Advent II
Isaiah 40:1-11
The passages read this morning both point to a new coming, or a coming again, of God to God’s people. Isaiah foretells the coming of God to a demoralized, defeated people; and Mark points to John as the one who prepares the way for Jesus’ coming. During advent it is also traditional to proclaim that Jesus will come to us yet again. The editors of the lectionary we usually look to for preaching texts and themes paired the two scriptures we heard this morning with a passage from 2 Peter which refers directly to that coming that has not yet been. And, of course, during advent we await the coming of God in the birth of Jesus.
This morning we will focus on the reading from Isaiah. God comes to him and his people, God’s people, in some really, really unexpected ways. Perhaps we will see some ways in which God might also be coming to us, perhaps quite unexpectedly. Listen with me for those comings as we revisit this story.
I have taught the Grade 11 Ancient Civilizations course a number of times, which in NO way makes me an expert of any sort on these times and places – but it has made me curious; and some things have become clearer as a result of getting even just the big picture in mind of the world in which God called forth a people out of Abraham & Sarah.
So I’m going down to my laptop and we’re going to look up to the angled ceiling at our planet for a couple of minutes.
[locate Mesopotamia (Tigris and Euphrates rivers) /Babylon, Canaan (Sea of Galilee Jordan River, Dead Sea), and Egypt (Nile and the delta). Trace journey from Abraham in Uhr, to Canaan, to Egypt, back to Canaan, back to Egypt (Joseph to Moses) back to the Babylonian exile. Note that God told Abraham to settle in the middle of the two most powerful ancient civilizations. Note how little time the Kingdom of Israel actually lasted. Now point out Persia.]
What had God promised Abraham?: Descendents and a land for them to live in. He got descendents, but the land kept slipping away from them. So here we are with Isaiah and thousands of fellow Jews, captive in Babylon, right back where Abraham started maybe 1100 years earlier. The kingdom of Israel had divided against itself after only three kings (Saul, David, and Solomon). The Assyrian king Sennacherib from the northern part of Mesopotamia took advantage of the situation and had wiped out the northern half of that divided Israeli kingdom. Shortly after, a resurgent Babylon came for the rest, taking the southern kingdom of Judah into captivity. In conquering neighbouring lands en route to Egypt, the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, destroyed what was left of the Kingdom of Abraham’s descendents. Jerusalem (the “city of peace”) was destroyed; Solomon’s gorgeous temple was broken to the ground. Imagine, the place where animals and crops are offered in sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins is gone! How will we become clean? How can we receive forgiveness? How can we keep the law of Moses? Imagine! Imagine watching a foreign power destroy your holy places, kill or imprison your loved ones, cut off your leadership, and mercilessly leave you without hope. Some here may not need to imagine such things, but need only remember them from your own experience.
The Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, wasn’t only interested in disarming powerful neighbours and acquiring their land. Though that was his main objective, he also managed something of a renaissance of the glory days of old Babylon from back when king Hammurabi’s court created that great legal code, literally written in stone which you can see today at the Louvre. Nebuchadnezzar also is thought to have created the fabled hanging gardens of Babylon. So Nebuchadnezzar wasn’t interested in only enslaving manual labourers; he also wanted the services of skilled trades people and even scholars. Indeed, as time progressed, some Jews seem to have become important officials and respected scholars in the administration of their captive new home. And most importantly, this horrible catastrophe and imprisonment seems to have give birth to the Jewish Torah. The old testament, as Christians usually call it, was likely written/edited/ collated in the form that we know it during the Babylonian captivity. That in itself could easily be enough evidence to support the theme that God comes to us in unexpected times and places. I should be able to end the sermon here and we all ought to be in wonderment at such a thing: the Torah, born out of Jewish captivity in a foreign land while the temple and the holy city lie in ruins. Imagine!
Well, I will go on. There are some ways in which those who were left behind in the ruins of Israel may actually have been worse off than many who’d been taken captive to Babylon. Those left behind saw every day the devastation of their homeland; they were without the temple, without the priesthood, without the Torah (as it was evolving in Babylon), and without leadership. They had no protection against any number of foreign invaders and roving militias.
