Rend the Heavens

Midweek Advent I St. Paul’s Otto Isaiah 63:7-64:8

“O that you would rend the heavens and come down…”

In the movie, “My Giant,” Billy Crystal, runs off the road and drives his car into a canal. Trapped inside the sinking car he says to himself, “Now I’m dead.” Unexpectedly, we see the car being dragged up and out of the water. Crystal opens his eyes a bit. When he sees two huge hands reach through the torn convertible top, he faints. When he regains consciousness he supposes that God has reached down from the heavens to save him.

Billy Crystal had what Gabe Huck calls a “Rend the Heavens” day. We’ve all had “Rend the heavens” days in which we wish, we plead, for God to tear open the heavens, come down and do something to save us. The author of Psalm 88 prays, “O Lord, God of my salvation; I cry out day and night before you. Let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry! …I am shut in so I cannot escape.” Another Psalmist cries, “My soul also is greatly troubled. But you, O Lord-how long?”

C.S. Lewis wrote while grieving his wife’s death, “Meanwhile, where is God? When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing him,…you will be- or so it feels-welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After then, silence…What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”

Isaiah puts our “Rend the Heavens Days” in the context of God’s steadfast involvement in the lives of his people. When Israel suffered distress, God suffered distress with them. Out of love he saved them again and again. As his angel led Lot out of Sodom so, later, out of pity for their enslavement in Egypt, God led Israel to freedom. Like a father rescuing a child, God carried Israel to safety. He gave them the land promised to their forefather, Abraham. God chose them as his own people.

He even gave them some guidelines on how they might live in thankfulness. Keep their Savior God as their only God. Use his name with awe and wonder. Set aside a day to remember what he has done for them. Honor your parents, etc. Many of us learned from Luther that in the light of all that God has done for us, it simply follows that we “thank and praise, serve and obey him.”

Yet, Israel rebelled. Their ingratitude and disobedience grieved God’s Holy Spirit. God turned away from his own people. He became their enemy. Matters can hardly get worse than rebelling against our Creator and Provider without whom we cannot live.

Isaiah writes, “You are our Father. Your name is Redeemer from of old. Why, O Lord, do you make us stray from your ways and (you) harden our hearts, so that they do not fear you?” Oh, that it were as simple as God getting into a snit over our sins and giving us the silent treatment. Earlier the prophet admonished, “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save or his ear dull, that it cannot hear; but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God and your sins have hidden his face from you.” What audacity on our part. We do the wandering and God gets the blame. We do the sinning and it’s God’s fault. We build a wall hiding God’s face of blessing from us and God is censured.

However, the author knows, as we know, that we cannot simply blame on God and get off scott-free ourselves. Our deeds which we would hold up to one another as evidence of our godliness: and would even display before God as examples of our goodness and righteousness, are stained with self interest and self justification.

Whether God turns his back on us because of sin or our sins build a wall hiding the face of God, the result is the same. We sinned, God grew angry. Then we sinned more. Separation grows. Silence deepens. However, the consequences of separation from God are deadly. The 17^th century mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal wrote, “if God interrupts the flow of his mercy ever so little, drought will necessarily set in.” Luther preaching during Advent in 1522 said, “Where there is no Gospel, there is no God, but sheer sin and destruction.” On Palm Sunday that same year he asserted, “The Law causes anger and hate, the Gospel gives grace.”

We need God to rend the heavens and come down with the gift of salvation. We are not able to claw our way up to God and tear open the heavens from our side. So God rent open the heavens from his side. He came down covering the distance between heaven and earth, between the spiritual and the physical, between God and humanity.

Isaiah called on God to come down with such might that the mountains would quake at his presence. When God did rend the heavens, he came down and entered the womb of a virgin named Mary. The quaking occurred in Mary’s womb as he grew and multiplied cell by cell. This one named Jesus grew in years and in wisdom. He lived among us and shared his own “rend the heavens” days.

In his last hours before dying, while people were hesitant to rend his garments, those same people did not hesitate to rend his flesh with whip and thorns and nails and sword. Yes, he even acceded to Isaiah’s demand that the blame for our straying from God be placed on God. Jesus carried our faults in his body to the cross. Jesus even endured God’s silence and anger against sin; yet, without sinning. He experienced God’s turning his back and becoming his enemy. The wall of separation, which our sins had built, hid God’s face from Jesus. In the end, the mountains did quake as he shook the very foundation of the earth in his dying and rising again to new life.

Today we sang in prayer, “O Savior, rend the heavens wide; Come down, come down with mighty stride…” An Easter hymn answers, “He rends death iron chain; He breaks through sin and pain, he shatters hell’s grim thrall.” In so doing, the rest of our prayer today is answered that our Savior would, “Unlock the gates, the doors break down; unbar the way to heaven’s crown.” Thus there is laid up for you and for me a crown of righteousness which the Lord will award when he rends the heavens again and tears open our graves.

Now we are in the hands of our Father. He is not a Father who judges and fights against us, but a Father who forms, molds, nurtures and guides us into becoming children after his nature. He hears our cries that he not be angry at us over our daily straying. He lets us live, restoring us again as members of his family through Jesus Christ.

Earlier I quoted C.S. Lewis as he wondered about God’s silence. Later in his journal he wondered if it might not have been his own frantic need, his own clutching and grabbing, like a drowning man, which had slammed the door shut in his own face. Like Isaiah and like Jesus on the cross, Lewis never stopped clinging to God and beseeching God in faith, even in the silence, until an answer, even a partial answer came. So like Mary, watching and waiting for God to break out of her womb, we too watch and wait for Jesus to rend the heavens and come down once again.