When God is Hidden

Isaiah 64; 1 Cor. 1:3–9; Mark 13:24–37

I was finishing this sermon yesterday as the sun dipped below the horizon at the late, late hour of 4:49pm. Shortly after, Ronnie texted me from the grocery store: “It’s just now 5pm and dark as midnight!” And it occurred to me that this may be one of many reasons so many people—especially in the Midwest?—are eager to skip Advent and jump right into Christmas. In our tiny portion of the globe, the winter days are short and gray and cold. The darkness descends upon us early. Why not turn to all things sparkly and Christmas-y to get us through?

O, Mariah Carey, patron saint of Christmas playlists, pray for us.

Now, please understand: I am not anti-Christmas. I literally wrote the book on it. (It’s kind of incredible that I can say that!) Truly, I am as eager as anyone else to put up our tree and turn on Spotify Christmas and decorate cookies. Bring. It. On.

And yet, as a priest in Christ’s church, I am also tasked with reminding us that we are not, in fact, in the Christmas season yet. Christmastide runs from December 25 to January 6. Today, and for the next four weeks, we are in the season of Advent.

The four Sundays of Advent are dedicated to watching and waiting for the return of Christ. We will hear from several prophets, principally the Virgin Mary, as well as John the Baptist and Jesus—all speaking of God’s coming judgment. God’s kingdom has come to us in Christ, but we await its final fulfillment in the age to come. Meanwhile, we live in the time-between-the-times, which continues to be plagued by evil, sin, and death. And we know we cannot deliver ourselves from this seemingly endless night. That is why, as the Rev. Fleming Rutledge says, “Advent begins in the dark.”

Admittedly, this is an odd emphasis in a culture that’s already leaning in to “the most wonderful time of the year.” Yet, the church keeps stubbornly doing her Advent thing regardless.

The good news I have for us on the first Sunday of Advent is this: God is hidden, but God is also faithful; therefore, we wait and keep watch in the dark.

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Tonight’s reading from Isaiah has been called “the most powerful psalm . . . of communal lamentation in the Bible.” The setting for Isaiah’s communal lamentation is one of apparent godforsakenness.

You will remember that after a few hundred years as a kingdom, first united and then divided, God’s people were conquered by the Assyrian empire and then the Babylonian empire. Under the rule of Babylon, many of Judah’s inhabitants were taken into exile, forced to make a life among a foreign nation—a nation that sought quite aggressively to assimilate the Jewish people and obliterate their culture.

After a few generations in exile, though, they were finally allowed to return to their land, the land of promise. So, they departed Babylon with great expectation. But when they arrive, things are not as they imagined. “The holy cities have become a wilderness,” Isaiah says, “Jerusalem a desolation” (Isa. 64:9b). They find their ancestral land burned, abandoned, and in ruins. Isaiah goes on:

Our holy and beautiful house,
where our ancestors praised you,
has been burned by fire,
and all our pleasant places have become ruins.
After all this, will you restrain yourself, O Lord? (vv. 11–12)

It seems that God has withdrawn from his people. God is hidden. Even their beloved land, so long anticipated, is bereft of God’s presence. They appear to have lost everything.

How did this happen? Isaiah acknowledges that Israel has some responsibility for their situation. Listen again to verse 5b: “But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.” And then again in verses 6 and 7: “our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. . . . for you have hidden your face from us and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.”

Israel was unrighteous. They transgressed the covenant and God delivered them over to their iniquities.

Still, Isaiah doesn’t describe things precisely as we’d expect. Did you catch it? We expect Isaiah to say: “We sinned and then you, God, turned away from us. We descended into iniquity and then God abandoned us.” But that’s not what he says! Instead, Isaiah says, “God, you were hidden and then we transgressed. You were distant and unseen, so we sinned.”

Isaiah is saying that God’s hiddenness has led God’s people into sin. It is the collective sense of God’s absence that has led God’s people to go astray: “because you hid yourself we transgressed” (v. 5b).

Now, before you dismiss Isaiah for making excuses, let’s recognize the truth in it. I think he is expressing something axiomatic about human nature. Jesus knows it, too, and he references it in tonight’s gospel reading. Listen again to Jesus’ words in Mark 13:

It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake, for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening or at midnight or at cockcrow or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly (Mark 13:34–37).

It’s really striking when you read Mark 13 alongside Isaiah 64. Jesus compares God the Father to an absentee homeowner. He goes on a journey. He leaves his servants in charge. But while he’s gone, Jesus says, they will be tempted to fall asleep. Why? Because the absence of God leads many to despair and defect.

