The Waiting Room
A Meditation on Isaiah 35
November 25, 2007
Advent III
by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

If you have no experience of exile, you won’t get this text today.  And if you are allergic to miracles, or find them a painful seduction, you won’t get this text today.  But if any part of you is desperate for a home and feels displaced or misplaced or about to be replaced, if any part of you feels like you are a Christmas toy that says on the box, “some assembly required”, if any part of you feels like you are all in parts and rarely whole, you are going to love this text.  It is Isaiah 35, one of the great pieces of poetry of the First Testament.  It is the opening gambit of a prophet called Deutero- or Second Isaiah, a prophet who spends  his first 50 chapters cursing those who stole Israel’s land from Israel, but then calms down into promise and hope for 15 or so chapters, only to die out in a tertiary or third Isaiah whimper.  I love the book of Isaiah if only because I believe we all have about 15 chapters of mature clarity in us―the bulk and majority of our chapters curse our enemies instead of transcending them.  The ending is often a whimper instead of a shout.  This is a prophecy for partial people, people who live in parts, partially, and who long for the wholeness of home, even if that is imaged as a miracle.

The 15 or so chapters of mature clarity are often called the “Suffering Servant” cycle of Isaiah.  They are seen to forecast Jesus as Messiah, and therefore savior, of the exiled people of Israel.  When you look at them in their moment in time, what you see is an exiled people, longing for revenge on those who stole their land and longing to be returned to the land.  When you look at them from a Christian or Christmas perspective, you see Jesus everywhere.  You even hear him, announcing that the deaf will hear, the blind will see, the lame will walk.  But the text itself needs to be looked at in parts, partially.

First, look at the text from the perspective of the Jews.  It was written around 740 B.C., in the period of King Hezekiah.  It is Jewish apocalyptic literature as well as Jewish Messianic literature.  It tells what is going to happen when all is said and done.  It is both supernatural―deserts bloom and become swamps―and metaphysical―disabled people become able.  It has Exodus echoes, which is the last time the Jews, now in deep Diaspora (deep partialness, deep parted-ness from each other), were unified and saved.  It even has echoes to other Babylonian exodus stories because it was written to people in Babylonian captivity, who were hearing those myths in their so-called countries.  One of the definitions of oppression is a circumstance in which you have to hear other people tell their stories, and are distanced thereby from your own.  The Babylonian God Marduk goes into the deep, and the chaos monster, Tiamat, is cleft asunder.  The text echoes the way chaos will stop and peace will ensue.  It tells a great story to anybody who is desperate for a home and for wholeness.  It must have been a story of great comfort to the Jews at the end of the 8th century.

Christians use the same story as a signal of the Messiah.  We up the ante.

We often use this text and many of the other Suffering Servant texts during Advent, the ritual period of expectant waiting or exile that preludes Christmas.  We make believe we are in exile for 40 days, a wilderness period that has a certain resonance, so as to receive the Messiah.   Advent is a very long prelude, 40 days, and Christmas a very short event, one day.  Thus finding a way to maximize the foreplay is important.

Isaiah 35 is, for us, a return to the time of exile.   It is the ritual reenactment of wilderness exile and Diaspora, both histories in which we imagine we participate. 

In modern language, Advent is more like an ER waiting room than a season.  It is also, in modern language, more like a spiritual transformation than a makeover. It is more like hope than joy.  But I have lost two Advent Sundays already this season to unplanned interruptions―and so I am going to sneak the joy theme of Advent in, with its primary theme of comfort while waiting.

Like last week’s text about the lion lying down with the lamb, it is the usual higher humbug of the season.  It is written to people who are desperate, who are exiled, who are in the mood for a miracle.  Today we might compare these Jews to the Iraqis―people both oppressed and displaced, people under the thumb of foreigners, people who would find it easy to lose hope.  These are people really, not ritually, in the mood for miracles.

Again, if you are feeling quite at home in your own skin and somewhat allergic to change, especially the deep shifting change of a miracle, you won’t have much time for this passage, these exiles, or your own exile. You won’t need a miracle, and so you will be inclined to resist change.  Someone wise once said to me in a waiting room in Miami, right after we had taken her husband in for his 15th emergency asthma attack, “You know, I both hope everything is about to change for us and I hope nothing will change.  Isn’t that weird?”  That, I believe, is Advent for those of us who are on a fence about our own pain.  If homeless, we want everything to change.  If exiled, we want everything to change.  If at home, we want nothing to change.  If not exiled, we want nothing to change.

