Messengers

Isaiah 63:1-6

December 29, 2013

What to do on the Sunday after Christmas?  It’s kind of a vestige of Christmas Eve and day.  It’s a Sunday between our beautiful candle light service and the familiar story of epiphany, when the magi arrive from the east to see Jesus.  Liturgically it’s still Christmas, the decorations of Christmas are still up, but there are no additional candles to light on our advent wreath and the silent night has been replaced by plain white. 

Even the gospel lesson is a misfit in some ways with this Christmas Sunday.  The gospel lesson today is the story about Herod killing all of the children aged 2 and under in Bethlehem in hopes of doing away with Jesus.  It’s always a little hard to move so quickly from birth on Tuesday to death on Sunday.  So I left that alone this week.

Instead, I’m departing from the gospel and the newborn Jesus and using a passage from Isaiah that always evokes many emotions in me.

You see, when I was in seminary, my Hebrew bible professor would start every class with a prayer.  In general, I really appreciated this.  It felt like it kept me focused on why I was there.

But one day he read a prayer and it didn’t focus me – it was entirely disorienting.  It resonated in my soul – and when something resonates in your soul it means someone has been able to articulate one of your deepest truths or desires.  The prayer was written by St. John of the Cross, a monk and mystic who lived in the mid 16^th century, and it was inspired by our passage from Isaiah, but not because it expresses what Isaiah writes, but because he’s almost jealous of how Isaiah describes God coming to the people without messengers or angels.

I am going to read that prayer – not because I expect you to have the same experience I did, but because I think it raises a question we all face from time to time.

Here is the prayer:

I no longer want just to hear about you, beloved Lord, through messengers.  I no longer want to hear doctrines about you, nor to have my emotions stirred by people speaking of you.  I yearn for your presence.  These messengers simply frustrate and grieve me, because they remind me of how distant I am from you.  They reopen wounds in my heart, and they seem to delay your coming to me.  From this day onward please send me no more messengers, no more doctrines, because they cannot satisfy my overwhelming desire for you.  I want to give myself completely to you.  And I want you to give yourself completely to me.  The love which you show in glimpses, reveal to me fully.  The love which you convey through messengers, speak it to me directly.  I sometimes think you are mocking me by hiding yourself from me.  Come to me with the priceless jewel of your love.  Amen.

Send no more messengers, St. John pleads.  It is the desire to know God directly, as intimately as possible, unfiltered by sages, pastors, prophets, etc.  Not in the words of people who write the doctrines, theology books, and sermons.  No messengers…no filters. 

Yes! – my soul cries.  I’m up for that.  God in the fullness of God’s goodness and glory. 

The God St. John yearns for is the God that Isaiah describes, the one who comes without messengers.  For Isaiah, God answers prayers like St. John’s.  God does come without messengers or angels.  And when that happens, people are redeemed – made whole again. The effect is pure salvation – it is restoration of Israel as a nation…it wipes away the tears of exile…it fills them with the love and compassion of God…a love so complete it cannot be imagined…only experienced.

But like St. John, this is not always a familiar God to me.  In all honesty, much of the time I do feel like there are filters between me and the divine.  I can’t quite see, can’t quite grasp, can’t quite feel what I imagine one would if God were present without the veils.  

Yet here we are, four days after Christmas, when we hear that Jesus is, precisely, God given to us without messengers.  The author of Matthew, the author of Luke, in their birth stories told us from the very beginning that Jesus is no mere messenger.  For them, Jesus is the answer to that prayer:  Immanuel.  GOD with us.  That was what we learned on Tuesday.  Jesus is fully God…fully revealing the nature, character and actions of God.  And that Jesus, as God incarnate, restores nations, wipes away tears…fills us with the love and compassion of God. 

So the question is, if Jesus is God without messengers, why do I still have the yearning of St. John?  Why does Jesus sometimes look suspiciously like a messenger to me?

There have been doctrinal debates about this question since the day Jesus died.  Was Jesus fully divine as well as fully human?  Was he God?  How can Jesus be both?  And where is Christ and the Holy Spirit in all this?  But these debates are exactly the ones that frustrate St. John and me.  These debates about doctrine…I want to know God, and sometimes Jesus – whether fully anything – is just not enough.  The authors of our scriptures are just not enough.  To hear others talk, or write, about God is just not enough.  I want more!  I want what Isaiah described.

Then I remember that this passage in Isaiah about God’s unmitigated presence as love sits between two other passages about how people sometimes think they are feeling God’s anger and vengeance.  The whole book of Isaiah is a story of how the Israelites experienced both God’s presence and absence as they moved from being a united nation to being an exiled people – driven from their homeland – to finally being a people returning home after the pain of exile.

