” When the lyrics say “mom and dad can hardly wait for school to start again.” We want Christmas to come, or in my case we want the ice to be fixed again. We want the celebration, the family, the joy, and the hope of a brighter future, but things must happen before that day comes.

Isaiah wrote in his oracles, “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence…” Isaiah lived during the days of the divided kingdom of Israel and Judah and began his ministry prior to the Assyrian invasion that scattered the northern tribes among the nations. Israel was still free; they were still their own nations and yet there was this fear and dread that surrounded them.

Isaiah could sense what was about to happen. He knew that their enemies were going to come. He knew that the people of God would face times of trouble, he knew. Anxiety. “Oh, that you would rip the sky open and come down,” he cries out to the lord, “to make your name known to your adversaries, and that the nations might tremble at your presence!”

Isaiah knows something is about to occur, something dreadful. It does not sit well in his mind. Israel has a purpose, a divinely appointed purpose. This is why Isaiah cries out the way he does. He cries out because Israel was called to be a light to the nations, they were to reveal the one true God to all. They were supposed to be, and yet they were not.

This past year I made a pledge with myself that I would spend more time speaking from the Old Testament and for the most part that is what has happened. The reason this has been more difficult is because there is so much more work and study that I must do to be able to present anything that sounds like a complete thought. When we enter the Old Testament scriptures we are entering into a different time and place. We know this but we often do not let that knowledge exist within our minds. This is a problem with most scripture because we are looking at it though eyes that are thousands of years removed from the time that it was written. The New Testament is easier because it is closer to us historically. We know what happened in the Roman empire because we have writings from that time period. But much of the history and culture surrounding the Old Testament has been lost in the sands of time and that of the desert.

We often read into the text, a western or Latin culture, but they were not Romans because Rome did not yet exist. There was no Caesar ruling the world, instead of that emperor there were others. We often laugh at the ideas and consider them to be silly superstitions, but the Old Testament world resembled the writings of Homer more than Shakespeare. It was a time when gods battled on earth and in heaven. Where giants or those great men of renown ruled the nations. Men that claimed to be the offspring of the gods. When we read the stories of Hercules the great ancient hero that battled with mythical beasts, are the stories dissimilar to the stories of Samson? I am not saying that the inspired words of scripture are fictional stories, but I do want us to take a step back and understand that the people that wrote these words were from a time and place without science as we know it today. And yet they were amazing. They did not have calculus or even algebra and yet they constructed the pyramids and the Parthenon.  They did not have a compass, and yet they were able to navigate the world using the stars in the sky. They did not have the internet and somehow through careful study and observation they could predict when cosmic events would occur and were often able to adjust in their lives to prepare for those future events.

How did they do all this? If we were to take them at their word, they received this information from their gods. We are enlightened today. We claim to know better, yet often we are relearning things those ancient people already knew. We do not want to accept the possibility that they had access to some supernatural intelligence, so we entertain the idea and are entertained by the concept of ancient aliens.

Isaiah, this ancient man of old, looked out at the world around him. He saw what was going on, and he knew the promise that was made to the man that began this advent, Abraham. He knew that this ancient father was promised to be a nation that would be the light of all the nations. Through him and his offspring, God would reverse all the evil that had come into the world. He would redeem all the nations and bring them back to the place we were created to inhabit. Israel was to show God to the world.

“We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls upon your name, who rouses himself to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities.”

Isaiah might as well be writing to us today, and yet he wrote these words thousands of years ago. It does not even matter where we are from or what cultural background we have, these words ring true. There is something wrong with the world. We are doing things that we know are not right, and yet we do them anyway. Just turn on the news and you can see it played out before our eyes. We know that innocent people are suffering at the hands of others. And that we have justified those actions in our minds because we want something they have for ourselves. We justify, but that justification does not make it right.

We are often polluted and diluted. We say in our minds that we are right, but have we taken a step back and examined beneath the surface? Albert wants to play hockey, but the ice has melted. We want Christmas today, but we must wait. Isaiah wants God to reveal himself fully to the world, but God has another plan.

God wants the world to know him. He wants everyone on the face of this earth to know that they are loved and created in His image. That is our calling and mission as people who claim to be his people. We like Isaiah want God to rip open the heavens and for Jesus to come in the clouds. I have heard the sermons on this my entire life. We live in a similar holy anxiety as Isaiah did in those ancient days. My grandfather heard those sermons, as did my great grandfather. For over a hundred years we have been told that the end of the world is upon us, and yet tomorrow has become today and the anxiety continues the advent is still anticipated. We have listened to these messages we have read the books and watched the movies. We fear being left behind, and in that fear have we missed the point?

“But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.” Isaiah looks at the calamity that is upon them, he pleas that God would just rip the heavens apart and reveal himself to the nations, yet God does not work like that. God has a different plan. He works the clay.

My wife has a fine arts degree in ceramics, so I often dwell on passages like this and remember the countless hours of watching her work with clay as I sat reading a book, well acting like I was reading a book. I watched her sitting at the wheel as a vessel seemingly magically appeared before my eyes. I observed her manipulate something I would have called mud into something profound. We are like that clay.

Isaiah says this somewhat metaphorically, but this is also what is explained in Genesis. God said, “Let us make man in our image.” And he created man out of the dust of the earth. He created humanity out of clay. He molded and formed Adam, we often see this as man but Adam means of the soil or ground. God takes this clay figure and breathes life into it and places it inside a garden called Eden. This clay figure is the image of God. But what exactly does that mean?

When God created this mud man we know as Adam, he said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish, over the birds, over the livestock, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” Does that give us any clue as to what the image of God is? The image is not the creativity we possess, or the mental capacity we wield, but it is dominion and position. We were place into the creation to be caretakers or stewards over all that God created. We were created to be God’s representatives to the plants, animals, and creepy things. We are living into God’s image when we allow God’s wisdom to live through us into the world we reside.

We want God to rend the heavens, but what does God want?

We want God to come down and make the mountains quake, to make his name known to our adversaries. Yet maybe in this time of advent, in this time of holy anxiety God is encouraging us to bear his image. Maybe he is encouraging us to show those around us the true hope that is found within the teachings of God.

“Behold, please look, we are all your people.” Is this what we see as we gaze upon those around us? Is this the prayer we speak as we pray for peace in Israel and across the world? Is this our identity and image? We want and we anticipate, but before we can have, we must wait for God to continue to work the clay. But as we wait, we can hold onto the promise that God will reveal himself to all people. And that God will himself known. He will fulfill what he has said he will fulfill, but until that time we are his people, here now. And we have work to do.

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