In exile with the elite, Isaiah’s main task thus far has been to explain to his fellow Jews how God could have allowed this catastrophe to happen. He has had at them about their worshipping other gods, and lambasted them for not keeping Moses law, especially that they did not care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in their midst; that they did not keep the Jubilee, or lend without charging interest to one another. He makes it crystal clear that they have brought this upon themselves by not trusting in God but rather in alliances made with idolaters as a means of securing themselves. They broke the covenant and now God is free from it as well; he owes them nothing and they are getting exactly what they deserve.
In the midst of this long harangue, suddenly a voice interrupts Isaiah with a totally unexpected message: Comfort my people. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that her warfare is over and her sins are forgiven. She has received from God double the punishment for all her sins.
Then another voice cries out: Prepare a way for the Lord in the wilderness; make a path straight through the desert. Knock down hills, straighten the crooked roads, smooth out the rough spots. God is on his way!
That’s crazy, nobody crosses the desert; they follow the Euphrates north and turn south again along the Fertile Crescent. But God is in a hurry to get to Jerusalem and is coming straight across the desert. Notice that not only has the content of Isaiah’s message taken a dramatic turn (from accusation to comfort) but that his audience has shifted too. Speak comfort to Jerusalem, to the ones left behind, the one
s living in the ruins still. The poor, the leaderless, the easily victimized, the unprotected; these are the one’s God is finally coming to again. Mind you, when he comes, he will bring many back from Babylon with him.
Now a third voice says, “Cry out,” and after some cynical venting from Isaiah (Oh what’s the point, we live short lives and die like the grass of the field) this voice gets to finish: go up to a high place – go to Mount Zion and say to Jerusalem and all the cities of Judah, “Look, here comes our God!” And then a final voice: God comes with strength to protect his people, like a shepherd who is ferocious in defending the sheep but gentle to the sheep themselves.
Wow, what an announcement! What a sudden, unexpected shift in message from the great prophet. But who hears these words, and how do they, how do we, respond to them. Really? God is going to deliver us from the great empire of Babylon that even the Egyptians couldn’t resist. And how will this happen exactly?
Well in the end, as Isaiah explains a few chapters further on, another empire, the Persians, will defeat the Babylonians. Now that does not sound comforting. That’s exactly how Israel fell in the first place, being rolled over as mega powers warred against each other. Surely that’s what will happen here. But the assurance is that Jerusalem’s warfare is over; she’s not in this fight this time. And that is what happens: a little know local chieftain named Cyrus cleverly manoeuvres his way onto the emperor’s throne in Persia and he conquers Babylon (after Nebuchadnezzar’s death) and he releases the Jewish captives, allowing them to return to Judah to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple. Who would have thought such a thing possible? Imagine. The very situation that seems most fraught with danger becomes a path to liberation and safety – a path by which God comes again to us, straight across the desert, no delays, eager to embrace us in all our frailty.
So, what is our Babylon? Where and how are we held captive? What is our fallen temple, our city of peace now in ruins? Who is speaking a word of comfort, and are we willing to hear it and believe it? Do our political systems seem so corrupted by corporate influence that we no longer trust them, nor see any hope of changing them? Take comfort, God is coming. Are the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer destabilizing the social stability? Are our leaders wilfully blind to what all of us are doing to our only home and God’s very good creation? Take comfort, God is coming. Are you suffering from information overload, aware of every problem that befalls any of your 7 billion fellow global citizens and you just don’t know where to start or what to do about any of it? Take comfort, God is coming. Are your stress levels through the roof with demands at work and demands at home? Do you wish you had work to be stressed about; do you wish you had a family to share that stress with? Take comfort, God is coming. Are you raising children on your own and you are absolutely exhausted? Is your marriage stressed to the breaking point or has it already broken? Have you been forgotten by younger, smarter, healthier, hipper people than you? Is there just too much violence, too much pain, too much sadness in the world, in your world? Is it all just too much? Is it just too hard to believe any more? Take comfort, I tell you truly, in some unexpected place and time and manner, God is coming to you. She is rushing in your direction, ploughing through deserts and knocking down mountains to get to you. Look for him. God is coming to you. God is coming to us all.