Now, to be clear, neither Isaiah nor Jesus thinks Israel is somehow not responsible for their sin. Not at all. God’s absence tested and tempted them—that is true. But they chose to betray the covenant. And they are responsible for that.

And yet, Isaiah doesn’t shy away from including the devastating truth of God’s absence in his lamentation to God. Even as the people of God confess their sins and beg for mercy, they also remind God that his hiddenness has led them to this point.

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During the season of Advent, the church sets aside four weeks to acknowledge the hiddenness of God. Because, as uncomfortable as it is to admit, God is hidden. And God’s apparent absence leads many of us to despair; it leads many communities to despair.

I know we’re an Anglican parish and we believe strongly in God’s presence—real presence even. And I know many of us are Charismatic in the sense that we believe strongly in the Holy Spirit’s present and active power to liberate and transform.

I am not denying either of these things. Yes, God is present—always present and at work. And the Holy Spirit’s power is available to us now in the inaugurated kingdom of God.

At the same time, though… Sometimes God is absent. Sometimes God is hidden. Isaiah says it: “[Y]ou have hidden your face from us” (Isa. 64:7b). You have hidden your face.

“Sometimes God hides God’s self” (Rutledge, Advent, 260).

In fact, strange as it may sound, God hides himself precisely to make himself known. I know it seems bizarre, but it’s the truth.

Theologian Katherine Sonderegger says that God is omnipresent in creation precisely in God’s apparent absence from creation. “[God] is everywhere present through His cosmos,” she says, “not locally, but rather harmoniously, equally, generously, and lavishly in all places, at once, as the Invisible God” (Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, 52). In other words, while affirming God’s abundant omnipresence, we also affirm God’s mysterious hiddenness.

Even among the holiest of people and the most faithful of communities, it is simply not true that God is clearly and unambiguously present all the time. Anyone who says to expect that is trying to sell you something. They are not speaking the truth.

Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, the people of Israel learn, over and over again, that they do not possess or control God. Not with the ark of the covenant, not with the tabernacle, not with the Temple. Try as they might, God is not their good luck charm or a vending machine of blessings.

The same is true of the church today. God is too free and too good to be contained or controlled by us, whether with a sanctuary, a Bible, or a sacrament. As Fleming Rutledge says, “The church cannot possess or control the presence of God. Only God is in control of his own presence” (Advent, 261). We in the modern West have been taught that the height of human achievement is mastery, possession, and control. But we have been lied to. And we will never be able to control the omnipresent God who hides himself.

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God’s hiddenness tests and tempts humans in a unique way. Why is that? Because without the felt presence of God we realize just how vulnerable, finite, and frail we are.

In the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, player-characters, or PCs, have an armor class, or AC. Your PC’s AC is a number between 1 and 20 that determines how hard or easy it is for other characters to hurt your character. A high AC might be 17 or 18. Someone like that is probably wearing plate mail or using a shield—or just really really fast. A low AC might be 12 or 13. Humans and dwarves without armor normally fall into this low-AC category.

We call low-AC characters “squishy.” They’re squishy because they are soft and can be killed easily. At the beginning of a D&D campaign, you have to be careful with squishy PCs because they can die very very easily.

All human beings are squishy. We try to pretend we aren’t, but we are. When God is hidden, we become hyper aware of our squishiness. We realize just how small and exposed we are in this vast, harsh, and unpredictable world. And that realization is, frankly, terrifying. “We all fade like a leaf,” Isaiah says, “and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” In the coldness of God’s absence, we feel like one of the millions of brown, shriveled leaves scattered on the wind and never seen again.

The other reason God’s hiddenness is acutely difficult is because very often we can remember when we felt otherwise. Isaiah recalls when God “came down” and did “awesome deeds that [they] did not expect” (v. 3). In the past, God’s deeds on behalf of Israel were unsurpassed among the nations of the world:

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 (v. 4).

We did not imagine the past, Isaiah says. God has done wonders that make God stand above all other gods. God made a covenant with Abraham, preserved his descendants in Egypt, rescued them from slavery, made them his kingdom of priests, brought them into a new land, sustained them against their enemies, and established them as a kingdom dedicated to God. But then… conquering, degradation, captivity, and desolation.

So, Isaiah voices a communal lament and reminds God who he is and who they are to God:

Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people (vv. 8–9).

