O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.
This is not a polite prayer. This is desperation given
public voice. This is a prophet standing in the ruins
of everything his people once knew—their temple
destroyed, their city emptied, their identity shattered in
exile’s aftermath. They are back in the land of promise,
but that promise rings hollow now.
Isaiah lifts his eyes, and he raises his voice. He does
not ask God to gently descend dove-like or send some
subtle sign. He begs God: rip the heavens apart. Come
crashing down with so much force that the mountains
quake and nations tremble, especially our adversaries.
Let them know you are God. O that you would tear open
the heavens and come down. Desperation given voice.
I think of the many souls who have sat across from
me—face-to-face, exhausted, hollow, finished with
proper praying. I hear their voices. I’ve been asking
God for years, and nothing has changed. I used to
believe faith mattered. What now, pastor? The prayer of
people who have run out of patience with polite piety,
people who need more than platitudes about God
works in mysterious ways. This is faith pushed to its
breaking point. This is faith holding on by its fingernails,
demanding that God show up—not someday, not in the
sweet by and by, not “in his time,” but now.
And this is where Advent begins. Not with the dog
treat advent calendars we saw at the grocery store—
God help us. Not with Starbucks playlists or the warm
glow of nostalgia.
Advent starts in the dark. In the waiting that grinds
you down. In the gap between promise and reality. My
friends, Advent ain’t easy. It is work to wait.
Isaiah recalls the rubble. His people, ripped from their
homeland, forced to live where their songs sound
foreign and their God had failed them. The temple—
the very place where heaven touched earth, the locus
and focus of their hope—is in ruins. Everything that
anchored their identity, destroyed. They are back at
home and yet still somehow lost. What’s more: they
have stopped trying. They have stopped praying. They
have stopped reaching for God. There is no one who
calls on your name, the prophet says. No one who
attempts to take hold of you.
And maybe you know what that feels like. Maybe you
know what it is to stop praying, to stop reaching, to stop
trying, to stop hoping. Maybe you know exile from the life
you thought you’d have. Maybe you know exile from the
purpose you once pursued, now evaporated. Maybe you
know exile from the God you thought you could trust.
This week, my sister, a pre-K teacher in North Carolina,
received a text from the mother of a four-year-old
student in her class. “Dear teacher, due to recent events,
I am afraid to send my son to school. I know you take
good care of them, but I am always afraid. I hope you
will excuse me. God bless you, teacher.”
Exile. A mother who fears sending her child to school.
This is our story. This is the world we have made, the
world we have learned to live with. I am always afraid.
Always afraid. Always. And somewhere, we decided that
was acceptable. That a mother’s constant fear for her
child is just the way things are now. We look away. It’s
someone else’s problem.
You have hidden your face from us, Isaiah says. But I
wonder if the prophet has it backwards. Maybe we’re
the ones who have hidden our faces. From her. From
what we have become.
What have we become? It’s a good question to begin
the season of Advent. What have we become? When
did we learn to live with this? When did cruelty become
tolerable as long as it doesn’t touch us? And have we
stopped believing anything will change? Anything can
change? Anything should change?
Have we made our peace with the way things are? Have
we called it realism? Have we called it pragmatism?
Have we called exile home? Maybe this is why we stop
reaching. Isaiah tells the hard truth: There is no one who
calls on your name. Not just ancient Israel. That’s us.
Isaiah prays a desperate prayer. It is heavy with doubt.
He dares God to act. O that you would tear open the
heavens and come down.
You see, Isaiah wants divine intervention on a cosmic
scale. He wants those mountains to shake and the
heavens to split. He wants God roaring into the
wreckage to fix what we’ve broken beyond repair.
And I have prayed that prayer, that aching for God
to show up. Just once, sweep in and make it all right.
Rescue the ones who suffer for no reason. Rip the
heavens apart and fix this.
But then Isaiah stops mid-sentence. Suddenly, the tone
turns tender. The cry for cosmic correction gives way to
intimacy. It happens in a single word in verse 8. Yet. Yet,
you, O Lord, are our Father; you are the potter, and we
the clay.
One verse earlier, Isaiah was demanding that God tear
open the sky. Now he claims kinship. You made us.
We belong to you. You belong to us. In the middle of a
hopeless prayer, something significant shifts. Isaiah
reaches all the way back to the beginning. He reaches
to the God who formed Adam from dust, coming close
enough to breathe life into human clay. He remembers.
