The Guinness Book of World Records keeps track of some very unusual records. The 1999 edition contains one entry titled “The longest time living in a tree.” It seems a man in Indonesia named Bungkas went up a tree in 1970 and has been there ever since. He lives in a crude tree house he made from the branches and leaves of the trees.
No one knows exactly why he took up residence in a tree, but 29 years later he was still there. Neighbors, friends and family have repeatedly tried to get him to come down, but he won’t. (1)
I can hear them urging him now. “Come down, Bungkas, come down.” But he doesn’t budge.
That’s an unusual story for this First Sunday of Advent, but it reminds me of today’s lesson from the Old Testament. The prophet Isaiah cries out to God, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down . . .”
Isaiah’s desperate plea was the result of a great feeling of helplessness in the face of two troubling phenomena: the suffering and the sinfulness of God’s people.
The people of Israel have known great suffering throughout their history. It was true in Isaiah’s time and it was even more true in the twentieth century when Hitler and his Nazi storm troopers put millions of Jews to death. And, to a lesser extent, it is still true today. Jews are still under attack even in the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”
On the one hand the Jewish people believe themselves to be a chosen people with a special relationship with God. On the other hand, there have been times when God seemed very far away from them.
Did you know, by the way, that Columbus took several Jews along on his historic voyages—as interpreters? He assumed that any Indians or Orientals he would encounter would probably be primitive and would therefore speak God’s language—Hebrew.
That was a naïve expectation, of course, but it is true that the Jews had this very special relationship with God. They thought of themselves as God’s chosen people. How is it possible, however, to reconcile the notion “We are God’s chosen people,” with the reality of six million Jews slain under Hitler alone? We can appreciate the difficult dilemma faced by the devout Jew as he or she wrestles with what it means to be a descendant of Abraham in the face of such unmitigated tragedy.
It’s like a story that the great writer and Jewish activist Elie Wiesel [eli vizel] used to tell. Wiesel himself was a Holocaust survivor. He would tell about a Jewish rabbi during that terrible time. The rabbi would faithfully come to the synagogue each day and pray, “I have come to inform You, Master of the Universe, that we are here.”
As the toll of slain, deported, missing Jews increased, he still came faithfully and prayed, “You see, Lord, we are still here.” Finally, he is the only Jew left alive. With a heart that is numb with grief he comes to the synagogue once more and prays, “You see, I am still here.” Then sadly he asks, “But You, where are You?”
Which of us in our time of personal grief has not asked that same question? Where were you, God, when my son was in that terrible accident? Where were you, God, when my wife suffered so terribly before succumbing to breast cancer?
Or, as we view the world’s enormous problems such as out-of-control viruses, who has not asked, “Why doesn’t God just come down and straighten the whole mess out? Then there would be no more starvation or war or oppression or sickness and death. Why don’t you come down?” Isaiah, the most sensitive of all the prophets of Israel, was struck to the very core of his being with the suffering of his people.
Just as troubling, however, was the sinfulness of his people. Listen as Isaiah prays, “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away. 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.”
More than any other faith on the face of the globe, the Jewish faith is one of doing right. The Jews were called together as a people to give witness to God’s moral law. They had the Law before they had a temple or a homeland. This was their mission, the reason for their election—to maintain that Law.
In the beginning, they believed, God created man and woman to live in perfect harmony with creation and with the Creator. But something was amiss in the very heart of humanity. Something there was that alienated human beings from their environment, from their fellow human beings, and even from the loving God who had created them. That something was humanity’s sinful nature.
It was sin that dug a chasm between God and humanity. It was sin that made humanity unacceptable to God—for the very nature of God is holiness, righteousness. Thus, the Psalmist wrote, “Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? The one who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not trust in an idol or swear by a false god . . .” (Psalms 24:3-5).
The Law was given to bring light to humanity’s dark existence. But here were God’s people who were to witness to His Law, and they were people with dirty hands and impure hearts. That sounds like us today, doesn’t it? We, too, are people with dirty hands and impure hearts.
We are like three young men in the Bible Belt many years ago who were caught red-handed breaking the Sabbath. Guilt-ridden for their sins and fearful of the punishment they were likely to receive, they stood before their stern pastor. They shook with fear as he asked for an explanation of their behavior.
The first young man, feeling great guilt, said, “Sir, I was absentminded and forgot that yesterday was the Sabbath.”
“That could be,” replied the pastor. “You are forgiven.”
Also very upset, the second young man said he too was absentminded. “I forgot that I was not allowed to gamble on the Sabbath,” was his excuse.
“Well, that could also be,” said the pastor. “You are forgiven.”
Finally, the pastor turned to the young man in whose home these events occurred. “Well, what is your excuse? I suppose you were absentminded, too!”
“I sure was, sir,” said the lad, who was a known troublemaker and the instigator of the card game. “I forgot to pull the shades down!” (2)
There is something about that young man’s attitude that strikes me as being quite contemporary. There is a rule that we associate with professional basketball, “no harm, no foul.” If I don’t get caught, it’s all right. If no one gets hurt, what’s the sweat? It’s only myself that I’m hurting, so it is my business, isn’t it?
Somehow, we, like ancient Israel, have deluded ourselves into thinking that sin is no big deal. We ignore its power to destroy health and home, to damage our witness and impede spiritual growth. We disregard its power to block our view of God and leave us slaves to our own passions. It was as a warning to us that Jesus taught, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). In other words, there is something about sin that coats the soul with grime and prevents us from seeing God. Rare are those who listen, however, until it is too late.
