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Isaiah 40:1-11
Advent 2
December 6, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
In the end and despite the reforming efforts of Kings Hezekiah and Josiah, the little Kingdom of Judah fared badly. Babylon was on the rise, having overcome Assyria, its major rival in the Tigris and Euphrates valley. It tore through the little kingdoms around Judah like a hot knife through soft butter.
The King Jehoiachin of Judah, although described as a king who “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord,” nonetheless was smart enough to know when he was beaten. When Nebuchadnezzar and the armies of Babylon showed up at the gates of Jerusalem, Jehoichin surrendered the city. Jehoiachin and his family were hauled off to Babylon as prisoners. The Temple gold was looted. Jehoiachin’s uncle (renamed as Zedekiah) was installed as the new king of Judah.
Judah was permitted some measure of independence, but it wasn’t enough for Zedekiah who, like a number of Judah’s last kings seems to have believed that Egypt would come to its rescue if it got into trouble with Babylon. When Zedekiah rebelled, it turned out that Egypt had better things to do than to get involved in a war of empires over a hilly and rocky little piece of real estate.
Babylon’s armies returned. This time after a short siege Jerusalem ran out of food and the Babylonian troops quickly overran Jerusalem. They tore down the city wall. They burned the Temple and the king’s palace. Anything of value in the Temple was taken to be melted down. Zedekiah was made to watch as his sons were killed and then he was blinded so that the last thing he saw was the death of any hope for his dynasty. Then he and large numbers of the residents of Jerusalem were herded off toward Babylon.
This should have been the end of Judah. It became plain to the people of Judah, both those taken to Babylon and to those who stayed behind that the covenant as they had known it was finished. It is hard to imagine just how painful this was for them, quite apart from the physical misery they endured. Psalm 137 attempts to capture their feelings as their world fell apart.
By the rivers of Babylon–
there we sat down
and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
No, it not be possible to sing in their new circumstances, they sang.
Grief, dismay, and rage struggled with each other to see which would win. And when they were exhausted by the fight, they found that, if the old covenant was dead, they were not. And somehow exiled Judah and its God refused to let each other go. Yes, it was Yahweh who had sent them into exile. It was Yahweh who had brought this disaster on them. And yet, it seemed that Yahweh had also decided that, if the covenant people went into exile, Yahweh would go into exile with them.
And time passed. The exiles got over the temptation of thinking that the exile was something that would be short-term, a temporary set-back on the path to restored glory. They did the whole Kübler-Ross “Stages of Grief” thing. Some of them didn’t make it. Some just gave up and died. Others gave up, turned their backs on their own story and became Babylonians. But others took Jeremiah’s advice to go on with life–to build houses, plant gardens, get married and have children–and a thriving Jewish community grew up in Babylon that lasted for a thousand years.
Parts of the Jewish community, scribes I think, had concerned themselves with gathering every scrap of Jewish text and tradition they could find. They gathered Judah’s memories and its stories. They edited the books of the Torah and gave them their final form. They debated the meaning of the Scriptures and recorded some of their debates.
And time passed. The people who could remember the fall of Jerusalem died. And time passed. And the children of the exiles grew old and died. And more time passed. And the grandchildren of the exiles grew to adulthood. No one alive had their own memories of Jerusalem, of its Temple, or of life in the little kingdom of Judah.
And yet, Jerusalem remained unforgotten. Parents told their children and their children told their children. They passed their memories and their stories down from generation to generation. They sang the songs that the exiles thought could never be sung again. They told stories of grief and glory, stories of defiant hope, stories that bore “subversive memories of the future,” in Walter Brueggemann’s pregnant phrase. They told how Yahweh had listened to the cry of the people and set them free from another empire. If Yahweh had done it once, could it be out of the realm of possibility that Judah could know a new liberation?
Maybe. Maybe not. But one thing was certain: three generations of people had clung to their identity as Judeans in the midst of the aggressive culture of Babylon and its gods of consumption and production. They had hung on. They would not easily be tempted away from Yahweh. God was not done with them yet, nor were they done with God. They were prepared, I think, to go on living as God’s people in Babylon or anywhere.
And then it came, like the sunrise after a devastating storm, like spring after a long, long winter. The word of a prophet came, a prophet in Isaiah’s tradition, speaking once again in Yahweh’s name to Yahweh’s people:
Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalemand 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.
