Have you ever said a prayer like Isaiah’s?  “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence!”  Isaiah doesn’t want God to make a quiet entrance.  Isaiah wants God to make an ENTRANCE!  God, come down to earth with footsteps so loud and heavy it makes the mountains quake!  Come down as a forest fire that burns so hot it made the water in rivers and lakes boil!  Make such a dramatic and grand entrance that the world trembles at your presence!

Sound like any of your prayers?  Have you ever been so discouraged with your life, or with the world in general, that you longed and prayed for God to tear open the heavens and come down and set things right?  Quaking mountains, boiling lakes, nations trembling, now that’s a God that could get some things done around here!  That’s a God that could dismantle unfair structures, melt hard hearts, topple arrogant egos.  “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence!”

What a prayer.  This prayer is a lament—it’s a prayer that mixes the depth of the writer’s pain with the depth of his faith.  This prayer was written about 500 years before the birth of Jesus, after the children of Abraham had returned to Jerusalem after spending about 60 years in exile.  You may remember us learning about the Exodus, and talking about that as the defining event in Jewish history.  Moses led the people out of slavery, and into a covenant where they promised to be faithful to God.  But the exile is probably the runner-up, the second most important event in Jewish history.  Around 597 BC, the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem and forced to make a life for themselves in foreign lands.  It was as if God said, “This is my holy city, and you don’t deserve to live here!”  The Hebrews understood the exile as God’s punishment on them for failing to hold up their end of the covenant, and so it was a very bleak time in the history of Judaism.  They had failed to keep God’s laws, failed to take their status as a holy nation seriously, and failed in their mission to be a blessing to the world.

After 60 years in exile, they were allowed to return to Jerusalem.  That’s good, right?  Well, yes and no. It was good to be back—but Jerusalem didn’t look anything like it used to! It reminds me of how, with COVID, we’re no longer under such strict quarantine, which is good.  But there’s a lot about life that is really different than it was two years ago.  That’s similar to the situation behind this prayer in Isaiah.  The Jews had been allowed back into Jerusalem, which was something to celebrate:  they had survived the period of exile, both physically and in terms of keeping their faith, and their city was still on the map.  But on the other hand, home didn’t look much like it used to!  Their city was destroyed by the foreigners who occupied it during the exile.  The temple was ruined.  Their holy spaces had been defiled.  So while they were glad to be back in Jerusalem, the task before them was overwhelming.  Their initial sadness and shock gave way to despair.  How long will it take to rebuild?  How long will it take until their city returns to its former splendor?

Apparently, longer than they thought it would!  Even though life was “back to normal” in many respects when this prayer was written, some crucial pieces are still missing.  See, Jerusalem was thought to be the dwelling place of God.  Even in Jesus’ day, there was still this religious snobbery—if you wanted to really worship, you had to go to Jerusalem, because that’s where the temple was, that’s where God’s headquarters were, so to speak.  To get kicked out of Jerusalem, during the exile, was a double punishment:  not only were they forced to leave their homes, they were forced away from the presence of God!  Now they are back in Jerusalem, but it seems to the writer of our prayer that while the people are back, God isn’t there!  They came back to Jerusalem, they cried and sweated and broke their backs to rebuild their lives in Jerusalem.  But something is missing.  The presence of God just isn’t there like it used to be.  And so the people got discouraged.  The writer in Isaiah says, “Because God hid himself, we sinned, because you hid yourself, we transgressed…we all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”

Come on, God, the prophet seems to be saying, do something!  Do something like you did before, when you did awesome deeds that we did not expect but that saved us from terrible situations.  Do something like you did back when we were slaves in Egypt!  Everyone knew who was God then!  Do something like that, and get us back on track, back where we belong.

Does that sound like a prayer you have ever prayed?  Not many of us have had to rebuild our lives after being in exile, or even after a flood or tornado like with Hurricane Ida this fall.  But many of have struggled or are struggling to rebuild our lives in the face of other struggles:  rebuilding after a divorce; rebuilding after an illness; rebuilding after losing a job; rebuilding after someone we loved and trusted disappointing us.  On some level, all of us understand this frustration that comes from finding out things often take longer than we thought!  All of us understand the despair that can set it when we don’t see progress.  All of us understand how easy it is to conclude that God is absent when we face difficult circumstances.

2500 years in between the writer of this passage of Isaiah and us, and the lament is basically the same:  we need you to make your presence known, God, in an unmistakable way.  Then the world will change.  People will know you are God.  They will stop sinning.  They will work together, and work for the common good.  Then we could rebuild your house, and we will all join in praising you together.  Come as an earthquake!  Come as a forest fire!  If you would just come, Lord, then things would change.  That’s verses 1 – 7 of our passage, a prayer as relevant today as it was over 2000 years ago.

