December 3, 2023
First Week of Advent
Rev. Chip Roland
When I was a kid, I became obsessed for a while with reading the accounts of emergency room doctors. I remember the magazine Scientific American used to feature a regular column with their stories. I don’t think this account came from that series but I think I read it about the same time. A woman came in after her dog became unexpectedly violent and bit her on the face. This left a ragged tear running down through her upper lip that was, among other things, significantly disfiguring. The doctor recalls this woman’s profound emotional distress at her injury to the extent that she didn’t wish for anybody she knew to see her. When she finally allowed her husband to come in, he sat down next to her, locked eyes with her and held her hand. He told her she was beautiful, and the wound wasn’t so bad, that they would take care of it together. It was entirely what she needed to hear at the time. I’ll never forget what the doctor wrote next. He said he looked away. He looked away, he said because he was raised a good Jewish kid. And the rabbis always taught him that he was not supposed to look at the face of God.
Now, what did he mean by that? I know he wasn’t saying that this woman’s husband was somehow God. I think he was saying that in the intimacy, in the healing tenderness of the moment, in the love on display, God tore open the heavens and came down. This inner sanctum of the old temple was referred to as the Holy of Holies. It was where the ark of the covenant was kept. It was what anthropologists might call a conceptual center of the world. It was where earth rose to meet heaven descending and the presence of God was uniquely potent. In the hospital, you often find yourself walking in to rooms that are Holy of Holies for patients and their families. They are in the most intimate circumstances of their life, and God is infused through it.
This reading of Isaiah, or second Isaiah, or even third Isaiah depending on which scholars your pay attention to, the prophet looks towards the awesomeness of God’s presence on Earth in the past such as the time of the Exodus to give himself hope for the restoration of his people following the Babylonian conquest of Judah. The language is full of fire and quaking mountains and trembling nations. But he also acknowledged that these deeds of God can be as unexpected as they are tremendous. He shifts gears and solicits God’s forgiveness by calling Him a potter, and the people of Zion the clay. It’s surprisingly intimate image compared to the intensity and scope this passage opened with. Hope, for salvation, for redemption, for a future that comforts the trauma of the past, can blossom in many types of soil.
This is the season of hope, the time in our advent cycle where we explore and embrace it through music and reading and art. So it calls us to ask, in what soil does this hope grow? Perhaps it is in this. The God who’s presence causes the quaking of the mountains, the Son of Man who will come in the clouds in great power and glory, is also the God who came to earth as a newborn in a stable, present and within the very essence of human vulnerability, just as he is present with you in the midst of your vulnerability. Perhaps our hope is within never forgetting to hold in precarious balance that this God of terrifying cosmic majesty is also the one who’s Spirit is present in emergency rooms.
In Mark, Jesus calls his disciples to be alert. It’s clear in the context that he is referring to the end times, the eschaton when heaven and earth will fall away, and be made new. But alertness is important in all of the Christian walk. Be aware of God tearing open that thing, maybe that conceptual thing that divides the realm of the Holy and the earthly. God is with us, God is among us in the grungy uncertainties of our life, on the hard roads, the holidays that don’t fit the commercial ideal, in a baby born in the cold outside the walls of an inn.
© Rev. Chip Roland, 2023, All Rights Reserved
Westminster Presbyterian Church | 1420 W. Moss Ave. | Peoria, Illinois 61606
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“What goes through your mind as you sit in the sanctuary and look around?
As I sit in my pew and look up at the cross with the wonderful light illuminating it, I am reminded of why I am at Westminster on this particular day. The cross reminds me that Christ died for me and, in a sense, I am to do the same in my daily life. The brightness of the cross illustrates for me the brightness of living my life in the way of Christ.”