Comfort
Isaiah 40:1-11
Click here to view the full sermon for December 6, 2020 entitled, Comfort.
God’s People Are Comforted
40 Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God.
2 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.
3 A voice cries out:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
4 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.
5 Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
6 A voice says, “Cry out!”
And I said, “What shall I cry?”
All people are grass,
their constancy is like the flower of the field.
7 The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the Lord blows upon it;
surely the people are grass.
8 The grass withers, the flower fades;
but the word of our God will stand forever.
9 Get you up to a high mountain,
O Zion, herald of good tidings;[a]
lift up your voice with strength,
O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,
lift it up, do not fear;
say to the cities of Judah,
“Here is your God!”
10 See, the Lord God comes with might,
and his arm rules for him;
his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.
11 He will feed his flock like a shepherd;
he will gather the lambs in his arms,
and carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead the mother sheep
The second candle of Advent is now glowing as we enter the second week of our journey toward Christmas. And despite what the holiday ads scream at us, Advent is still a season of waiting - a season of anticipation and longing for something even better than santa - a season in which we are invited to a deeper awareness of both the brokenness of our world and the great hope we profess.
Perhaps, this waiting and longing is felt more keenly at the end of this strange and difficult year.
Advent is also the season when we spend time with the prophets of old. Prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah who spoke truths the world wasn’t ready to hear and who looked forward to a future filled with the presence of God.
My dad is a CPA and one of his favorite jokes is to point out that churches are non-profit (non-prophet) organizations. It’s a funny pun, but also feels a little too true sometimes.
Prophets like to stir things up. They are usually inconvenient and very often, scary. There is no candy-coating to their truth-telling.
In the first scroll of Isaiah, which takes us through chapter 39 of Isaiah, the message on the prophet’s lips is dire:
He warns the people to turn back from their ways – to once again trust in God for protection rather than foreign kings or powerful armies.
He warns them to turn from their worship of idols and misplaced loyalties,
He warns them to turn from their exploitation of the poor.
Isaiah sees clearly the tragic consequences of their ways quickly approaching from Babylon – he sees the utter destruction on the horizon that will swallow the people up if its leaders will not listen.
Against the tragic backdrop of the Babylonian exile which followed and proved the warnings of Isaiah correct, the words that begin the second scroll of Isaiah meet us like cool water to parched lips, surprising us with maybe the most dramatic shift in tone you’ll find in Scripture.
“Comfort, o comfort my people, says your God”
The people have suffered their consequences. Words of warning and destruction have now become words of comfort and hope. As Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel describes these tender, opening words of Isaiah 40: “to comfort is to throw a glimmer of meaning into a cave of wretchedness.”
Isaiah now holds a light up for the people to find their way out of the darkness.
Last week in our middle school Godly Play class, we looked at this difference between First and Second Isaiah. We looked at the difference between First Isaiah’s warnings and Second Isaiah’s message of comfort. We talked about how prophets have different messages for different times and places. And together we wondered what message our world needs to hear today -what message each one of us needs to hear today.
We all agreed with the clear-eyed student who said, “a little bit of both.”
We need to hear the prophets warning when we consider how over this last year we’ve seen how the pandemic has exposed and deepened inequalities in our country:
Racial minorities have been disproportionately affected by this virus.
Low-income communities which have historically suffered a lack of access to quality health care have been decimated by this disease which preys upon those with underlying health conditions.
Children without access to adequate technology cannot equally access educational opportunities while schools are closed, while their parents often have to work in unsafe conditions with no option to work from home or take sick days.
We’ve seen the disproportionate toll the pandemic has taken on Pueblos here in New Mexico and on the Navajo Nation –
Inequalities that have always been part of our country’s fabric have become even deeper and devastating this year. And yes, the words of warning from First Isaiah echo in our time – calling us to change our ways, to care for the vulnerable and dismantle systems that only serve to prop up the wealthy and powerful. Isaiah’s words should unsettle us if we truly hear them.
And at the same time, we hear the words of comfort in Second Isaiah. There is so much suffering around us. In the immense grief and isolation of this moment, we are comforted by our God who is steadfastly faithful. Hope is as much a part of the prophet’s vocabulary as judgment.
But when we hear these words of comfort this morning, it’s important that we hear them the right way.
Isaiah’s not talking about the kind of comfort we find when we get to stay warm and cozy inside in our pajamas all day or curled up with a good book and cup of hot tea. As nice as those things are, the kind of comfort declared here is not exactly so comfortable.
The people are still in exile, the temple is still destroyed, and these words of hope are declared not from a cozy home, but from the middle of the wilderness. It seems that there’s still quite a difficult journey ahead and not an immediate reversal of fortunes or restoration of the way things were.
What comfort means here, is that the people learn they are in the middle of the story and not the end of it – contrary to where it seemed history was pointing, Babylon would not get the last word to their story. There are yet future chapters to be written.
What comfort means here, is God’s people finding out that God had not abandoned them, despite what they had thought. Though humans are fickle and inconsistent as the withering grass, God declares that God’s word will stand forever and God’s promises can be trusted.
Comfort here, is Gospel. Did you hear it?
God says,
Get you up to a high mountain,
O Zion, herald of good tidings;[a]
lift up your voice with strength,
O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,
lift it up, do not fear;
say to the cities of Judah,
“Here is your God!”
This word for “good tidings” in Greek, is the same important word we just heard in our first reading from Mark’s Gospel which begins with: “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Mark announces good tidings, or gospel, just as Isaiah did, declaring to a weary world, “here is your God!”
In fact, Mark’s opening proclamation quotes directly from this Isaiah passage, introducing John the Baptist as one who comes in the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord. To the Gospel’s early Jewish audience, this passage would have been well known and closely held.
As New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine says, “by evoking Isaiah’s prophecy, the Gospel writer is telling readers: I’ve given you one verse of Isaiah 40, now fill in the rest of the Song”. And the song those early hearers would have filled in here was a song filled with words of comfort to a people in exile - good news about God’s presence when they thought they’d been abandoned - good news about forgiveness and hope and new beginnings. This is the tradition in which John the Baptist joins as he enters the scene, preparing the way for Jesus out in the wilderness.
“Here is your God” is the good news declared by both Isaiah and Mark.
“Here is your God” is the good news declared to us today in our Advent waiting.
May you hear in this good news the profound word of comfort that it is – and not the kind of comfort that makes us complacent, but the kind of comfort that stirs hope deep in our souls so that we might join the prophet in the wilderness to prepare the way for the coming one, who is both mighty God and gentle shepherd.
May it be so. Amen.