Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord;
Lord, hear my voice.
Let your ears be attentive
to my cry for mercy.
If you, Lord, kept a record of sins,
Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness,
so that we can, with reverence, serve you.
I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,
and in his word I put my hope.
I wait for the Lord
more than watchmen wait for the morning,
more than watchmen wait for the morning.
Israel, put your hope in the Lord,
or with the Lord is unfailing love
and with him is full redemption.
He himself will redeem Israel
from all their sins.
Psalm 130
—
There’s a particular type of darkness that wraps itself around you at 3am. When you’re awake in the night, the sadness and anxiety and fear and anger all are heavier. 3am is when shame smothers you with memories of all the ways you’ve failed yourself and people that you love. 3am is when no mental math can stretch to cover the medical or tuition or electricity bill. It’s when you realize the habit is actually an addiction. It’s when you look at the person lying asleep next to you and feel the weight of loneliness and apartness, even though you aren’t alone or apart. At 3am, you will never find someone to love. At 3am, your daughter will never call. At 3am, God can’t hear you.
Out of the depths, I cry to you, oh Lord.
And there are times in our lives that feel like 3am times. Every day seems like it’s slogging through fog, overwhelmed with exhaustion and the panic that is normally reserved for 3am. Days roll into weeks roll into months and the difference in your soul between 3am and 3pm is irrelevant because the depths are very deep.
And there are times in the world that feel like 3am times. I don’t need to describe what those times feel like.
Advent is a time for 3am people
Advent is a before space. It is a not yet space. It is a darkness space.
Advent says that Jesus is not here yet.
Advent says that the sun isn’t up yet.
Advent says that the world is broken and not fixed. Advent invites us to join the Psalmist and bellow “out of the depths I cry to you, oh Lord!” without shame, without guilt, without platitudes and without cliches and without being told to look on the bright side because in the darkness there is no bright side.
In Advent, we reach back and grab hands with the Israelites of the past who were living in an occupied country under foreign rule, a people living under religious leadership that argued theological semantics while putting on their communities “burdens too heavy for the people to bear.” We link arms with a people walking in darkness who haven’t seen a great light yet. We hold a weary world that isn’t rejoicing yet, people suffering all around the world. We sit in silence with our neighbors and friends who are mourning, fearful, and angry. Advent calls us to speak honestly with God about the darkness without tut-tutting or rebuking – it never tells us to only speak positive words and cheerful lies.
I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,
more than watchmen wait for the morning,
more than watchmen wait for the morning.
My whole being is tired of all the effort and work that it takes to be awake at 3am, in the dark, waiting for morning. People of today and Saints of yesterday – during Advent, we’re all here together. Sitting up on the back porch in the cold, wrapped in blankets, watching the sky and waiting for the darkness to end. We wait for the Lord, more than watchmen wait for the morning.
And morning does not disappoint us. Because morning – always – comes.
It came when God stopped just speaking from a burning bush, and a cloud, and in dreams and visions of the ancient prophets and poets, and started speaking inside time. God started eating real food, wore clothes, got blisters, knew his friends like a Person knows other people, cried real tears from a real body that, along with us, waited for resurrection and for the redemption of the world. And then the Person became the thing that we were all waiting for.
“Look! I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?”
When you sit on that back porch waiting for morning, you can’t make morning come faster. But also no one can stop the morning from coming, and no one can slow down the morning from coming, because God is coming no matter what.
We are waiting and it is hard. Having a hope that does not disappoint us doesn’t mean that the waiting is less painful, or less exhausting, or less scary. But it does mean that we can remember that being an Advent people doesn’t just mean being in the darkness, but being on the very edge of light.
Every night in the darkness, the sun will always, always, always be there at sunrise. Advent reminds us that we are a weary world that isn’t rejoicing yet. But Advent also reminds us that God has been faithful – God will be again.
While we wait in darkness, we do not mourn as those who have no hope.
originally preached as an Advent sermon on 11/30/15