He remembers that this God chooses love over power.
Proximity over distance.
Isaiah knew it in his bones. He built his whole life
around it. His call to a prophetic career was grounded
in this hope. He Preached it, and he prayed it. He
proclaimed it, and he declared it. He repeated it over
and over again. And Isaiah died waiting for the answer.
So did his children. And their children. And their
children. For five centuries, this prayer hangs in the air,
unanswered. Generation on generation of God’s people
live in the waiting, passing this prophetic promise on like
one of those family heirlooms no one knows quite what
to do with.
How long, O Lord? they pray. How long, O Lord?
Advent ain’t easy.
Sometimes we must prepare the way for a hope we will
never see. Sometimes we are not the ones who get to
hold the baby. We are the ones who keep the prayer
alive for those who will.
Isaiah holds God to account. You promised. You
promised! You created us. You simply cannot abandon
what you made.
I’ve heard that prayer. I will never forget it. A mother in
tears of anger, hands gripping mine, praying over her
son held captive by addiction. She prayed the most
honest prayer I have ever heard. “God, you knit him
together. God, you know every part of him. Don’t you
dare give up on him now.”
That’s Isaiah’s prayer. Holding God to God’s promise.
Perhaps you’ve prayed that prayer.
Last September, Hurricane Helene hit my parents’
home in western North Carolina. We lost contact with
them early on a Friday morning. From there, there were
no calls, no texts, cell service down everywhere. We
followed the news and hoped to hear.
We spent Friday night and Saturday morning doing the
only thing we could: praying. Not tidy prayers. These
weren’t polished prayers. We were praying through
clenched teeth, and tight chest, and sweaty palms. We
were hanging on by the fingernails of faith. And then
Saturday at 10 AM, an unknown number lit up my phone.
And I braced for the news.
My mother’s voice. My waiting ended with good news.
But the truth is, for many it never comes. Those twenty-
four hours in the dark. The illusion of control evaporated. I
couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t reach them. I was utterly useless.
We are the clay. Dependent. Breakable. Every single
one of us can be shattered by one storm, one loss,
one unexpected moment. We will all break. The self-
sufficient. The proud. The powerful. No one escapes it.
We will all break.
And because we are all clay, we are all kin. With tender
care, God made that little boy my sister teaches. With
tender care, God made his fearful mother. With the
same tender care, God made every person who lives in
terror and every one of us who has learned to look away.
We are all the work of God’s hands. And if God will not
abandon them, neither can we.
Remember, Advent ain’t easy. And this is where hope
becomes demanding.
You see, the God who comes at Christmas will not arrive
as a conqueror. God comes as one of the vulnerable,
one who knows what it means to need help. And if that’s
where God is—with the afraid, with the displaced, with
the ones who must hide in fear—then that’s where we
must be too.
This week, I trust that there is one person in your life
who is waiting, and you know who that person is. Stay
with them. Sit with them. Wait with them.
As a church, we must do it together. The families living
in fear of a knock at the door. The ones who’ve worn
out their welcome. The ones whose lives hang in the
balance. The ones whose problems don’t have simple
solutions. The world will offer quick fixes, and when they
fail, it will walk away in resignation. Just the way it is.
But we stay. We do it differently. We sit in the darkness
and insist that somehow, someway, light is still coming.
We beg God to tear open the heavens and come down.
And then we remember we are the work of God’s own
hands, called to be about the work of God’s hands in
the world.
This is the ancient call of our faith, what the church
does that no organization, no program, no policy can
do. Isaiah held that prayer his whole life, and now it’s
our turn.
Advent demands we stop hiding our faces. We are all
the work of your hand. And we who follow this God must
join that work. We must become a church that looks like
Jesus—the refugee, the one in need of protection, the
child of God who knew what it meant to need help.
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.
Very soon, we will hear the answer to Isaiah’s prayer.
Very soon, we will see the God whose face is now
hidden. Very soon, we will hear the voice of our creator.
And it will not come in thunder that shakes mountains.
It will come in the cry of an infant.
God’s final answer to our desperate prayer is to become
desperately dependent on us. A baby, who must be
fed, and held, and protected. A vulnerable child whose
parents will flee under the cover of night to keep him
safe. Yes, the heavens will be torn apart, not from above
but from below. Not in power, but in need.
The hope we long for has a name. Emmanuel.
The God who holds us comes to be held by us. Amen.