December 7, 2014
Advent 2, Year BIsaiah 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 6th 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.
F
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?
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