Our nation is at war.  God’s American people and God’s Iraqi people and God’s people from many other nations are dying, and our country, and the world as well, is divided over whether this war is a just and righteous one or the worst travesty of modern times.  The United States and our neighbors to the south have been pounded over and over by storms of a magnitude that you and I can hardly imagine, and in the process, we have learned terrible truths about ourselves and the distribution of our wealth among the races and the classes.  It has not even been a year since the ocean rose up and rolled over Southeast Asia.  The planet is warming bit by bit, and nobody really knows what this will mean for those of us who live on it.  There is widespread poverty right in our midst and extending throughout the world while at the same time the richest people in history continue to walk the globe and grasp at their wealth.  AIDS ravages Africa and continues to affect and end lives in communities here in our home.  Hundreds of thousands of citizens of this Commonwealth continue to live without adequate health coverage.  And you and I?  Well, I’ll venture to say that you and I each have our own problems that we’re dealing with, our own worries and stresses and terrible fears.  Don’t we?

It is too much going too wrong, too much that is too twisted, too much that is spinning out of control in exactly the wrong direction, too much for us ever, ever to handle.  Or at least that’s how it seems to me from time to time.

It’s how it seemed to Isaiah, fiercely lamenting the destruction of the holy city of Jerusalem and the exile of the Israelite people.  “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence,” he says.  “We fade like a leaf, our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.  All our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth, God.  You have hidden your face from us!  O come, o come, he says to God.  This is too much, too much for us, too much even for the most righteous of our deeds to take away.  Come, God, come.”  He says that God’s coming is like a fire that first kindles the wood, and eventually, eventually sets the water to boiling.  But the people of Israel, in their exile in Babylon, had been watching, and waiting, and watching for that water to start boiling for a long time, and you know what they say about a watched pot.  So they called out to God, called out from the ruins of their middle Eastern city, called out amid the death and the destruction, called out amid gnawing poverty, called out for God to enter in and change the order of things, reorder history, set the world to rights, God’s rights.  For when things have gone so very wrong that even the most righteous of deeds can’t redeem them, what else is there to do?

In Advent, we in the church of Christ join Isaiah in his desperate cry, O come O come!  We don’t start Advent with carols or joy, despite what the ad execs and the marketers would have us believe.  We don’t begin the journey to Bethlehem singing “Go, Tell it on the Mountain!”, we begin it by singing of our mourning in lonely exile here, by begging god to ransom us from our captivity.  We begin it with a good, hard look at the reality of the world and of our lives.  With a mighty awakening to the enormity, the mind-boggling scope of the problems that surround us.  With a shudder and a passing of the hand over our eyes.  With Isaiah.

For make no mistake about it, my brothers and sisters, the world is a mess.  The world is a mess, and alone, we are unequal to it.  Not all our righteous deeds, all our outreach projects and faithful ministries and well-meaning loving-kindness is enough to put it to rights if God is not with us.  And until we know that deep down in the bones of us, until we can call out with Isaiah, “Oh, God!  Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down, for all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth,” we are ill-prepared to begin the journey to Christmas, to appreciate what the impending inbreaking of God into our world might mean.

In Advent, we who call on our God have courage to start in truth and despair, for we have seen the signs and know that we shall end in truth and new life with the God who comes to us in Christ.

So what hard truths must you recognize here at the beginning of Advent this year?  At what must you take a long, hard look and name yourself unequal to?  Where do you see exile, and into what do you call out to God to enter?

You may have noticed that we have a new antependium, and that it, and the Advent candles, and the cover of your bulletin, and the insert in your bulletin, are all blue.  And while that color choice does coordinate remarkably well with the watery liturgical art that our Religion and the Arts Committee has installed for the stewardship campaign, that’s not the reason we chose it.  We chose it because this deep blue is the color of the night sky just before the coming of the new day.

