Advent Waiting:  Placing our Lives in the Potter’s Hands

      My kayak found its winter resting place earlier this month. The paddle and pfd were put away. The roof racks have been lowered, no longer at the ready. I wait for a day when the thermometer breaks 60 and the wind isn’t howling as winter descends. Soon I’ll be waiting for ice to melt in the lakes and ponds I frequent. I look forward to the days when the waiting changes and I am waiting to see what I’ll see on the first day on the water: migrating ducks, a raccoon washing its paws after a fish dinner, an eagle soaring above. 

     You’ve probably got your own way of tracking the seasons of waiting. The passive times when you can do nothing; the period of preparation; and then the less burdensome phase when what you’ve been waiting for arrives: vacation; the beginning or end of school; the annual gathering of special friends; the time when the trials and travails of the year 2020 have become a distant memory. Think of that wonderful kind of waiting. Notice how the joy of what you’re waiting for seeps into the time while you’re waiting. Recall the good feelings that well up when you are actively waiting for something or someone special.

     That’s the kind of waiting the prophet gets around to voicing in Isaiah 64. 1-9. Oh, it may not seem so at first, with Isaiah crying for God to “tear open the heavens and come down.” Yet, if we listen carefully to all that Isaiah is saying, we get a glimpse of what and whom we are to be waiting over the next four weeks.

     Isaiah’s cry to the Lord speaks for us in many ways, does it not? After all, there are days when we look at the world around us, and after a good long look find ourselves wanting to say to God: “Do something about this, will ya!” With each report of positive Covid cases; with every day’s addition to the election that never ends; as the list of scandals grows, and we watch the celebration of Christ’s birth morph into Happy Honda Day and Hundai Holidays; we’re ready to join Isaiah in calling on God to “Tear open the heavens and come down.”

     We may not be in exile as were the people to whom Isaiah was writing, but we may have some of the same impatience when it comes to wanting to see God’s sending some help to straighten out the multiple messes that color the world as we know it now. That is why it is important to listen closely to what the prophet is saying for us and to us. By remembering what God has done, and reminding the people of it too, Isaiah is introducing an element of hope. A favorite old hymn sums it up nicely. “Our God our help in ages past, our hope for years to come.”

Isaiah’s words hint at what we’re waiting for in Advent: a savior. Isaiah’s words proclaim why we need saving:

            “We have all become like one who is unclean,
                    and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.
                We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
                There is no one who calls on your name
                    or attempts to take hold of you;”
                    for you have hidden your face from us,
                    and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.” (Isaiah 64. 6-7)

     Isaiah identifies how humanity strays from the Creator’s ways. It fits us all too well. But notice this: Isaiah doesn’t leave it at that. He takes the spotlight from us and puts it back on God, and in doing so, reminds us all what we’re really in need of; what it is we are waiting for:

            “Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;
            we are the clay, and you are our potter;
            we are all the work of your hand.” (vs. 8)

Those words draw us back to an earlier verse that sounds the note of hope we so need to hear:

            “From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived,
            no eye has seen any God besides you,
            who works for those who wait for him.” (vs, 4)

     In the reminder that God works for those who wait for him, in the image of through the image of the Father and the Potter, Isaiah is telling us something important. Professor Scott Ba-der-Saye suggests these images, which speak of “closeness and personal connection…evoke a God whose mode of action looks more like that of the artist or the parent than that of a superhero. God forms and shapes the people as a father over time shapes the character of his children, as a potter lovingly molds her clay. Isaiah calls on Israel to be malleable in the hands of God, and he reminds God to fulfill the task of forming Israel into a people of blessing.”[i]

Such is the waiting of Advent: waiting for God, allowing God to shape us into the people we were created to be. Following the example of those who have gone before us and who show us the way to go and to be, like the one featured in this poem Favored Is As Favored Does - https://youtu.be/3mpGd2GuqEE

[i]Scott Bader-Saye, Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 1, ©2008, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY, p. 6