Thus Advent is one of those times that we are uncomfortable or comfortable, depending on how we read our own lives.  Preaching is supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted and rarely does both.  Today I am going to try.

Two inches and five seconds and I would not be standing here today.  I am.  A car accident tried to make me and those I love homeless.  The same simple arithmetic applies to Andy Frantz and Martha Giardina and Peggy McNamara, all of whom also survived a car accident this year.  You may not be in the mood for miracles, but we are.  And if you still live in that blessed place where I used to live, that place that says nothing that crazy could ever happen to me, I have e-mails to answer, if you still live in a pre-exilic or post-exilic place, again, miracles won’t matter much to you.  If you are not an Iraqi or a Jew or an Afghani or an undocumented immigrant, this text won’t make much sense.  The desert seems fine to the homed, just the way it is.  We are strangers to wilderness.  But the second we know a little wilderness or a little wildness or a little chaos, we get very much in the mood for miracles―a word that, by the way, isn’t just a life and death word.

I intend to make a study of every time Ben Brantley uses the word miracle in his New York Times Broadway reviews.  Isn’t Broadway itself understood as a kind of miracle, and not just on 34th Street?  Consider Ben Brantley, describing Mark Twain’s play Is He Dead?  “It’s a miracle,” said he.  The word miracle doesn’t only apply to the supernatural or the metaphysical, it also applies every now and then to things within human reach.

Consider what Max Planck said, in 1900, when he put out his famous theory of quantum mechanics.  He called his theory of light, based in quantum mechanics, a theory of desperation.  He just didn’t understand how light could do what it did, given that it did it somewhat predictably. “Light,” said Max Planck, “appears to travel in little packets.”  Well.  Lions lie down with lambs, too.  The blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear.  There is water―actually in the Hebrew the word is “swamp”―the desert becomes a swamp and blooms and flowers.  Come on.  If this is not the higher humbug, I don’t know what it is.  But it sure does sound a lot like Ben Brantley describing a play or Max Planck describing light. Planck goes on to argue that particles of light are, by their nature, unpredictable. If you shoot light across a room, you can never tell where it’s going to land.  Simultaneously, we know if we turn on a switch that the light will hit all four corners of the room.  We both do and don’t predict miracles.  We hope for them on Broadway all the time! 

Again, if you are not in the mood for miracles and are very happy in your skin and your home, just the way it is, Mazel Tov.  It’s nice to live in Christmas all the time.  Most of us, however, live in Advent all the time, and we need the poems.  I swear that even as a cradle Christian, one who has been Bible-bombed since day one, I don’t think I ever understood a thing about scripture until some Mexicans told me what Jesus had done for them.  I was just too comfortable; I just didn’t get it.  For me the desert was fine, with or without flowers.  But once I was touched by discomfort and affliction, mine and others, I began to see a little bit of what it means.  The deaf hear, the blind see, the feeble knees of exhausted exiles get a knee replacement! 

The Advent passages in Deutero-Isaiah are addressed directly to a people in deep trouble, deep grief, going through what we might call deep shifts. (Joke!)  I think some of us can identify.  We join Al Gore in wondering why it is our nation that is holding up progress at the Climate Change Conference in Bali.  We wonder why anyone is still in Guantanamo.  We wonder why the Parks Commission in NYC didn’t even bother to ever show the plans for the “new” Washington Square Park to the duly appointed committee to review said plans.  And more personally, we wonder why so many of us have a joy deficiency, why we know less joy that we deserve or than there is.

So if you will permit me an excursion into what I lovingly and joyfully call the higher humbug, let me take you to and through the full text of Isaiah 35, written by a desert nomad, a Jew who had lost his homeland, a Jew thrown out into the desert, with no land to call his own.  Chapter 35 is a song of longing, about what will happen when the “redeemed” are returned to Zion. It is written from the wilderness waiting room, a place that resembles the emergency rooms we all know and hate so very well.

