Years ago, while preparing for Easter, I read someone say, “On Easter Sunday, we don’t have to persuade or argue or debate the resurrection. We can announce it.”

As I’ve thought about this first week of Advent, I’ve thought about what we can announce about hope. What is the basis of confidence that we can point to? What is the assurance that we can build on?

For years and years, I’ve thought about what pastor types know as the Incarnation. It’s the name for the story of God putting on a body and walking around among other human beings.

Jesus talking to little children. Jesus feeding a crowd. Jesus walking on water.

As nice as that picture is, it doesn’t reflect the desperation that people felt, the passion that God felt.

This week, we read from Isaiah 64. The writer is in the middle of feeling abandoned by God. Of a whole community of God’s people being forgotten and disregarded.  

“Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,” we read.

That’s what we want, right?

When our loved one is in surgery, when our people are being killed, when our world is breaking, we want God to break through. If we knew that God knew, that God was aware, that God could and would act, it would help. We could hang on a bit longer.

He did.

The heartbreaking desire in Isaiah 64 was fulfilled in by Jesus.

But rather than hope looking like a lightning storm, like a descending superhero, God came in human form the way humans come. As a baby. As the response to a whole list of messages from prophets over a couple thousand years, Jesus quietly was born and grew up and lived in a little town in a little country.

He taught and healed and laughed and cared for people. Cared about people.

And then he died.

But not like we will all die. Because we will all die.

He died and then he rose again.

He said, “I’ll be with you always” and he said, “I will come in the clouds with great power” then he disappeared into the clouds.

So somehow, we wait with him and we wait for him.

God is here and God is coming.

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Part two of a series for the first week of Advent.