Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Comfort Ye My People: Sermon II Advent

Sermon on Isaiah 40:1-11, Advent 2B Revised Common Lectionary
To be preached at St. John’s on December 7th, God willing.

King Hezekiah had been very sick.  God intervened miraculously and healed him.  Shortly after he was restored, visitors came from a far away land.  They represented Merodach-baladan, the King of Babylon.  They brought gifts and letters of congratulations to the king of Judah.  The emissaries seemed to have good intent, and seemed to express a genuine joy at the King’s restored health.  In what might be called a “fit of generosity,” Hezekiah showed them all that he had.  The Prophet Isaiah saw the guise for exactly what it was.  These ambassadors were scouts for the raiding parties and invasion that were sure to follow.  God employed the Prophet to detail to King Hezekiah what was soon to come when the invaders came back in force.  At the heart of the message was the stark pronouncement, “Not a thing shall be left.”


Against this background of impending doom and desolation, God came again to the prophet in today’s first lesson from Isaiah 40.  Our proper today consists of the first few stanzas of a poem of consolation, one of the most beautiful in the literature of the Hebrews.  “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, says your God.”  Against the stark realities of the darkness of life, Isaiah is commissioned by God to deliver a message of hope and deliverance to the people.  It is a message that they had heard before, but they had always seen it as a message from their history, from their distant past.  It concerns deliverance from captivity across a barren wilderness, and ultimate restoration to a promised land.  But it also points out the weakness and insufficiency of mere human wisdom and provision.  And ultimately, it invokes the image of the “good shepherd” to assure the people of God’s love and provision for them.  With the coming captivity in Babylon, what had been a distant memory of their tribal history became real-time experience.  When we face times of difficulty and hardship today, we join them, and people throughout history in experiencing firsthand this same message from God. So what does it all mean for us today on this second sunday of advent?  I offer a few suggestions.


The first stanza in verses one and two speaks of sin and atonement, and of the punishment which accompanies that atonement.  Hezekiah and the people had sinned against God.  Sometimes it had been blatant sin, like when idols were erected in the temple precincts, or the poor were dispossessed of their property in the great economic upheavals of the eighth century.  At other times, the sin consisted of the adoption of cultural values or popular political agendas which were inconsistent with God’s will, such as when a good king was killed because his sense of duty and commitment to friends caused him to put his trust in horses and soldiers and fight with the Egyptians when the prophet had told him to stand firm and place his trust in God.  And then there were those things such as Hezekiah had done in extending absolute hospitality, a Biblical and cultural imperative, to those who had determined to do him and his people ill.  His misinterpretation of the law of hospitality happened because he was perhaps a bit prideful, or as Isaiah 39:8 and the opening verses of chapter 38 would seem to indicate, that he thought first about himself instead of about the job that God had given him to do.  How often do we in our ignorance willfully misinterpret scripture in a way that  tries to justify our actions or allow us to continue in our character defects and sins?  Our sins, like those of Israel, are very real, whether they be based on a willful rejection of God’s word, on a thoughtless adoption of the cultural values around us, or on a more nuanced attempt to see ourselves justified because our situation is special, or different.  


This leads us to ask, why must sin be punished at all?  Couldn’t God just let a few little things pass?  So much of bad decisions and stupid mistakes are rather harmless after all, aren’t they?  Well, not really.  If a person bounces cheques, he should not be surprised when people stop extending him credit or accepting his cheques.  If a woman cheats on her husband, betraying his trust, breaking his heart, and exposing him to disease and social rejection or ridicule, she ought not to be surprised if he divorces her.  If someone drinks too much or drugs and is ineffective in the performance of his job, he shouldn’t blame his employer when he gets sacked.  If a man engages in risky behaviour sexually, or by being a glutton or a heavy smoker, he should not be surprised when he dies young of health issues.  Sin has consequences in this world.  It also has consequences in eternity.  If God is who we say he is, that is, he is holy and good and true, and the essence and origin of those things, then sin and darkness and imperfection cannot exist in his presence.  Imagine that all sin and shortcoming and pain and hurt are a deep darkness.  When the light comes into the darkness, the darkness ceases to be.  So when God comes into our lives, all of those bad things are put away as well.  The time of punishment has ended because we have received from the very hand of God that undeserved gift of atonement which restores us and makes us one with God again.  Our sin is put away as far as the east is from the west, and we are healed.  In this world, God gives us positional holiness and looks upon us as sinless, even though our lives are still characterized by struggles and occasional failures, and by the ongoing consequences of past sin.  But this positional holiness is a foreshadowing of that day when Christ returns and we shall be perfect even as he is perfect.  We have all received punishment for our sins in this life.  But our faith tells us that when Jesus comes again, we shall be completely free, and in the mean time, we see those evidences of coming freedom in our lives every day when we make good decisions and walk away from the destruction of addiction, and selfishness, and bad behaviour, and perverse attitudes.


Isaiah says a voice cries in the wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord! Make straight in the desert a highway for our God!” Like many of you, for years I drove the snakelike valley roads of southeastern Ohio, with their steep climbs and treacherous turns when the topography finally runs out.  And then the route 33 bypass was completed between Logan and Nelsonville.  Every valley was filled in, and the mountains were laid low.  What used to take over an hour now just takes a matter of minutes, and I can run 70 miles per hour all the way to my destination.  When the Jews were led out of Egypt, they wandered in the wilderness for forty years.  God would have shortened the time, but their faith failed at several critical junctures. He kept loving them, and ultimately he got them to where they were going.  Here is a promise to the people of God.  Whether you are held as a slave in Babylon, or in prescription medicine, or in lust, or in gluttony, or in pride, or in discouragement, or in any other land,  God is still in the delivering business, and he offers us the same deal he offered the Jews the first time.  “Walk with me and I will give you strength and take you to the promised land. I am coming to you again, to lead you out of the wilderness, this one of your own making, into the promised land.  All of your efforts to this point have been ineffective, I know that.  They wither like the grass and fade like a flower, but now I am with you, to make the way .  I come with power and victory, and joy- to gather you into my arms as a shepherd gathers his sheep, I will hold you to my breast and bring you rest.”   That is the hope of Advent and the story of Christmas.  

Have you taken the time in this busy season of preparation to honestly catalogue those bad habits and worse memories and ongoing sinful decisions which defeat you, and make you want to give up?  Have you actually made a list of the things which make you feel distant from God, or unclean, or less than whole?  The God who loves all of us, speaking through Isaiah in today’s first lesson, has promised that when we acknowledge these realities in our lives, he will deliver us in wonderful ways and restore us to spiritual health and purpose as we await the consummation of this age.  We cannot do it ourselves, but he will make for us a highway through the wilderness.  Where we cannot see a way, he will bring us restoration and peace.  Today in this Holy Communion, which is the emblem of his acceptance of us, bring him your list, and receive his healing, and know his peace.  Hear the voice of the joyful messenger, that our God is here!  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.  

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