It was like getting a check in the mail from the estate of a forgotten uncle! After so long a period of bad news that the people had become grateful for no news at all, here was genuine good news, announced in the streets:
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.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
This wasn’t just good news; it was the reversal of over two generations of bitter experience. The people of Judah were going home, home to the unremembered and unforgotten homes of their great grandparents. The land given to escaped slaves from Egypt, was to be given back to the returning exiles from Babylon. And they weren’t going to slink back, either. The rough terrain would be a parade ground and they would march in glory, little exiled Judah, as all the world’s peoples gazed on this wonderful thing.
And then the perspective shifted from Babylon that would send the exiles, to Jerusalem that would receive them:
Get you up to a high mountain,
O Zion, herald of good tidings;
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!”
See, the Lord God comes with might,
and God’s arm rules;
God’s reward is with God,
and God’s recompense before God.
Yahweh will feed his flock like a shepherd;
she will gather the lambs in her arms,
and carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead the mother sheep.
The exiles had left in despair, forsaken by God, squashed by Babylon, shamed in the sight of the world’s people. Judah returns to Jerusalem in hope and joy, tenderly cared for and protected by God.
In Judah’s testimony, the exile that followed deep disobedience to God was a grief that tore their world apart, swept the ground out from under their feet, and sucked the air out of their lungs. It removed any hope that they could rely on their inner character or determination to survive and recover. They were desolate, as desolate as the roads they had walked to far Babylon. It stripped them of their protective lies and fantasies. It made optimism impossible. It should have been the end of them.
But it was not the end. When all reasonable grounds for hope had been removed, the only things they were left with were the stories that gave them the audacity to hope and the hope that was born out of their audacious story-telling. Against all expectation, their hope was answered by a new intervention of Yahweh their God. The announcement was impossible. Homecoming? How could it be? And yet, there it was, the impossible presented to them as gift and summons, just in time.
We hear this text out of time. Our temptation, since we can read the Bible in any order that we want, is to assume that we can step out of or into the story as it suits us. But that isn’t the way this story works.
We followers of Jesus are facing difficult times, difficult enough times that it is not too much of a stretch to say that we are facing a kind of exile. Those who follow Jesus find that our stories and the values that our stories carry sound increasingly strange among the tales that our world is living by. We tell stories of peace and our world beats the drums for war. We tell stories of liberation and justice and our world calls those who long to be free of injustice thugs. We tell stories of God’s tender care in the world that God made and entrusted to us and the earth cries to God to be freed from exploitation and desolation. We tell stories of contentment with plenty and the world celebrates the greedy and rapacious. We tell stories of welcome and inclusion and the world builds walls to shut out strangers.
Even the name of Jesus has grown strange. Jesus, some people would have us believe, carried an AK-47, threatened his neighbors with death if they dared think or life differently with God than he thought proper, and turned away the sick and the hungry as unworthy of his help.
Our life as Christians had gotten mixed up with other identities, but now that all that threatens to come undone. We are American Christians in a world where America carries less weight than it used to. We are white in world that is willing to call us on our privilege and unconscious racism. We are Christian consumers in a world where infinite expansion has met a finite earth. We have been in and will go through times that will test us, offering us again and again the choice between being a follower of Jesus and enjoying the privileges of our other identities. Again and again we will find that we are able to be one or the other but not both. It will be hard.
We’d like to skip the hard part. The temptation that we face when we read a passage like this morning’s from Isaiah 40 is to imagine that we can do just that. We’d like to find our way to a place where we are blessed with homecoming without having to live with exile. But, it just doesn’t work that way.
There is no way past the disruption that feels like exile. But we need to hear, with the Jerusalem exiles in Babylon, that exile is not the last word. Desolation is not the end. Death is not the ultimate reality. God has an answer to each of these that will come in due course. God’s answer to exile is homecoming. God’s answer to desolation is new life springing forth. God’s answer to death is resurrection.
Whatever we have to face in the coming years and decades, we know the God who heard the cry of the oppressed and liberated them, who answered the prayers of exiles who had given up praying. If we must go into some sort of exile, God will go with us. God will not let us go. We won’t let go of God either. Together, we’ll get through what our turn of history sends us. And one day, when we have given up hoping for it, when we’ve almost managed to make a place for ourselves in a alien world, a prophet will come and say to us:
Why do you say, O Jacob,
and speak, O Israel,
“My way is hidden from the Lord,
and my right is disregarded by my God”?
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
[T]he Creator of the ends of the earth does not faint or grow weary;
God’s understanding is unsearchable.
God gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.
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