Have you ever watched the sun rise?  Have you ever gotten up in the dark and the chill of the hour before the dawn, and watched it come?  It’s a remarkable exercise, to commit to watching the rising of the sun.  First, you learn that the old saying, “it’s darkest just before the dawn” is a true one.  The moon, if it’s visible at all, is low in the sky and headed down.  The stars wink out one by one.  The hour is weird, and the sense that nobody and nothing else is stirring is strong.  The mind is trembly and tricksy.  Body and soul seem especially vulnerable to cold, and loneliness.  And it is quiet, so quiet that any noise at all seems an affront to the order of things.  You sit, your spirit wrapped around itself and huddled within, and you wait, and you watch.  And watch.  And watch.

And finally, after a shivering eternity, you notice that while you were concentrating so hard on watching, it has begun.  The world seems no lighter, but the sky is no longer black.  Now it’s a deep, rich blue.  You thrill to the sight, and though you didn’t even know it was there, the part of you that was wondering if maybe the sun wasn’t going to rise this day, the part that whispered the poison whisper, “all shall be dark forever”, is silenced by that deep blue, and withers away.  Your eyes widen, you sit up a little.  You take a deep breath of the still-cold air, and your spirit begins to unfold itself from its fetal position.  Now that it has begun, you know in the depths of you that there is nothing, nothing that can stop the dawn from coming.  So you watch the more intently.  And while you’re watching, but somehow again before you realize it, the sky is suddenly a lighter blue still, and the world around you is just a touch more visible, now.  This continues, and continues, and the world comes more and more visible, and your spirit more and more focused.

You look toward the bright place on the horizon.  And you watch, and you wait, but now you’re not just waiting, not just sitting there, now you’re leaning, you’re stretching, body and soul, toward that bright spot.  You, who not so long ago sat in the dark wondering if, to mix a metaphor, this particular watched pot was ever going to boil, are now alive with the knowledge that it cannot but happen, and that you are part of it.  It’s as if your whole self has become the dawn’s cheerleader, chanting, “Go, go, go, go!”  You feel as if you’re waking up from deep sleep, though you hadn’t been asleep at all, and you become aware that the whole creation is awakening with you, the wind moving and the birds singing, and in the deep, deep place that speaks truth against all reason, you know that you, and the birds and the wind, by the very force of your awakening will, are drawing the sun back to the world.  And finally you realize that the bright spot at which you’ve been staring is no longer just a bright spot on the horizon; now it’s the real thing.  The sun.  It has cleared the horizon, and now that it’s visible, the sight of it is too much to be borne, and you look away, bathed in the light of it.  And the day, and your newly opened spirit, are abroad in the world again.

If you’ve ever watched the rising of the sun, you know that blue, the deep, dark blue of the night sky just before the dawn, is the color of hope.

So we wrap our Advent in it.  As we look around our world and hear Isaiah and the Israelites calling to God from their Exile and the ruins of their holy city, surrounded by the broken shards of a social, and a political, and a religious system in which they had invested all their lives and all their confidence, raging and begging and desperately cajoling God to return, return.  What better, what braver color than the color of hope with which to deck our halls as by our watching and our waiting we proclaim our faith in the coming of the God who by her very presence makes us more than equal to the problems of the world, and who has promised to gather us all in and make us whole?

How better than with this color could we ever prepare for the coming of Jesus, the one who promises that in the midst of war, and injustice, and desolation, that exactly in the midst of the very worst our world has to offer, in that very place, the very kind of place we find ourselves in today, God comes, God breaks in in surprising and mundane, powerful and everyday kinds of ways.  Like the breaking of bread, which is the sign and power of peace.  Like the leafing out of the trees with the changing of the seasons, which is the sign and power of joy.  Like washing with water, which is the sign and power of love.  Like the birth of a baby, which is the power to change the whole world, the power of hope.

My friends, we who start in despair and walk in darkness have seen the signs.  The bread-breaking signs.  The leafing-out signs.  The watery signs.  The pregnant signs of our approaching God.  So let us do what the people of our God always do: stand in the darkness of the world’s folly and of the longest nights of the year, wrap ourselves in the first deep blue of the morning sky, turn to the light place on the horizon, and say, “O come, O come, Emmanuel.”