Drinking Tears by the Bowlful

How long, Lord God Almighty, will your anger smolder against the prayers of your people? You have fed them with the bread of tears; you have made them drink tears by the bowlful [Psalm 80:4-5].

Patience has never been my long suit. Whether it was high school basketball, where Todd and I sat on the end of the bench with close friend, Robert, waiting for our team to fall sufficiently far behind so that those of us on the “second string” could do no real damage to the cause, whether it was Jane’s and my inability to wait two additional years for graduation–talking both sets of parents into consenting to our engagement at age 19, and our wedding one year later–or whether it’s something quite mundane, like being third in the check-out line at the grocery store, I’ve never been one who could easily tolerate waiting.

I would have made a lousy Israelite. Consider their countless years of servitude in Egypt, their forty years of wandering in the wilderness with Moses, and then perhaps the worst: the years of painful exile in Babylon where their identity as a people was truly at stake. I know we’re all supposed to “wait for the Lord” [e.g., Psalm 27:14], but it seems that so much of Israel’s time was spent in waiting.

And, oh, while we’re all waiting for Christmas to get here, we have a slew of readings for the first Sunday of Advent whose primary subject is–you guessed it–waiting! The OT reading this Sunday is the somewhat familiar Isaiah 64:1-9, a text that is full of deep lament about waiting. Most OT scholars agree that this portion of Isaiah dates to the early days after Persia defeated Babylon (i.e., to the late 6th century BCE). With the Edict of Cyrus, the Persian king, those Israelites in exile were allowed to return to their homeland.

At the time of this Sunday’s Isaiah text, the first group of former exiles has likely returned to Jerusalem. Of course, there is no real Jerusalem to which they can return. “Zion is a wasteland, Jerusalem a desolation” [Isaiah 64:10]. And so, as the exiles return, they have a realization of how much has been lost and why. They had turned from God and, in turn, it seemed that God had turned from them. They’ve returned, but there are so many issues. When they complete the rebuilding of the Temple, who will be priests? Who will exert political power and moral suasion? Has Yahweh permanently rejected them? Has Yahweh forgotten the promise that out of the house of David, out of the stump of Jesse, a Messiah would be born?

In the face of all these and other questions, both Isaiah and the people who had returned to what used to be Jerusalem have an additional, significant lament: the apparent absence of Yahweh from their lives. Indeed, for many, Yahweh seemed to have been absent for a long, long time. And so, in this week’s OT text, Isaiah cries out:

Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you! As when the fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil, come down to make your name known to your enemies and cause the nations to quake before you! [Isaiah 64:1-2].

A frightening closeness with Yahweh is to be preferred over the chilling absence that they have had to endure. In a somewhat similar fashion, in this Sunday’s reading from the Psalter, the Psalmist is impatiently waiting for God’s anger to abate. He anxiously implores Yahweh to come and save the people [Psalm 80:1b]. The Psalmist complains bitterly:

How long, Lord God Almighty, will your anger smolder against the prayers of your people? You have fed them with the bread of tears; you have made them drink tears by the bowlful [Psalm 80:4-5, a portion of the reading from Psalms, First Sunday of Advent, RCL, Year B].

In the 21st century, many within and without the church have come to wonder if God is absent from our midst. We feel lost and in need of the sort of powerful “rending of the heavens” about which Isaiah wrote. As we gaze at friends and neighbors, particularly during these days of pandemic, we see many who are struggling to catch even a glimpse of hope as they maneuver through difficult times of pain, sorrow, and darkness. Jane and I gaze at our daily prayer list and we see that it includes close friends who are battling cancer and other infirmities; a sister-in-law with significant cardiopulmonary issues; dear friends for the past 45 years, who mourn the recent loss of a brother to COVID-19; and a TAPC couple about our age, whom we usually sat behind during the 9 a.m. service for years–when there was church–both battling the virus, he at home, and she on a ventilator in a local hospital ICU. Each of you, of course, has your own “list.”

And, like many of you, we pray for others whose identities we don’t know: an elderly gentleman whom I see almost daily during my walk, as he sits by the graveside of his wife; others who live alone; single mothers in East Durham who must trudge off to work each morning, all the while worried that their children are falling even further behind because they are ill-equipped for so-called “distance learning;” those who are going through divorce and family breakups; those without skills who are being released from prison; those whose livelihoods are in peril due to shut-downs; and those whose lives will be ended before their birth. It’s enough to fill a bowl with tears.

In dark moments, there is always a tendency to throw up one’s hands and say, “There’s nothing we can do; we must await a greater power.” And yet, this week’s OT and Psalm text teach us something: that in the face of despair, while waiting, one can still pray boldly, even presumptuously. Although the community described in the Isaiah text is in misery, although it is guilty of multiple sins, it is, nevertheless, bold in its prayer. As Richard Nysse, Professor Emeritus (Old Testament), at Luther Seminary has allowed in his provocative offering, “The Dark Side of God: Considerations for Preaching and Teaching,” within the Isaiah 64 passage:

The dark side of God is not explained away; rather, it is prayed against with questions that God must address and with imperatives that God must carry out. The potter’s conduct must change; God’s “darkness” must be answered by God’s “light” [Nysse, p. 442].

As Nysse stresses, in the Isaiah text, the narrator leaves the next move up to God; he does not presume to announce a change in God.

And so we wait for God’s next move. Like Isaiah and the Psalmist, we may wonder aloud, “How long, O Lord, must we wait for You to break through into our lives and the lives of those around us? How many bowls of tears will those who suffer be forced to drink?” We might add, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you” (Isaiah 64:1].

By the first half of the first century in Palestine, the Jerusalem Temple had long been restored, but in a real sense, the Jews of Palestine still waited. Their shared stories told them that almost six centuries earlier, Persia had conquered Babylon. It also told them that living under Persian domination wasn’t much better than being enslaved by the Babylonians. By the first century, Rome had replaced Persia as the dominating power.

“How long, O Lord?” Six centuries had come and gone since Isaiah’s time and yet, it was still Yahweh’s move. Many longed for a new David, a powerful Jewish king to rout the oppressive Romans. In his own good time, Yahweh answered their prayers, but not by rending the heavens. Yahweh dealt with their concerns, but in a fashion that was easy to miss. Instead of sending a powerful king, or a general and an army, God sent a baby born in a stable to a mother in her teens. With Yahweh, it seems that one must always be on the lookout for the unexpected.

One of my favorite Christmas hymns is O Little Town of Bethlehem. Among its beautiful lines are these:

How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given!

So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven.

During Advent, we wait not for the rending of the heavens, but for a whisper. The God we meet in Jesus Christ will give his life for us on the cross, but He will be raised from the dead on the third day. And according to the Faith that we’ve been taught, he will return in glory. When He does return, we will no longer drink tears by the bowlful, for “He will wipe every tear from [our] eyes” [Revelation 21:4].