A policeman watched as a young man backed his car around the block. Then he did it again, and again. Finally the policeman stopped the young man and asked him why he was driving backward. At first the youth didn’t want to explain the reasons for his strange behavior, but eventually he admitted that he had borrowed his father’s car for the evening and because he had driven farther than he had promised his father that he would drive, he was backing up to try to take some of the miles off the odometer.
Isaiah saw that there was no hope that Israel could save itself from the moral abyss into which it was drifting. The only hope was that God would come down and bring healing to his people. “Why don’t you come down and save us not only from our suffering but also from our sin,” Isaiah was pleading. It is in this context that he uses a very familiar image to us. “Yet you, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.”
Isaiah knew that only God could remove the flaw from the fragile clay of humanity. That is the second reason that Isaiah cried out for God to come down—the sinfulness of God’s people.
But there is one more thing to say. That is this: God has come down. That, of course, is what Advent is all about. From beyond time and space, down past the galaxies and all the heavenly firmament, in an event that surpasses our grandest attempt to get our little brains around it, God has come down. In a little obscure town outside of Jerusalem, in a lowly stable, He came as a tiny babe born to a humble couple from a backward village called Nazareth. God has come down. That which Isaiah prayed for has happened. God has come down in the person of Jesus Christ, and he is the answer to humanity’s suffering and sin.
There is a story told by the late Dr. John Claypool about a play written in 1945 by a German pastor named Guenter Rutenborn. This story was set at a time when Germany was still reeling from the tragic impact of World War II.
Many people in Germany were agonizing with the question of who was responsible for the terrible agony that the Second World War had brought upon the world. Characters in the play voiced the opinions of those who were looking for answers. Was Hitler alone responsible? How about the munitions manufacturers who financed him? Did an apathetic German population share the blame?
But then a man comes up out of the crowd and says, “Do you want to know who is really to blame for all the suffering we’ve been through? I’ll tell you. God is to blame. He is the one that created this world. He is the one who has let it be what it is.” Soon everyone on stage is echoing the same indictment: “God is to blame. God is to blame.”
And so, God is put on trial for the crime of creating the world . . . and is found guilty. The judge sentences God to what he considers to be the worst of all sentences. He sentences God to live on this earth as a human being. Three archangels are given the task of carrying out the sentence.
The first archangel walks to the end of the stage and says, “I’m going to see to it when God serves His sentence that He knows what it’s like to be obscure and to be poor. He will be borne on the backside of nowhere with a peasant girl for His mother. There will be a suspicion of shame about his birth, and He will have to live as a Jew in a Jew‑hating world.”
The second archangel adds to that harsh penalty: “I’m going to see to it when God serves his sentence that He knows what it’s like to fail and to suffer disappointment. No one will ever understand what He is trying to do.”
The third archangel said, “I’m going to see to it when God serves His sentence that He knows what it’s like to suffer. I’m going to see to it that He has all kinds of physical pain. At the end of His life, He’s going to be absolutely executed in as painful a way as possible.”
And suddenly the three archangels disappear and the houselights go down. (3) And the audience is left for a few moments in darkness as the reality dawns upon each member of the audience that God has already served his sentence. He knew what it’s like to be obscure and to be poor. He knew what it’s like to fail and to suffer disappointment. He knew what it’s like to suffer an excruciating death. He experienced it all in the life and death of Jesus Christ.
Jesus is the answer to humanity’s suffering and sin. He has come down, but the world has yet to receive him. For you see, what he offers us is himself alone. We want hope. He is hope. We want peace. He is peace. We want love. He is love. The problem is we want hope, but we don’t want him. We want peace, but we don’t want him. We want love, but we don’t want him. We want to achieve a world without suffering or sin, but we do not want to open our own lives so that he might begin his healing and reconciling work through us. There is no other way, however. Without him there is no hope, no peace, no love available to this world.
Once there was a little girl named Annika, not quite four. Annika was fascinated by a waste basket filled with scraps of fabric left over from one of her mother’s recent sewing projects. Annika decided to root through the scraps of fabric and retrieve some brightly colored scraps for herself. She took the scraps out to the back garden. Her mother found her there sitting in the grass with a long pole. Annika was affixing the scraps of cloth to the top of the pole with great sticky wads of tape. “I’m making a banner for a procession,” she said. “I need a procession so that God will come down and dance with us.”
“With that,” says her mother, “she solemnly lifted her banner to flutter in the wind and slowly she began to dance.” (4)
That spoke to my imagination—the idea of God coming down to earth to dance with His children.
“Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down . . .” Isaiah prayed. That prayer was answered. He has come down. Now all we have to do is to receive Him and to make Him known to a sin-filled and suffering world. How about you? He has come down. Will you receive him now?
1. Tom Weller, https://catapult.co/stories/when-the-most-amazing-marvels-from-every-corner-of-the-globe-came-to-indiana.
2. Contributed. Source unknown.
3. Rev. Dr. John Claypool, “God Became What We Are,” 30 Good Minutes, Chicago Sunday Evening Club, 1994, http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/claypool_3812.htm. (Adapted).
4. Gertrud Mueller Nelson, To Dance with God: Family Ritual and Community Celebration, (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 3.