A waiting room is a place where life has changed.  Something bad has happened.  We are exiles from our health or the health of a loved one.  We are nervous.  We wonder if things will ever be the same again.  We both hope they won’t and hope they will.  We sit and wait for wellness.  Isaiah 35 is a pushy kind of waiting room. It is an announcement of the return of the redeemed to Zion, of the repatriated Israelis who have been pushed into exile.

It reminds me ever so much of the remarkable letters of Nelson Mandela from prison.  He wrote from a cell.  He wrote about his longing for freedom and what it would be like when or if he ever got out.  As a form of prose, we might call both Isaiah 35 and Mandela’s letters Advent prose.  They are about expectant waiting rather than defeated nostalgia.  They imagine―from a dark place―a better time and a better place.  I can imagine writing from a jail cell something more like this: “I’ve had it, I’m finished, there is no point, I will be stuck in here forever.”  Instead, Mandela described the vegetables he grew in his small garden as signs and wonders of a time to come.  Instead Isaiah, often called the Second Isaiah, writes from a barren desert about a desert that is about to fruit and flower.

Isaiah 35 is misplaced in the book. Most scholars agree that it is the first chapter of Second Isaiah, which goes from chapter 40 to 55 and is best known, as I said, as the Suffering Servant text.  It is considered Messianic, even by Jews, and is widely understood as the best poetry in the Bible.  Listen to it: The wilderness is going to be glad.  Imagine a glad wilderness.  Weak hands will be strengthened. The feeble knees of the enslaved will become firm.  The eyes of the blind will open.  The ears of the deaf will be unstopped.  The lame shall dance like deer.  The tongues of the speechless will sing for joy. You were right, Al Carmines: everybody can sing.  Most miraculously, there is going to be water in the desert.  There will be streams in the desert.  Burning sand will become a pool.  The desert will become a “swamp.”  A highway and a pathway will be there.  We won’t wander lost in a desert any more.  Chaos will be tamed.  There will be a way, a way on which we shall go.  All sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

The joyful passage we have here compares well to what a radio announcer said about Maria Callas: she “decanted her art into her life.”  If you, like me, are sort of in exile and sort of not in exile, you are probably looking for a key to this passage.  You don’t need Mexican guilt, nor do you want to fake a homelessness you don’t really have. Both Martin Buber and, ironically, Max Weber have studied this text and the Suffering Servant passage in ways that can help us.  Their conclusion is that Jewish apocalypse and Messiah are both always in the plural.  The things announced here only come to the people all together.  In fact the tenses of the passage flip around in funny ways, ending up in the plural.  The message:  You won’t get it until you see with the eyes of one people. 

That of course sets up the whole problem I have been playing with so far.  We don’t get it till we borrow enough pain and enough community to get it.  The same is true of the whole gospel: it is what all flesh see together.  When and what we see as individual flesh doesn’t give us the perch to understand the Suffering Servant.

So, to conclude with something important for those of us in between, let me borrow from Gustav Flaubert. Miracles happen in the decanting. They happen as we pour ourselves out of our bottle into our lives.

Madame Bovary (created in 1857) read romance novels all day.  She borrowed experience because she found her own a little thin.  She then realized that her life was boring, so she had love affairs to stave off her boredom.  Flaubert only wrote 500 words a day on this book because he wanted to describe the most ordinary things in a new way: “it is so easy to chatter about the beautiful but it takes more genius to say, in proper style, ‘close the door.’”  When we go to these Advent texts, we go as Flaubert did: slowly, trying to maximize both the borrowing of experience and the joy available in that borrowing.  Not the suffering, but the joy.  You have to go to the suffering to get to the joy.  You have to see how others live and what they face―exile, boredom, and all―to imagine what life and God are trying to say to you.  The Messiah will not come until we see what all flesh see together.  For Flaubert, it was the eroticization of everyday life.  Yup.  The splendid and sensual and sexual everyday life.  For those of us at home, that task remains.  For those of us in exile, that task remains.  500 words a day is plenty of time for all of it.

Let me change from a literary system to a scientific one; there are lots of places from which to borrow experience.  Most of us live like Galileo, untouched by our own experience.  When the Pope rejected Galileo’s life work, his biographer says the following about how he responded, in a great chapter called “Whatever happened to Galileo?”