A Beautiful Ending

Isaiah 65:17-25

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

22 December 2024

            We humans long for a beautiful ending.  Not just the fairy tale happily ever after, but in the biggest and grandest sense of the idea.  We dream and long for history to arrive at a beautiful ending, whether that’s the communist utopia or the kingdom of God or a scientific techno culture that has expanded human habitation into the stars.  The historian John Jeffries Martin has revealed the ways in which this vision of a beautiful ending not only animates our religious ideas but is also embedded in our modern political ideas, which imagine a better, more just world of freedom and equality.

            This Advent we’ve been exploring the beautiful endings imagined by the Hebrew prophets.  And, in particular, how those visions of God’s redemption are rooted in the here and now, with rather ordinary, mundane visions of the good life—old people at rest, children playing, young people making merry, everyone with plenty of food to eat, where work is fulfilling and we can enjoy the fruits of our labor, where the disabled are included, people feel safe and secure, where griefs are comforted, and together we joyfully celebrate with dancing and music. 

            And today’s reading from the Book of Isaiah adds to the wonderful imagery.  The poet dreams of a new heaven and a new earth.  God is about the work of new creation, and that new creation will be filled with joy and delight.  The great Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann writes about this passage, “[God] is moving beyond what is troubling and unresolved to what is wondrously new and life giving.”

            And what will this newness look like?  Again it is very practical, very here and now.  God is creating a new city, a new social arrangement.  Walter Brueggemann identifies three qualities of this divinely new society. 

            First, there will be “stability and order that guarantees long life.”  In a world of violence, where lives are so often cut short by the bombs of war or a random shooter, what a blessed dream that we could be safe enough to enjoy long life free of those horrors. 

            The second quality of Isaiah’s vision is economic stability.  There will enough to go around.  Our work will not be in vain.  We will not live in fear that someone else will take what we have worked for.  Here’s how Brueggemann describes it:

[God] will be the guarantor of a viable, community-sustaining economy. . . .  Nobody is threatened.  Nobody is at risk.  Nobody is in jeopardy because the new city has policies, practices, and protective structures that guarantee . . . an egalitarian possibility.

            And the final quality of the beautiful ending Isaiah imagines—“an agenda of well-being for our children.”

            This October, Wendell Berry, the great American poet, essayist, and social critic, who is a deep person of faith and a Kentucky farmer, wrote a scathing cover article for The Christian Century entitled “Against Killing Children” in which he condemns our society for not “prevent[ing] our own children from being killed in their classrooms—and who do not much mind the killing of other people’s children by weapons of war.”  According to Berry, we have become the exact opposite of what Isaiah envisions.  Ours is not a society that prioritizes the well-being of children.

            Yet, in the face of our troubled, disappointing reality, we return again and again to visions like Isaiah’s.  We want to imagine something new, something better.  We long for this.  We want to prepare for it.  We keep waiting and hoping for the beautiful ending.

            Advent, of course, is the season of hope.  A season of waiting and preparation.  The beautiful ending isn’t here yet, it’s still coming.  We are still longing for it.  We can imagine it, maybe even begin to taste it, but it isn’t here yet.  We’re doing what we can to prepare for it—hoping, loving each other, enjoying life, and practicing peace.  But, we are still waiting.

            And, truth be told, we keep on waiting.  For all the fun and excitement of Christmas morning, we know that when we return to normal routines next week, the world won’t have radically shifted, the beautiful ending will not have finally arrived in all its wonder.

            Which is one of the many reasons I appreciate the liturgical calendar of the church.  In the cycle of the year, our worship focuses on so many human emotions and experiences.  All of us have Good Fridays, for instance—days of deep and despairing darkness when all seems lost.  We also have Easter moments—filled with new life, the bright sunshine of a new dawn, a chance to begin again.  We face Ash Wednesdays, when we are confronted by our own limitations, our mortality, our vulnerability, our weaknesses, our sins.  But there are also Pentecost moments in our lives where we are filled with spirit, on fire with passion, capable of amazing things. 

            It’s not that every year we are in the same emotional place on the same day as the church calendar.  But all these aspects of the human condition are explored each year and over and over again, reminding us that our spirituality and our faith flow from and are present in all the varied aspects of our lives.

            Advent is that season of waiting and longing.  And sometimes what we are waiting and longing for, never quite arrives.

            On the Alban Institute blog this week I read a fine essay on the meaning of Advent.  When I shared it to the church Facebook group, a few of you responded, including one congregant who wrote, “Thanks for sharing....I'm right there.”

            The essay was by Jean Neely, who teaches writing at Azusa Pacific University, and she wrote about the profound depths of this season of longing:

Advent says that there’s room in the church for all of us whose desperate faith is more doubt and longing than steadiness of belief.

Advent is for the eternally bothered, those of us who too keenly feel our own pain and the world’s. The season meets us in our inability to perform “good cheer” or “great faith” when it is not well with our souls.

In Advent, we attend to the heartache over all that has gone awry. We join our yearnings for more love in our homes, our churches and our country; we cry for peace in Palestine, in Ukraine, in Sudan and around the globe.

            These reasons Neely articulates are why it is so important for us to observe Advent and not just rush into Christmas.  Not everyone is feeling as festive.  Each year there are people grappling with new losses and griefs who may want to be in the mood, but just can’t muster it.  Each year there are some people stressed out and made anxious by all the holiday preparations.  Each year there are some people dreading seeing family.  Each year there are some people for whom this season is always difficult, because of their memories of what has happened in the past.  Each year there are some people for whom this darkest and coldest part of the year brings on depression.  There are always folks who are more “In the Bleak Midwinter” than “Joy to the World!”  And Advent is for them.

            Jean Neely continues:

This time of year, we get to remember that we’re still in the waiting season, that though the Light has come, we’re still caught in the place of unfulfillment. It’s for all of us who never feel ready for Christmas or who feel like Christmas never quite comes in the ways we’d hoped.

Advent says that it’s OK to still be waiting through Christmas for God to show up. We’re allowed to “always always long for something.” Advent invites us to come with our fragile hope, our dimly flickering faith and our . . . longing to the Christ who welcomes all of who we are.

            The great truth of Christmas is that Christ was not born once long ago, but Christ is born anew in each of us every year, all the time.  The love, the power, the glory we encounter in Jesus of Nazareth is made available to us in our vulnerability by the Spirit of God that dwells within us. 

            God is present with us, and empowering us, even in our moments of unsatisfied and unfulfilled longing.  And because of that, we dare—despite the present circumstances and whatever might be troubling us—to gather together and lift our praises.  To sing with the angels and proclaim with the shepherds, while also pondering like Mary. 

            Because something good and wonderful and beautiful and true is happening.  In us, in others, in the world.  And we continue to hope for more of it to break out and spread and bring the change we so desire.  And we continue to practice peace, even if this world is violent.  And we continue to love, because that’s the greatest gift of all.  And we rejoice, because joy is our birthright as children of God.

            So, we do all of this together—we wait, we dream, we imagine, we lament and mourn and grieve, we wonder and prepare, we light the candles and ponder the darkness, we sit quietly and we make merry together.  We do all of it.  Because we continue to long for the beautiful ending, and our eyes are open to see all the little bits of it already present among us.

            A Happy Fourth Sunday of Advent.

A Blessed Solstice.

And, a Merry Christmas.