Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 27, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Some of you probably know the play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. It’s a modern classic. It is a story of two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who are waiting for a character named Godot. They wait, and wait, and wait. Various things happen to them while they wait, but Godot never shows up. The author always denied that Godot represents God, but this denial, which sounds rather disingenuous to me, hasn’t stopped that notion, that Godot represents God, from becoming a common interpretation of the play. Interpreted that way, the play is an allegory of the human experience of the absence of God.

It’s an important theme. Around here we talk a lot about the presence of God. That’s an important theme too, and ultimately it trumps the experience of God’s absence. Yet that is not to minimize the reality or the significance of the opposite experience, the experience of the absence of God. The absence of God is a major theme in the literature of the second half of the twentieth century, and Waiting for Godot is a prime example of that literature, Beckett’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. After the horrors of two world wars, a major depression, and the Holocaust, many, perhaps most, people in the Western cultures, especially in Europe, concluded that there is no God or that there might as well not be. Their experience was that even if there is a God, God has abandoned us and left us to wallow and suffer in our own murderous brutality. That absence of God rendered life for these people hopeless and meaningless. Hence, we got existentialist literature with titles like No Exit. God is absent, and we have no hope. That’s a major theme of twentieth century European literature, and given what Europe lived through in the twentieth century, it’s not a hard one to understand.

The experience of the absence of God, however, isn’t limited to European intellectuals. I suspect that a lot of you have had that experience too. I know I have. I mean, let’s face reality. I often say at the beginning of our service that we come to enter into the presence of God, but look around. I see people and pews. walls and windows, a carpet and a cross, but I don’t see God. I hear my voice, and through this service I hear people singing and children babbling, but I don’t hear God. I feel my feet on the floor and my hands on the pulpit. I feel warm under this robe, but I don’t feel God. If someone came in here and asked me to point out God, I couldn’t do it. If we rely on our ordinary senses the only conclusion we can reach is that God is absent-if, that is, God exists at all. That’s how it is with me, and I suspect with you.

And here’s an interesting thing. At least some of the authors of the Bible had the same experience. Our reading from Isaiah this morning is a prime example. There the author, writing in the late sixth or early fifth century BCE, or some 2,400 years more or less before Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot, said: "Because you hid yourself, we trespassed." Isaiah 64:5c (NRSV only) And: "For you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity." Isaiah 64:7 Who knew this Isaiah was a twentieth century European existentialist?! But he sure sounds like one. This Isaiah knew the experience of the absence of God. He had that experience; and both the Jewish tradition whose book Isaiah primarily is, and the Christian tradition that has adopted it, have had no trouble including this book and this passage in their Holy Scripture. Our tradition does not deny or reject this experience. It recognizes it, validates it, and even sanctifies it. It is part of the universal religious experience of humanity; and if it sounds paradoxical to call an experience of the absence of God a religious experience, please remember that all profound religious experience is paradoxical.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. The people who created the Revised Common Lectionary that I use here included this passage from Isaiah in today’s readings as an Advent text. The reason for that may not be immediately apparent, but I think making this text an Advent text is perfectly appropriate. After all, what is Advent? It is a period of waiting for the birth of Jesus. And what is the birth of Jesus? For us Christians it is nothing less than the appearance of God in the world in the person of an infant boy. We’ll get there. We’ll get to celebrate the birth of Jesus, but we aren’t there yet. We are just beginning our period of waiting.

And that waiting assumes that what we’re waiting for isn’t here yet. Now, I know as well as you that as an historical matter the event we say we’re waiting for happened over 2,000 years ago. So on one level it makes no sense to say that we’re waiting for it and that it hasn’t happened yet. But that’s historical thinking, and historical thinking is very limited thinking. We aren’t speaking history here. We’re speaking what the Greeks called "mythos," that deeper thinking, that thinking in images and symbols, that gets at truth history can’t touch. And we’re speaking liturgy, that ritual commemoration and reenactment of the mythos that connects us with that truth that is so much deeper than mere historical fact. Mythically speaking, and liturgically speaking, what we’re waiting for hasn’t happened yet. This is Advent not Christmas. For us from today until Christmas Day-well, we do fudge it a bit here so for us from today until Christmas Eve, or at least until the last Sunday before Christmas when we’ll have our children’s Christmas pageant-Jesus isn’t here yet.

In other words, for the next four weeks for us Jesus is absent, and since we’re Christians that means that for us God is absent. This is the season for us to live not Immanuel, God with us, but to live Isaiah 64:7a: You have hidden your face from us. So I invite you to live for a while with a God who has hidden God’s face from us. For that is a spiritual reality too, or at least it too is a valid, authentic spiritual experience. And it is appropriate for Advent, for the time of waiting for that which, mythically and liturgically speaking, is not here yet.

That may sound like I’m inviting you to spend Advent in despair. Despair after all really is nothing more or less than the experience of the unreality of God, as the great Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard so powerfully taught, and experiencing the absence of God can be a lot like experiencing the unreality of God. That, however, is not what I’m inviting you to do. Advent may be a time to experience the absence of God, but despair is not the appropriate Christian attitude for Advent. Rather, the appropriate Christian attitude is the one set by our first Advent candle, which burns now before us. It is the candle of hope, and it is the first candle of Advent because it sets the tone for all the others. Hope is the appropriate attitude for Advent.

Yes, hope is the appropriate attitude for Advent, but what is hope? I’ve preached on hope here several times before. The best definition of it that I’ve heard, and that I’ve shared with you before, comes from the great Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall. It goes like this: Faith is trust, and hope is faith applied to the future. In other words, hope is trust applied to the future. As we live through Advent in the absence of God we do so not in despair but in hope. We can have hope because our experience is not that God is not real but only that God is absent. So we can trust that Christmas will come, God will appear, God’s absence will turn to presence, and our time of waiting will end.

We live in that hope for now, but our hope does not by itself, mythically and liturgically speaking, end God’s absence. For that we have to wait. For now, God is absent. The Christ candle is not yet lit. Mary is still pregnant, herself awaiting the hoped for birth. The manger is empty. The shepherds are just tending their flocks as always, unaware of what God is about to reveal to them. The Wise Men have seen no star. The world waits and hopes. We wait and hope. May God bless our time of waiting and of hoping. Amen.