“I once caused consternation in a drugstore in Louisville,” Thomas Merton wrote a long time ago.
I was going to the hospital and I wanted to get some toothpaste, so I went in and said, “I’d like some toothpaste.” The clerk says, “What kind” and I said, “I don’t care.” He almost dropped dead. I was supposed to feel strongly about Colgate or Pepsodent or Crest or something with five colors. And they all have a secret ingredient. But I didn’t care about the secret ingredient. The worst thing you can do now is not care about these things.[1]
Kathleen Norris called him a prophet for saying “I don’t care” in one of the temples for the brand-conscious consumer.[2] These days, of course, it’s a lot harder not to care about these things since they tend to invade your every waking moment. TV ads, pop-up ads, radio ads, billboards, busses, and thumbstoppers. Haven’t heard about thumbstoppers yet? It’s what they call social media ads like tik-tok’s dogs in panda suits – you glance, you do a double take, and before you know it, your thumb has stopped scrolling.
And in that movie you streamed the other night? A whole team of people worked hard to make sure you notice without noticing that the young, handsome hero drives a Dodge, and the villain, an import.
Did you go bargain hunting on Friday? You know that as a brand conscious consumer you are expected to spend much of your Thanksgiving week tracking special offers and what they used to call door busters before 2020 happened — track those offers so you’re ready to pounce when price and delivery estimates meet in the sweet spot.
Or you could work on becoming a junior prophet, take a sip of coffee, and declare, “I don’t care.”
Retail marketing and faith are both about the cultivation of desire and the formation of habits. But where marketing is all about annual sales, brand loyalty, and the promise of purchased fulfillment, faith is about our relationship with God and aligning our lives with God’s purposes. Many voices invite us to enter the holiday season of santas, angels, elves and lights, all mixed with warm childhood memories and bathed in a nostalgic glow. In the church, today is the first day of a new year, and the voices we hear during Advent urge us to watch and wait for the God who comes to us in the child in the manger, in visiting strangers, and like a thief in the night. The latter, of course, doesn’t lend itself to sentimentality, which is why the Black Friday marketers won’t touch it.
The contrast may never be clearer than today: Advent begins with the prayers and tears of an old man.
Look down from heaven and see, from your holy and glorious habitation. Where are your zeal and your might? The yearning of your heart and your compassion? They are withheld from me.[3]
The voice of Isaiah has been with the people of Jerusalem and Judah for many years. His was a voice of warning, a voice of truth telling and judgment, a voice of challenge and comfort. Isaiah spoke when Jerusalem was proud and when the city fell to the Babylonian army. Isaiah spoke in exile, reflecting on the devastations of loss, and declaring that they were God’s righteous judgment on a people who had made a mockery of justice and faithfulness in their communities. Eventually Isaiah began to speak of an end to their exile. They would return to Jerusalem and the hills of Judah. The Lord would lead them on a highway through the wilderness, in an exodus even more glorious than their liberation from Egypt, and they would return to the land of their ancestors and the city of David.
And when king Cyrus of Persia toppled the Babylonian regime, they began to return. But amid the burnt ruins of the city and the temple, their shouts of joy and songs of freedom soon died down. Journeying home under banners of hope was inspiring and catching — doing the work of hope in rebuilding was hard, much harder than any of them had imagined. The old prophet, in moving poetry, gives voice to the people’s longing:
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence … to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
These are the first words of scripture we hear on the first day of Advent. “Advent begins not on a note of joy,” says Walter Brueggemann, “but of despair.” We are urged to recognize ourselves in that situation of utter need.
Humankind has reached the end of its rope. All our schemes for self-improvement, for extracting ourselves from the traps we have set for ourselves, have come to nothing. We have now realized at the deepest level of our being that we cannot save ourselves, and that, apart from the intervention of God, we are totally and irretrievably lost.[4]
Advent begins with a profound sense of stuckness and absence. It feels like you’re kneeling under a blanket of silence, pleading, and all you can sense is your own yearning for something better. It feels like letting go entirely of anything like respectful restraint before God and crying out, “Rip open the heavens and come! Come like wildfire! Do something nobody can ignore!”
We don’t pray for long when the fire we want isn’t coming, but the prophet keeps praying.
You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways, but there is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you.
Isaiah offers words of confession and reproach, suggesting that we think honestly about our part of the relationship, but he also sees responsibility on God’s part:
You have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
Not that we don’t deserve it, but don’t leave us like this. The prophet keeps praying, wrestling really, refusing to let go of the relationship that has shaped his entire life. He’s come to the point where God’s face is hidden and all we can see is our iniquity — true enough, but not the whole truth. At the point where the chasm between God and God’s people appears too wide and too deep to be crossed, the prophet on behalf of the people makes a bold and confident turn:
Yet you, Lord, the prophet says, and I imagine he whispers here when before he may well have thundered — yet you, Lord, are our father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. You made us. You own us. All of us. You are responsible for us. We belong to you. We are your responsibility, your burden, your problem, your treasured possession. Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people. We have long been like those whom you do not rule, like those not called by your name.[5] We are stumbling in the darkness, not walking in your light. Yet you, Lord, are our father. Everything hangs on that briefest and boldest of prayers. When we’ve taken an honest look at ourselves and what we’ve made of the world, when all is said and done, when we’re at the end of our rope, when we’re exhausted by recognition and confession and despair — yet you. You made us. You own us. All of us. Will you hide your face forever or turn to us with mercy? Will you keep silent or speak the word of peace? Will you remember that you have made us your own?
Most of us have wished on occasion that God would tear the veil between heaven and earth and do something big, something to make the mountains quake and the nations tremble, something that would undeniably manifest the divine presence among us, so that all of us, from the first to the last, would confess that the Lord is God and no other. It may well be that, because we live in a world of constant noise, we expect a voice loud enough to drown out all the others. And because we live in a world of constant distractions, that we expect a vision bright enough to outshine all the others. And because we’re constantly bombarded by advertising, that we expect thumb-stopping kingdom marketing.
But God doesn’t shout or flashbang people into belief or manipulate them into trust. God calls us and waits for us. God comes to us, and God is continually at work among us until creation is complete. Isaiah’s psalm moves from the image of God as the divine warrior who comes bursting out of the heavens in the most powerful of military interventions, to God envisioned as an artisan: a potter who molds and fashions us from dust of the earth, continually forming us as a people, until all that we are and all that we do shows forth our Maker’s purpose. This is where our hope is rooted, in God’s loving and faithful attention. This is where we become who we are as God’s own: people of loving and faithful attention.
[1] Thomas Merton, The Springs of Contemplation: A Retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani, ed. by Jane Marie Richardson (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), 155.
[2] Kathleen Norris, “Apocalypse Now,” The Christian Century, November, 15, 2005, 19.
[3] Isaiah 63:15
[4] Walter Brueggemann in Texts for Preaching, Walter Brueggemann e.a., eds., Year B, 1993, 1.
[5] Isaiah 63:19