I am struck by the incredible faithfulness of such prophetic lamentation. It’s truly faith-full to cry out in this way. To the One who is apparently absent, to the One who is apparently hidden, Isaiah voices his protest. You are our Father. You are our Potter. We are your work and your people. So, help us! Only someone of extraordinary faith can cry out in supplication to the One who seems directly responsible for your suffering.

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God’s hiddenness tests us, sometimes beyond what we can bear. When God is hidden, we become aware of and terrified by our vulnerability. When God is hidden, we remember God’s past faithfulness to us and, in light of that, we mourn our present desolation.

Now, some of us have felt the absence of God in an acute way. Some of us are walking through that valley of the shadow of death right now. Advent, then, is an especially significant season for us. Singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson sings poignantly about such experiences in his song “The Silence of God”:

It’s enough to drive a man crazy; it’ll break a man’s faith
It’s enough to make him wonder if he’s ever been sane
When he’s bleating for comfort from Thy staff and Thy rod
And the heaven’s only answer is the silence of God

It’ll shake a man’s timbers when he loses his heart
When he has to remember what broke him apart
This yoke may be easy, but this burden is not
When the crying fields are frozen by the silence of God

And if a man has got to listen to the voices of the mob
Who are reeling in the throes of all the happiness they’ve got
When they tell you all their troubles have been nailed up to that cross
Then what about the times when even followers get lost?

Some of us, though, have not felt God’s hiddenness for ourselves. If God’s silence has not yet been part of your experience, that’s OK. Advent is for you, too.

Remember: Isaiah 64 is a communal lamentation. It speaks on behalf of the whole community—of which you are a vital part. As one part of the body suffers, so the whole body suffers. Our flourishing is mutual, and our suffering is mutual too. We walk through it together.

Our son, William, has been reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road for his English class. He had to pick an award-winning book, and he definitely picked a doozy. If you’ve never read it, I’d argue The Road is pretty close to perfect Advent reading. In it, McCarthy imagines a post-apocalyptic world in which a man and his son travel on foot across the barren and desolate landscape of the former United States.

Father and son are in search of… well, we’re not quite sure what. But they keep moving, they keep walking, trusting that if they can get to the coast, they will find other “good guys” like them—others who refuse to resort to murder, theft, and cannibalism to survive.

Along the way, the man knows that his hope for the future is entirely irrational. Given all the horrors they have seen—and there are many—and all the horrors that probably await them, perhaps he should use the final bullet in his gun to take his child’s life. Perhaps it would be mercy to kill his son and spare him unspeakable suffering. Even his wife, before her death, encourages the man to “curse God and die.”

As you read The Road, you can see why the father is tortured by this dilemma, especially once you realize the man is slowly dying of tuberculosis. There’s a hard and realistic logic to it. When he’s dead, he can’t protect his son. So, why not take his life now?

Yet, the man is irrationally convinced that he has been given a mandate to keep his son alive. He believes that God—if there is a God—has entrusted the boy to his care. The boy is, somehow, “a glowing tabernacle” in the dark, a “golden chalice” in a parched land. So, against his better judgment, the man keeps going, trusting that somehow, some way goodness will find the boy in the end. And it does.

When God is hidden, it is only faith—a trust bigger and deeper than empiricism—that tells you God is present even in the absence. When God is hidden, it is only faith that tells you God is still working to make all things—even horrific things—new.

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Of course, we don’t have to read post-apocalyptic fiction to encounter communities who are finding a way to persevere amid profound godforsakenness. Consider, please, the Palestinian Christian community in Gaza.

Christians have lived in Palestine since before Christians were even called Christians. Their community goes all the way back to when the Apostle Philip travelled down the desert road from Jerusalem to Gaza to spread the word of Christ’s resurrection. So, when the state of Israel was created in 1948 and around 700,000 Palestinians were displaced, tens of thousands of Christians were among that number. Many of them settled in Gaza and tried to begin their lives anew amid the conflict and poverty all around them.

Yet, when Hamas took control of Gaza in 2008, only 3,000 registered Christians remained. Hamas rule brought with it an Israel-led land, air, and sea blockade, which then accelerated the flight of Christians. Many fled for the West Bank, the U.S., Canada, or other parts of the Arab world. As of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, only about a thousand Christians remained in Gaza. And when their oldest church, the Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius, which was founded in the fifth century, was bombed by Israel on October 19, 18 more Christians were killed.

