Gathering: Sin
Sin Will Tear Us Apart
Isaiah 64:1-9
Rev. Tim Callow
Preached Sun. November 29th, 2020
The story of Israel is a story of gathering and exile and re-gathering. God gathers his people from slavery in Egypt and plants them in the promised land. The people turn from God, turn to idols, and are scattered. God returns the people to Israel, and promises to gather them all together again. Our reading from Isaiah is from this time of exile, when the Jews in Jerusalem were captured and sent to Babylon. The prophet yearns for the presence of God, and the restoration of his people, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” he cries, “so that the mountains would quake at your presence.”
Imagine the pain the prophet must have been going through. Losing his homeland, yes. The destruction of the Temple, yes. And being isolated. Alone. Cut off from friends and family. Forced to make do in a strange new world. Perhaps, to some degree, we have some commonality with the prophet’s pain. To some degree we feel it ourselves. This is the first Sunday of Advent, and normally we gather together under boughs of evergreen and among the lights and we remind each other of the coming of Jesus. We eagerly await Christmas parties and family returning home. Or we might eagerly await going to see family.
But this year things are different. It will have almost been a year since COVID first hit. There are those of us who have stayed put, keeping ourselves safe, for almost a year. It’s been almost a year of remaining distant, and wearing masks. It’s been almost a year of precarity and strangeness. It’s been almost a year of living, I’m sure we would agree, in ways we are not really meant to live. We are made for each other. We are made to enjoy one another’s company. We are not made to stay in one place for too long, or to be apart for too long.
So we do know a bit of the pain of exile. We have some sense of what it must have been like for the world you once knew to come toppling down, and to be shoved into a strange new world of alienation and loneliness.
The loneliness we may feel not only imitates the pain of exile, but it is also an imitation of the pain of sin. Now I want to be clear here. I’m not saying it’s sinful to stay home. I’m not saying that the pandemic is here on account of any particular sinfulness of ours. I’m not in the business of making such judgments. I abide by the old rule that when you’re pointing your finger at someone you got three more pointed back at you. But I do think the experience of separating ourselves, much like the experience of exile for the ancient Jewish people, can inform us about the consequences of sin. It reminds us how sin works in our lives.
Isaiah attributes the exile to sin. “You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed. 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.” Isaiah offers a lament and a confession. The people of Israel did not perceive God’s presence, and so they relied instead on themselves. They put their trust in their own righteous deeds, which are like a filthy cloth. They sinned. Sinning is oftentimes relying on ourselves and not putting trust in God. And on account of their sin they faced ruin. On account of their sin they were split apart.
I’m reminded of a little allegory, if I can call it an allegory, that C.S. Lewis once wrote called The Great Divorce. It’s the depiction of a dream I have to assume Lewis pretends to have. In the dream he has a dreadful vision of Hell that has always remained with me (I bet you were expecting a sermon touching on Hell for Advent, right?). He imagines a dark and drab city in perpetual twilight where it’s always raining. As he walks through the city he doesn’t come across anyone, until he arrives at a bus stop. There he sees two men fighting in line to get on the bus. As the story progresses this picture of Hell comes into greater focus. The people there are irritable, resentful, and wrathful. They can’t stand each other. Everyone is complaining about someone else. There is one former bishop who is part of a book club, and he insists that he is the only one who knows anything that’s going on.
Another person explains that the worst part about the afterlife is you’d expect to run into some interesting people, but all of the interesting people have left. As it turns out building a new house is just as easy as imagining it up. So as people get into arguments they get up and walk off. So the most interesting people you’d expect to run into, have all moved thousands of years away. The figure explains how a friend of his went to go see Napoleon.
About fifteen thousand years of our time it took them. We’ve picked out the house by now. Just a little pin prick of light and nothing else near it for millions of miles.’
‘But they got there?’
‘That’s right. He’d built himself a huge house all in the Empire style—rows of windows flaming with light, though it only shows as a pin prick from where I live.’
‘Did they see Napoleon?’
‘That’s right. They went up and looked through one of the windows. Napoleon was there all right.’
‘What was he doing?’
‘Walking up and down—up and down all the time—left-right, left-right—never stopping for a moment. The two chaps watched him for about a year and he never rested. And muttering to himself all the time. “It was Soult’s fault. It was Ney’s fault. It was Josephine’s fault. It was the fault of the Russians: It was the fault of the English.” Like that all the time. Never stopped for a moment. A little, fat man and he looked kind of tired. But he didn’t seem able to stop it.’
Lewis’ image of Hell isn’t ironic tortures in a series of concentric circles, but it’s an intensification of sin in this life, and an intensification of the way sin causes us to suffer. Instead Hell is drab and despairing. People grow to be so consumed by their sins that they get into constant fights, they simply can’t control themselves. They grow isolated, alienated, and alone.
But Lewis also mentions that old bus stop. In his vision of Hell there is a bus that runs from Hell to Heaven. It’s absolutely free. It’s never out of service. All you have to do is get on it, and you make it to the fields of heaven. But it just happens that some people never bother to make the walk. Their sins are too much, and they find all sorts of excuses to go back to their misery.
Sin is not exciting, it’s not pleasurable, all that wears off quickly. Sin is actually suffering. It damages us. It consumes us. And it tears us apart. It builds walls of self-righteousness and resentment. It hides us in the shadows of secrecy. It alienates us from God, and it alienates us from one another. And in this season we surely know the pain of alienation, we sense how dehumanizing and destructive it can be.
But I’m not ending this without good news. The good news is that there is a regathering. The good news is that God does not leave his people in exile. The good news is that this season will be over, and we will gather again. And the good news is that God has promised the cleansing of our sin, and wants to set us right with him and with one another. We will talk more about that next week.
