Weaving Promises: "You Are Our God" by Cheri Holdridge (with an assist by Patti Lusher)

When I was in high school, in West Texas, I went to a United Methodist Church that had a theology similar to that of The Village: God always loves us. Because of God’s grace, even though we do stupid things, God still keeps loving us. It does not matter what we do, God will forgive us. God’s love is constant. God just keeps giving us another chance to be in relationship. This is a reassuring theology. I have come to state it this way as a pastor: we are God’s beloved children and nothing we do can separate us from God’s desire to be in relationship with us. We always get another chance with God.

But where I grew up in West Texas, most of my friends did not go to a church like mine. I was surrounded by Southern Baptists. My best friend went to First Baptist Church in our hometown of Abilene. Even many of the United Methodist Churches had a more conservative theology than the United Methodist Church my family attended. It went something more like this: we are sinners. We must repent in order to be saved from the fires of Hell. God loves us but we must turn away from our sin or we will go to Hell. We are responsible to DO something for our salvation.

The first move is on us. Not so much emphasis on God’s grace.

Now, in my mind, there a few problems with this theological approach. For one thing, it motivates people out of fear rather than love.  It’s a very negative approach to theology.  You’d better get your act together or else God will punish you. I am pretty sure that Jesus came to show us how much God loves us, not to show us that God wants to punish us.

But another problem with that theology for me was this: when I was in high school, I did not feel like a big sinner. Okay, truth be told, I was pretty much a goody two shoes in high school. I did not do drugs and I was not sleeping around. Those are the big things the Youth Minister at First Baptist Church was preaching against. When I would go with my best friend to a worship service, or when I would wander into a United Methodist Church camp with an altar call, and they would say, “You need to turn away from your sins and turn to Jesus” I could not think of any big sins that I was committing. I wanted to be close to God, but the message they were giving did not match my life experience.

Of course, now that I am an adult, I see that we all sin. I see that if they could have been more nuanced in explaining sin, of course, I would have had a list: the sin of trying to do too much to prove that I am worthy. I committed that sin back then and still do today. Also, there was the sin of comparing myself to others and putting myself down. That is a sin because God makes each one of us beautiful in our own way and when we put ourselves down we are judging God’s creation as less than. I still do that one, too. I can be very competitive and feel like I am not as good as the person next door.  

The truth is, we have all sinned and fallen short in the eyes of God. Sin is what separates us from God. Sin is what keeps us from realizing that we are beloved children of God. The truth is, I did need to turn from my sin, but not in order to be saved from the fires of Hell. I needed to turn from my sin, so that I could grow closer to God. Because being close to God is where we want to be. It is the only place to be. We want to live in sync with God.

Well, long ago, in the time when Isaiah was working as a prophet of God, the people were buried neck deep in sin. They had turned away from God, for lots of reasons. Remember those chosen people, the ones we heard about all summer and fall, who made it to the Promised Land? Their land has now been taken over by foreign invaders. Many of them have been taken away to live in exile in a place called Babylon. And their beloved Temple in Jerusalem? The center of their religious life? It has been destroyed. They are, by the time of Isaiah, a broken and defeated people. They feel God has left them and so they have given up on God. They are blaming God for everything. They feel abandoned. And so they have turned to all sorts of sin.

That is when the prophet Isaiah comes to them. Now, let’s clear something up. A prophet is not a fortune teller. A prophet does not just predict the future out of nothing. A prophet speaks for God. A prophet looks at the situation and says, “Based on your behavior, these are the consequences. This is the road you have chosen and this is where I see you headed unless you change your ways.”

So Isaiah comes to speak to the people living in exile. But this time he prays to God on their behalf. We can only hope that they are listening:

But how angry, [God] you’ve been with us!
    We’ve sinned and kept at it so long!
    Is there any hope for us? Can we be saved? We’re all sin-infected, sin-contaminated…. We dry up like autumn leaves—
    sin-dried, we’re blown off by the wind. No one prays to you
    or makes the effort to reach out to you Because you’ve turned away from us,
    left us to stew in our sins.

Isaiah confesses the sins of the people but then he shows how the people have turned it around. They say that God has turned away from them. But God never turns away from God’s people.