One might think that Palestinian Christians have strained relationships with their Muslim neighbors, but that is not, in fact, the truth. Living under siege, has created a spirit of solidarity among Christians and Muslims in Gaza. Kamel Ayyad, who is a spokesperson for the Church of Saint Porphyrius, had this to say to Al-Jazeera: “We are all Palestinians. We live in the same city, with the same suffering. We are all under siege…”

Under Israeli bombardments, both Christians and Muslims are taking refuge in St. Porphyrius and Holy Family, a Catholic church, nearby. Estimates are about 600 people are sheltering there. Among them is Nisreen Anton, one of the managers of Holy Family, along with her three daughters aged eight, nine, and 12. “Christians are suffering like any other Gaza people,” she said. “This is our land and we will not leave” (“Under Israeli attack: Who are the Christians of Gaza?” Al Jazeera, Nov. 1, 2023).

On October 28, nine days after the bombing of St. Porphyrius, Holy Family released a video of their young children, around 30 in all, praying together in front of the altar. They stand in three rows facing the camera, wearing what little kids wear: Batman T-shirts and flip-flops and headbands and athletic shorts. Yet, while they cross themselves and pray together for peace, you can hear the sound of Israeli bombs dropping in the background.

Why did St. Porphyrius post a video of their children praying on YouTube? It was a desperate prayer in its own right. A plea to God and to the world to protect these precious lives. Those children and their parents pray to a God who is apparently absent. Those children and their caregivers invoke the mercy of a God who is apparently hidden. They know far better than me what it is to offer a lamentation and persevere amid God’s mysterious absence.

Listen to the wisdom of Prof. Sonderegger again:

[T]he surpassingly Hidden God, as He is, truly and fully, dwells with us. . . . God in Himself, the God glorious and free, the One Lord, beyond all and each: this very One is met in the waste places, the jackal dens, the temples, the mangers, the leper colonies, the prisons, and the tombs where the Lord God is pleased to dwell (85; emphasis added).

The season of Advent summons the church to lament and protest the destruction of the world and the degradation of God’s precious image-bearers, both here in Wheaton and around the world. We who do not know how to meet God in the waste places, leper colonies, and tombs need to learn from those who do. Historically suffering communities, like the Christians of Gaza, often have generational wisdom in this respect that historically affluent and comfortable communities do not. Because they are well-acquainted with loss and grief, they can be our teachers—if only we will join them. I hope Advent be a time when we do so.

This is one of the reasons why at Advocate we are going to be hearing the New Testament read in the First Nations Version. We are seeking, in an admittedly small way, to hear from and learn from our ancestors in the faith.

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Let’s return again to Isaiah 64. Communal suffering requires communal lamentation. And yet not every single person in Israel is sinful and suffering. Right? Still, Isaiah voices a confession and lament on behalf of all:

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. (Isa. 64:6–7)

Can you imagine Isaiah voicing this haunting lament in a public gathering of God’s people, only to have one guy, way in the back, cry out indignantly: “Nope. Not all Israelites! Not all of us!” No, of course not. It’s unthinkable!

We are all unclean. We are all fading. We are all desolate. We are all delivered into iniquity. We share in God’s absence, we share in our iniquity, we share in our suffering, and, therefore, we share in our lamentation.

At Advocate, we offer a special service during the Advent season called “The Longest Night.” Usually, we hold it on the literal longest night of the year, the winter solstice, but this year we’re doing it a week early: December 14 at 7:00pm. This is one humble way we can practice, as a community, joining others in their suffering.

During the season of Advent, while “the voices of the mob are reeling in the throes of all the happiness they’ve got,” God’s people light candles and keep watch in the dark. We are present where God feels hidden. We join those who bewail God’s absenteeism. We come alongside those who shake their fists and scream into the sky. We add our pleas to those who beg God through tears, “[W]ill you restrain yourself, O Lord? Will you keep silent…?” (Isa. 64:12). As Dorothy Day says in her autobiography: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”

As we lament, we also remember together: God has acted in the past, God continues to act in the present—even when we can’t see it—and God will act in the future. One day, in the time of God’s own choosing, God will “tear open the heavens and come down,” and the “mountains [will] quake at [God’s] presence.” Jesus Christ will “come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead,” and his kingdom will have no end. In the meantime, we cling to the truth spoken of by Isaiah’s lament and embodied by Gaza’s children: God is hidden, but God is also faithful; therefore, we wait and keep watch in the dark.