God is not Time and Temperature
Episcopalians who are familiar with the Morning Prayer liturgy may remember in its Rite II form a canticle that comes from the second of Isaiah’s four servant songs.
Seek the Lord while he may be found;
ISaiah 55:6-7
call on him while he is near.
Let the wicked forsake their ways
and the unrighteous their thoughts.
Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will freely pardon.
Isaiah is a regular stop on the Advent cycle. During this season, in fact, the Morning Prayer liturgy opens with two different pieces of scripture from this book. They offer two ideas: that we are in the wilderness, and that God will soon reveal himself to us.
You might remember the prophet Isaiah from the token verse of his calling. God asked who he should send, and Isaiah answered, “Here am I! Send me!” I admit that as a child, whatever I assigned to Isaiah in my brain was dramatically reduced to lines like that–but it’s worth remembering that this prophet lived and wrote some 800 years before the birth of Christ. The book’s narrative essence follows a time of captivity, a time of punishing Babylonian captivity and exile, and afterward, a time of restoration.
I receive a daily Advent meditation by email, and this morning’s scripture was Isaiah 55:6-13, which begins with the passage quoted above. For some reason, the first sentence landed differently: Seek the Lord while he may be found.
Last weekend I enjoyed a sermon from Blake Daniel, the pastor at First Presbyterian Sylva, that focused on a later passage from Isaiah, this one from the 64th chapter. Here’s the seventh verse:
No one calls on your name
or strives to lay hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us
and have given us over to our sins.
Is God always available to us?
This isn’t a revelation, or some secret hidden in scripture. Even Christ, dying on the cross, cries out to God and asks why God forsake him. When we isolate that rejection–especially when Christ voices it–the universe feels rather overwhelming.
There have been many times in my life when I have been surrounded by a feeling that God is present. The most poignant times have been moments of great vulnerability or fear, times when I was forced to acknowledge the many things that were beyond my control. (Precious little, dear Reader, is within my control.) Nonetheless, God’s presence produced moments of profound comfort: these were times when my soul felt lost and alone and helpless, and suddenly there was a way forward.
Is it possible I’ve taken those moments for granted? Or simply trusted God would always be available when life humbled me and I needed God most?
Seek the Lord while he may be found. Why? Because there may come a time when God hides his face from us–not because he abandons us, but because we’ve gotten lost.
Blake Daniel’s message on Isaiah 64 connected it to a moment in Genesis. Isaiah calls out for God to tear open the heavens and come down; in Genesis, after Adam and Eve, guilt-ridden and ashamed, hide in the Garden of Eden, God enters the garden and calls out, “Where are you?”
The tension between these two moments–one, where a prophet looks for a way out of the wilderness, and another, when a shepherd calls to his flock–feels hard to make sense of. God loves us, but we are prone to error. God redeems us, because we are prone to error. Does God abandon us when we err? What’s our capacity to become lost?
Isaiah was convinced that his people were in the wilderness, so to speak, because they had collectively turned away from God. I have always resisted the impulse to assign the bad things that happen in our lives to some collective sin. It feels dramatically off, for example, for me to accept that a terrorist attack, or an economic recession, or a pandemic occurred because American society permits or legalizes something un-Christian. There are a lot of examples in Old Testament literature that support that idea, though.
Today I will ponder on the idea that God, unlike the conveniences we demand from our modern lives, might not be the 24/7 concierge we pretend him to be. Or that we take for granted. God is not Time and Temperature. Sometimes we get lost. Sometimes we wander off.
In an Advent season, a time of waiting, that totally tracks. Seek God while God is there to be found. And if you can’t find God, spend some time in deep prayer and anticipation. The capital-letter Good News, of course, is that God will eventually show up.
RUTH ANN OLP
I have so enjoyed your writings. I agree with so much that you have written,,I also at times have felt somewhat lost, like a sheep who wanders off but I have been able to amble back to the flock, so to speak. I am reading Luke during this time of advent and meditating on the words. Thank you for your gift of writing