Advent Comfort and Advent Challenge

December 7, 2014

Advent 2, Year B
Isaiah 40:1-11

The world has felt extraordinarily heavy to me lately. Unarmed African American men being killed by police officers and grand jury decisions tearing communities apart.  Hannah Graham’s disappearance and death.  A deepening realization of the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses.  Mass shootings, suicide bombings, polar ice caps melting faster than we’d feared, draught, famine, and wars raging in more countries than I can name.

Probably the news isn’t actually any heavier now than at any other time.  I’ve probably just been paying more attention.  Or maybe having kids makes me worry more about the future.   Or maybe I’m just starting to feel so powerless to affect the pain I read about.  

I’m betting that from a God’s-eye view the pain of the world has always been heavy.  Our Old Testament reading today from Isaiah is a perfect example.  It’s set in the last half of the 6^th century BC.  The Israelites are living in exile and captivity after having their beloved Jerusalem invaded and their army decimated by the Babylonians.  The remaining Israelites have been in the equivalent of a prison camp for decades.  We sing of them in our Advent song: “O come O Come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here.”  And their military and political crisis has led to a theological crisis as well.  They feel as if their captivity is God’s judgment for their failure to live faithfully.  They feel as if God has abandoned them and will never again be in the midst of them.  They feel as if they have no future.  And into that heaviness come these beautiful words from Isaiah:

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.  Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.

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A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.  Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.

God will feed God’s flock like a shepherd; God will gather the lambs in God’s arms, and carry them in God’s bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.

This is such good news for the Israelites.  Words of comfort and a promise of redemption for a people drowning in pain and despair.   Hope in the midst of disaster and uncertainty.  God is creating a way to the future through the Israelites’ desert wilderness.

These words are like a balm to my soul after the harsh and threatening words of judgment we’ve been hearing from Matthew’s Gospel all year.  God is our gentle shepherd, capable of changing anything and longing to change everything.  And the comfort these words offer are just as powerful in our world of heaviness as they were in Isaiah’s time.   There is a way through the wilderness that we see all around us in this world.  We have a God who comes to be with us, who promises a future for us.

A few weeks ago, we opened the Church for silence and prayer and candlelighting for all those struggling with loss after the news of Hannah Graham’s death.  A few people from St. Aidan’s came, but even more were visitors from the community.  A woman whose occasional sobs could be heard was sitting right there.  A mother with her arm around her teenage daughter walked forward to light a candle with tears streaming down their faces.  And then someone walked up the aisle carrying a yellow bow. 

For weeks that bow, and hundreds like it, had symbolized hope and return and promise.  We read the papers and prayed for Hannah and followed the search and put out our yellow bows.  And then we got the news that her body had been identified.  The hopes of Hannah’s family and friends, the dreams for Hannah’s future, were dashed.  The yellow bows were no longer a symbol of hope and return, but of sorrow and loss. 

But when the woman came up and placed her ribbon on the altar it became a symbol of something else.  A symbol of the kind of comfort that Isaiah promises.  A reminder that our God is present in our anguish.  A symbol of a way through the wilderness and darkness that is possible only with God.

            It made me wonder how I, how each of us, might transform the heavy places of our own lives, and of the world around us.  How we might be able to lay our heaviness before God and open ourselves to receive the comfort that Isaiah promises.  What are the dashed hopes, the unfulfilled dreams, the impossible hurts that you might be able to lay on the altar? 

[Now, that’s a big question.  And that may be a place where you need to stay for a while, and if you are there on your own , please know that John and I and our lay pastoral care group are always here if any of us can help with that.]

            But along with being comforted ourselves, the people facing heaviness in Isaiah’s time, and we facing heaviness of the world in this age, are also challenged by Isaiah’s words.  We are waiting, but we aren’t to wait passively.  We are also called to be comforters, commissioned to bear this message of hope to a broken world.  We are called to cry out until our voices break.  And we are called to help prepare the way through the wilderness, lifting up valleys, making mountains low, leveling the uneven ground, in whatever way we can.  We are called to reimagine the world and to transform it.

We can’t help Hannah Graham now, but we can be there for people we know who are reeling with grief from the loss of a loved one.  We can’t undo the sexual assaults that have already happened on college campuses but we can push against the system that seems to marginalize victims and protect perpetrators.  We can’t help Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown or Eric Garner, but we can be part of a conversation about race in this country that challenges us all in the way we think and act towards our brothers and sisters.  We can’t help the kids killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, or the other past victims of gun violence, but we can push for gun laws that have reasonable protections to help stem the tide of violence. 

What kind of transformation might God be calling you to be a part of this Advent?