But in verse 8, there is a change in the tone of the prayer.  “Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are the potter.”  Remember a few minutes ago when I said this prayer is a lament:  it’s a blending of the writer’s deep despair, and the writer’s deep faith.  This is a prayer that says, yes, Lord, things are bad.  Yes, Lord, it seems like maybe you’ve forgotten about us.  But!  In our text this morning it’s translated “yet”—three little letters that completely change the tone of the prayer.  All this bad stuff is true, but!  We are near despair, and yet!  We have not given up.  We believe you are God, and that you are with us even if it doesn’t feel that way.

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!  Come with loud footsteps.  Come with bright fire.  Come and take away our doubt, so we can know for sure that you are with us!”  We’re here this morning, in part, because of our faith that someday that will happen.  God will come and make all things new, and while we don’t know exactly what that looks like, we know it will be good!  But we are also here this morning because we know that God has already torn open the heavens and come down.  He came so quietly, only a handful of people heard him cry.  He came so gently, only the insides of a 15 year old virgin trembled and quaked.  He came so humbly, only one star marked his arrival.  But God did come.  And God is still with us.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent.  The church calendar sets aside four Sundays to help us prepare to receive the gift of the Christ child on Christmas.  Advent can be a frustrating time, because who wants to wait?  It’s much more fun to just start celebrating Christmas NOW.  But the wisdom of the liturgical calendar calls us to wait and prepare, so we don’t miss Christ’s presence in our lives when he comes.  Because while one day in the future, Christ will come in a dramatic fashion, like Isaiah prayed for, these days Jesus usually comes in ways that are easy to miss.

In our gospel lesson today, we heard a story from Matthew 13, how Jesus went back to his hometown after beginning his travelling ministry.  The people were shocked—where did this man get such wisdom?  Isn’t he the carpenter’s son?  Isn’t his mother Mary?  In other words, isn’t this guy just one of us, just a regular person?  They had no room in their imagination for the possibility that someone they knew well, someone they watched grow up, might be the long-awaited Messiah.  Jesus, he was the carpenter’s son, and nothing more.

But he was so much more, and Joseph was much more than a carpenter.  During this season of Advent, we are going to spend some time each week learning about Joseph.  The Bible tells us very little about him.  Only seventeen verses mention him by name.  In our passage today, Matthew refers to Joseph simply as a carpenter. This is the ordinary Greek word for someone who worked with wood.  Most buildings were constructed of stone in Jesus’ day, but wood was needed for doors, shutters, and furniture.  Wood was also used for farm implements.  Joseph earned his living crafting useful objects from wood, and taught his trade to Jesus.  When Jesus says, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me,” I imagine he had in mind learning to make yokes from Joseph.

The name Joseph would have been pronounced “Yosef” in Hebrew.  It means, “The Lord will add.”  What a great name for the man chosen to be the adoptive father of Jesus.  In the coming weeks, we will read about how Joseph added Jesus to his family, and provided for him and protected him.  We will read how it took the intervention of an angel to convince Joseph that the Lord had indeed come down.  Joseph was the very first Christian man, and we are all spiritually descended from him, just as we are descended from Father Abraham.  Joseph sets the example for us, of being open to seeing the presence of God in our midst.  I have hope that, if Joseph can do it, so can we.

One of my favorite parts of advent is the Advent wreath.  Today we light only one candle, the candle of hope.  It’s just a little glimmer.  But week by week, we will add more and more light, contradicting the diminishing amount of daylight we have week by week as we move toward Christmas.  It’s amazing what one little candle can do.  This one candle is the equivalent of our word, “Yet”—just three little letters that completely changes our perspective.  Isaiah and his people were suffering, wondering why they couldn’t sense God’s presence with them.  “Yet,” Isaiah claimed in faith, “you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.”  Even in the darkness, Isaiah was able to claim that God is not finished yet.  Several centuries later, James echoed Isaiah, encouraging us to “Be patient and stand firm, for the Lord is coming near.”

In our opening prayer, we confessed, we don’t really know how to prepare for Christ’s coming.  We don’t like waiting, we’re tired of keeping watch, we want God to get down here and fix things NOW!  We don’t really know how do Advent, but this year we have another chance to learn:  to learn how to welcome the baby Jesus into our hearts, how to embrace Jesus’ call to discipleship, and how to live abundantly and eternally.  May our hearts be soft and pliable, like clay in the hands of our Father, the Master Potter.  This Advent, let’s focus on drawing closer to the God who has come, is with us still, and will come again.  Amen.