About
Isaiah 65:17-25
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The danger in a passage like this is that we can get so swept up in the vision it offers, so carried away by the beauty of the words and the picture they paint that we neglect or lose sight of where and to whom the prophet delivers this inspiring word from God. The truth is that before this is an eloquent piece of poetry, something to be cross-stitched on a pillow, or wall hanging, it is a word from God. It is a word from God to God’s people in a very important moment in their history. What makes this scripture so powerful is that while our own moment may look far different than what those who first heard it were experiencing, it has much in common with theirs.
The book of the prophet Isaiah is generally understood to be divided into three parts that correspond to the timeline of the historic fall of Jerusalem, the Babylonian exile, and the people’s return from exile to the land. First Isaiah, which takes up well over half the book, runs through chapter 39 and details the words of the prophet to the people of Judah leading up to the siege of the city of Jerusalem and its eventual destruction at the hand of the Babylonian army. Second Isaiah, then, is a word of comfort and promise that God hasn’t abandoned the people who have been carried hundreds of miles away to a foreign land to live in exile. Finally, from chapter 56 to the end of the book we hear the voice of Third Isaiah speaking a word to the people liberated from exile who have returned to the land. The whole thing plays out a little like an object lesson in the old saying, “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.” The people of Judah had grown complacent. When it came to worship and God they were simply going through the motions while neglecting God’s long-established commands to attend to the most vulnerable among them. Suddenly, they were the vulnerable ones. Suddenly, they were the ones being trampled by those more powerful than them. But in the despair of exile, they are promised the hope of return, the assurance that God would restore them to the land promised to Abraham and his descendants. Some seventy years and a major regime change later from Babylon to Persia, the people were allowed to do just that. They returned to the land, and as you might imagine after 70 years, nothing was like it was. It was a wasteland of ruined cities and overgrown fields. The promised land was nothing like they expected. In fact, it was pretty desolate.
Now, unlike the people of Judah or even our contemporary Ukrainian allies, we haven’t had to face down an invading army, or the existential threat of annihilation. But when COVID hit, it did shut down our economy, shutter schools and businesses, and send all of us into a kind of homebound exile. As we were cut off from so many of our normal rhythms and shared spaces, we engaged in a kind of lament for the loss of contact, the loss of connection, and so much more. In those days of lockdowns, and social distance, face masks and limits on gathering together, all we could think about was what we were missing. We were missing our friends, we were missing our family, we were missing the ease of traveling freely, and worshipping together. Things we had certainly taken for granted. Like the exiles returning to the land, our return was a series of fits and starts, vaccines and variants, and ever-changing guidance. Even now, we know we live with the specter of yet another variant and a winter wave of new infections. Still, we find ourselves back where we longed to be while it was all closed down, only to discover that things are not exactly as we hoped. There aren’t as many people in worship as there was before. Congregational giving that held so strong during the pandemic has fallen off. We changed music directors and organists. Then Libby retired, and Frank left to help another church, and now Stephanie is being called elsewhere. So much that was familiar isn’t what it was. The church we’ve returned to, like the land of promise, isn’t the same. So much has changed and is changing and it can make all of us feel more than a little lost, and at a loss for how to go forward and where to go from here. It’s enough to make a person wonder what it’s all about anyway. What’s the point of any of it?
It is to that place, to those feelings, these questions, that God speaks this word of promise to a people who have gotten what they yearned for only to find it isn’t anything like they imagined. Which is to say, God speaks this word to us. It is a word that signals not simply what God is about to do- “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth,”- it is a word that let’s us know what God is about. God is about a kind of holy amnesia that doesn’t hold onto the memory of our fits and failures, one that doesn’t nurse the grudges and wounds of the past. Because in order to create anew, in order to walk into a world remade by the powerful love of God, we must be willing to let go of the former things. It’s been observed that the people returned from exile were cynical about their future. The promises of the holy city made to them in exile hadn’t materialized in the way that they imagined they would, and it left them a little bitter. That’s where cynicism comes from. It comes from the wound of disappointed expectations. It comes from putting our faith, our time, our energy and effort into a particular outcome only to fall short. It’s easy to become cynical if we don’t let go of those former things, if we call to mind all the ways that things didn’t work out the way we hoped they would. And when we do, when we remain captive to our hurts and disappointments, it can be difficult to see what God is creating. It can be difficult to rejoice and be glad in what God is creating when we remain bitter about what didn’t happen, what didn’t work out the way we wanted it to. That way of thinking remains focused on what we want, what we think, what we expect. None of which is conducive to rejoicing in what God wants, what God thinks, what God is doing in our midst.
What we’re told God is about to do is to create Jerusalem as a joy. Now the particular Hebrew word here is both a clue and a corrective. The word for ‘create’ here is only ever used elsewhere in the Genesis account to describe what God does in bringing all that is into being. But here, instead of creating a universe out of nothing and an isolated garden for two people, God is about to takes what to all the world looks ruined and create a city on a hill, a place of joy that brings all kinds of people together to delight in God and one another. I wonder if that isn’t what we are called to be as church. Imagine God saying, “I am about to create the church as a joy, and it’s people as a delight.” What would it look like not to remember and mourn all that’s been lost, all that isn’t as it was before, and to rejoice instead and be glad in what God is creating? This isn’t some abstract promise either; just a bunch of empty happy talk. The joy and delight that God describes for us, that God intends for us looks pretty specific. It looks like a place where concerns about infant mortality are addressed, and aging well is a priority. Where those who do the work in an economy are not exploited purely for the benefit of others, but actually get to live in the houses that they build, and enjoy the fruit of fields they plant and tend. Where people can enjoy the work they do because they can see and experience its benefits for themselves and their descendants and not simply for the enrichment of shareholders. Their labor is not pointless and their children are not fated to become just more grist for the mill of industry, or warfare, or the algorithm. When our hearts are not set on the hurts of the past, but look instead to what God is about, what God is creating even now, God does not wait for us to call out to answer. God does not wait for us to say the right words to hear what is in our hearts. God’s answer is already unfolding right in front of us creating anew all that we might have otherwise written off as a lost cause. God hears and knows our longing for the places of desolation to become generative and life-giving places once more.
What we hear in this word from God delivered to a people who are at a loss for where to go from here is that our future is so much more expansive than even we can imagine, because it is one that God creates and is creating. In fact, it is so expansive that even our assumptions about enmity itself, the entrenched divisions that we’ve come to accept as the natural way of things, even those are reconciled so that lambs can eat alongside wolves without fear, and lions need not kill to survive. What God creates does not come at another’s expense, it isn’t part of a zero sum game in which someone has to lose for another to win. There is no place for hurt and destruction in what God creates and is creating even now. This is what it’s all about. This is what God is all about. And if we can rejoice and be glad in the promise of what God creates and is creating, if we can catch sight of these things that God values and prioritizes in this new creation, then we need no longer remember the former things, or call them to mind, because it is what we are about too, as a people in whom God delights.