This is Isaiah’s point, which he makes in the very next sentence.

^8-9Still, God, you are our God…. Don’t be too angry with us, O God.
    Don’t keep a permanent account of wrongdoing.
    Keep in mind, please, we are your people—all of us.

Isaiah is speaking to God but you better believe he wants the people to listen. “You are still our God,” Isaiah says. “We are your people – all of us.” He’s begging the people to turn away from sin and turn back to God.

Do you think God needed to be reminded of that? Of course not! But the people? Yes, they needed to be reminded. They had fallen on tough times and they had fallen into sin. They had turned away from God. Just because circumstances of life became dire, they thought God had given up on them, so they gave up on God. But that is not how it works. When things get tough, that is when God is right here with us, carrying us, and weeping with us, and patiently working with us to get to the other side of the difficulty. 

Now, why do you suppose we are reading such a text during Advent, this time of waiting and watching as we prepare to celebrate Christmas? At the beginning of the text there is a theme of Advent longing. Isaiah says:

Oh, that you would rip open the heavens and descend,
    make the mountains shudder at your presence….

Isaiah asks God to come down from heaven. It is many centuries before Jesus comes but we hear the prophet speak the longing of the people’s hearts. They want to experience the presence of God first hand. It is because they are so beaten down. They need God. Isaiah goes on to say: 

Since before time began
    no one has ever imagined,
No ear heard, no eye seen, a God like you
    who works for those who wait for God.

Isaiah is reminding the people that there is no God like their God. They have sinned and fallen away, but God works for those who wait. When we put our trust in God we will be satisfied. 

These are the advent promises. Even though we ARE a broken people who fall into sin, there is no one else like our God, who loves us and forgives us, who heals and restores us. 

God is the strong warp on which we weave the fabric of our lives. God’s warp is constant. God never wavers. 

Let me explain. You see a weaving loom in this picture right? To make a piece of fabric, you need threads going two ways. They crisscross with each other to make the strong bond of the fabric. The threads on the loom are the warp. The warp is threaded on the loom carefully so that it is strong. The yarn must be strong and usually smooth so it does not get caught up in the loom. Then the weaver weaves the threads back and forth which are the weft. The weft threads are where the creativity comes in, and the messiness.

So God is the warp – the strong part, and we are the weft, the creative and messy part. For the weft, you can play it safe and use smooth thread and get a balanced weave. Most fabric for clothing is made in this way. Or you can use nubby yarn and get a more interesting fabric. Or you can weave a pattern in the fabric. The more complicated the weave the more opportunities for mistakes, and the more opportunities for delightful creativity. If the weaver is not careful, however, the weft can get tangled or the pattern can get messed up. But the warp is always there, the same, strong and even. 

I believe God is the warp of our lives. God is the strong steady part. We weave our lives into God, sometimes we weave something beautiful. When we sin, we weave a big mess. But no matter what we weave, God is still there on the loom, never flinching. Never failing to be present and ready for us to weave the next section of fabric. 

Advent is a season to prepare our hearts to receive the gift of Jesus anew. So our Advent question is this: How does your fabric look? What blemishes are in your fabric, because you have turned away from God and turned to sin?

Sin can take many forms. Not just the big moral ones like sleeping around and being caught in addictions. When I was in high school I was too simplistic in my understanding of sin. Sin is anything that keeps you from being the person God created you to be, a beloved child of God, blessed and beautiful to behold. 

·      Self-doubt is sin;

·      Holding ourselves back out of fear is sin.

·      Trying to do too much can be sin if we have no room for Sabbath rest.

·      Holding a grudge against someone is sin because it holds us in bondage to negative thoughts and feelings; God wants us to be free.

·      Not using our gifts to our fullest potential is a sin. God gave us these gifts to use. 

What sin is in the fabric of your life? 

Now hear the good news. Whatever your sin, God forgives you and wants to give you a fresh start. The weaver, to get a fresh start, simply stuffs some tissue in the weft as a spacer, and starts a new piece of fabric. The old messed up stuff is wound around the loom and it disappears. But the warp is always there. God is always there, ready to receive us and love and make us new. So as we begin this advent season, let’s confess our sins and get started in a new life with God.