These experiences of God – both when God is absent and when God is present – are descriptions of the human condition.  St. John was a reformer of the Catholic Church in response to the Protestant reformation.  For this spent time in prison where he was tortured.  It makes sense to me that God felt “distant” as he says in his prayer.  It makes sense to me that someone in his situation would cry out for God’s presence. 

And it makes sense to me that he would later write a poem called The Dark Night of the Soul.  But amazingly, when you read the Dark Night of the Soul, it is different in its tone than the prayer I read.  It acknowledges the pain of God’s absence sometimes, but it also acknowledges that this pain is, in and of itself, a divine yearning.

He writes:

“In that happy night.

In secret, seen of none,

Seeing naught myself

Without other light or guide

Save that which in my heart was burning.”

It’s the burning of his heart that ultimately guides him to the divine.  That’s why he can call such a dark night a happy one.

It’s the crying itself that prepares us for God.  We can’t get to God by trying to come up with the perfect doctrine describing everything that is “true” about God.  We can’t get there by relying on others to give us the secret path.  It is the burning of our hearts that becomes the playground for the divine.

I know many of you have different experiences; your lives are lived more consistently sustained by a sense of God’s presence.  But I admit most of the time I rely on messengers to help me understand God and God’s will for my life.  Though I know he’s otherwise, Jesus functions more like a messenger to me.  And most of the time that works for me.  It does give my life purpose and direction.  And truthfully I can’t really ask for anything better than that.  Maybe it’s selfish, but there are moments when that frustrates me.  And it feels like there is no substitute for those moments of divine connection – especially when the world feels like it’s collapsing in on me.

Have you ever felt like God was absent?  Have you felt like all you hear and know of God is through other people talking about it?  Sometimes I’m relying on people I know and trust to tell me about God’s love.  But with St. John I feel like that that is not enough.  That my soul yearns for more, because the yearning itself is an invitation to the unfiltered divine.

The truth is even Jesus comes to us through messengers.  If Jesus was the full revelation of God, we still only hear about him through our biblical authors..messengers.  But my desire to know God fully drives me to read about and understand the life of Jesus – the one who is different from other messengers.

Remember, we’re still in Christmas.  Remember that Jesus was born among the lowly, the exiled, those living under occupation, just as the Israelites did in Isaiah’s time.  Jesus is the one who comes, as Isaiah writes elsewhere, for people living in the darkness.  People who are desperate for God to dwell with them.  Jesus comes precisely in the midst of our darkest nights of the soul.

When God comes unmitigated, often it’s for those living under occupation, those mired in war, those devastated by poverty.  God comes for those living under the weight of grief and illness.  God comes without messengers for those who suffer in darkness.  Not all the time.  Part of the human condition is that we do live in darkness sometimes.  Part of the human condition is that life is not fair, people hurt each other, we have times of exile and willful disobedience to God.  That we can’t change.  That is why we pray with St. John.

But I suspect we also have those moments of unfiltered love and grace.  More rare then we would like maybe, but I can think of at least one powerful experience in my life that has sustained me in times of deepest need.  And I suspect many of you have had similar experiences. 

Meanwhile, whether we have or haven’t, I believe we need the prayer.  We need to acknowledge our deep desire for things to be different.  It is precisely in that that we affirm our belief that God is active in the world.  If Isaiah can claim God’s presence in the midst of the world in which he and the Israelites lived, then I can yearn for the God that feels absent in the midst of our world’s pains and sufferings.  And in fact, if Jesus is God in any sense, isn’t that exactly where God comes in full – unmitigated love: the places of pains and sufferings.  Isn’t that where Jesus came – isn’t that the world into which Jesus was born? 

Please pray with me:

I no longer want just to hear about you, beloved Lord, through messengers.  I no longer want to hear doctrines about you, nor to have my emotions stirred by people speaking of you.  I yearn for your presence.  These messengers simply frustrate and grieve me, because they remind me of how distant I am from you.  They reopen wounds in my heart, and they seem to delay your coming to me.  From this day onward please send me no more messengers, no more doctrines, because they cannot satisfy my overwhelming desire for you.  I want to give myself completely to you.  And I want you to give yourself completely to me.  The love which you show in glimpses, reveal to me fully.  The love which you convey through messengers, speak it to me directly.  I sometimes think you are mocking me by hiding yourself from me.  Come to me with the priceless jewel of your love.  Amen.