December 11, 2016
Sage Story | Hope for God's People
- Isaiah 52:1-12
- Rev. Dr. Jerry Deck
During this Advent season we have dubbed this series “Sage Story” which means that we are looking at the story that the prophet, or sage, Isaiah told those who were in exile in Babylon thousands of years ago and asking what those words might have to say to us today. As we said last week this was a time of unsettledness and questions for the people of Judah. It was a time of struggle and depression, of calling out for God and wondering if God was there. While we have not been captured by the Babylonians per se there are many ways in which we might feels as if we are in exile. Perhaps exile symbolizes for us a nation that is at odds with itself, fractured and in conflict and seeming to have lost its way. Or exile may be a more personal sense of loss or struggle and feeling distant from God. Perhaps sickness or job loss or a fractured relationship or mental health issue or anything that causes us to wonder where God is in the midst of our struggle.
And the story to which our sage speaks finds itself in the midst of that feeling of exile. As we said last week Isaiah reminds us that the Servant, who we would understand as Jesus, is the sign to us that God has not turned his back on us, but will enter into the depths of wherever we are. And this week, it seems to me, what Isaiah is addressing is the question of how do we open ourselves up to the belief that God really is at work even if we are in the midst of feeling lost or in exile as a community or as an individual? The truth is that all of us go through exilic times, be it as a nation or as a church body or as individuals and it can be easy at times to be overwhelmed by our situations and simply give up or get angry and decide that God simply doesn’t care.
One of the first things that stood out to me this week were the emphatic remarks in this passage as well as in the chapter that precedes our passage today. It’s been pointed out that there are four double imperatives in chapters 51 and 52. “Awake, Awake,” “Arise, Arise, Awake, Awake and Depart, Depart. And why do we use double imperatives in our lives? Well, we repeat ourselves like this, I think, because we feel strongly about something and because we’re not sure that others feel as strongly as we would like them to. Megan and I experience this almost every morning with our kids when it comes to getting them ready for school. “Get your clothes on, get your clothes on.” Eat, Eat. Find your backpack. Find your backpack. Don’t hit your sister. Don’t hit your sister. Look both ways. Look both ways…and on and on the double imperatives go. We think it’s important and we’re not convinced (or we know) it’s not as important to them as it is to us.
Awake. Awake, Isaiah says in verse 1. Why? Because it’s urgent to God for them to wake up and because the people are sleepy and aren’t sure they want to wake up. They are not literally sleepy, of course, but instead they have grown drowsy on God and have become so wrapped up in their bleak situation that they have lulled themselves into thinking this is all there is and all that will be and that this is all they are and all they will be. So, Isaiah tells them to wake up and to put on beautiful garments and to shake off the dust of captivity and loosen the bonds from their necks. In other words there is more than just this bleak exile in which they are existing.
This is similar to what we discussed last week when we said that our call is to rise above the cynicism, the anger, the loudness of the society around us, to dust that off of us. When we remember to put on the beautiful garments of God we remember that we are a new people called to change the discourse, to change how we respond to the exile around us. So often I think that the reason we get caught up in the anxieties and anger and fear of our time is because we have fallen asleep to the society around us and have forgotten that our identity, our beautiful identity, is so different is wrapped up in God. So, Isaiah says, “Wake up, wake up” dust yourself off, remember who you are and that you are and allow that to shape how you see others and the world around you and do so with love, with endurance and with patience. “Awake, awake.”
And one of the ways that we wake up and remember that God is here and is not silent is by reflecting on how God has been with us in the past. Caught up oftentimes in our own present world we can easily forget God’s faithfulness in the past. In verse 4 Isaiah recalls how God’s people had been in Egypt, of course, reminding them of how God rescued them from slavery. In the previous chapter Isaiah brings up Abraham and Sarah, thus reminding those in exile of God’s blessings in the past. It is crucial that we are continually mindful of what God has done for us in the past in global ways, but also in personal ways. It is easy for us to fall asleep to that. Easy for us to forget.
That is why it is so critical for us to be continually intentional about remembering God’s faithfulness. A few weeks ago now we practiced that as a congregation by writing down those things for which we are thankful-areas where we have seen God at work. I’ve been reading over those and, quite honestly, it was powerful just due to the sheer number of them. Foolishly, I didn’t realize what a large task it would be to read over the ways in which God has been with you all. There were those who mentioned God’s grace and salvation and the powerful change that has made in their life. There were several that talked about being thankful for seeing God through reconciled relationships with family members. How that which was broken has been made whole. Someone mentioned even how in a specific year they were helped financially by someone and how they have never forgotten that. One person mentioned the Cubs win in the World Series, though I quickly tore that one up as the work of Satan! Some of the gratitude notes I was most struck by were those who seemed to come from the younger set, perhaps middle schoolers or high schoolers in our midst and to see them taking time to reflect on God’s being with them in the past.
As I read through the notes what stood out to me was the fact that there were so many ways in which God has been at work in the life of the people of this church and yet, by-and-large we are probably unaware of it. What I mean is that you are sitting next to someone who more than likely could go on and on about the ways in which he or she has seen God work and yet we simply don’t know it. What I noticed even in just watching people come down and offer up their gratitude on that Sunday was just how different it was to visually experience gratitude- to visually experience seeing the celebration of God’s work. We could guess that it was true, but it was different to see it. I was thinking about how helpful it might be if each of us had a news ticker like you see at the bottom of your television that scrolled around our bodies continually with the news of what God has been doing in your life. In moments of despair or questions we could look in the mirror and read our own news ticker, but in coming here we could also read about other’s lives and what God was doing there. How might that build our faith when we are going through times of exile or pain or wilderness?
Which brings us to the sentinels we see in our Isaiah text. “Listen! Your sentinels lift up their voices, together they sing for joy for in plain sight they see the return of the Lord to Zion.” And what is a sentinel? A sentinel is a person who is keeping watch. In other words, we are called, in good times and in difficult times, to watch for the Lord and when we see him to point it out, to celebrate, to sing out, to rejoice. Again, it takes intentionality oftentimes to see God. We must be willing to look for him. The analogy that I have used here before is that a decade or so ago when I knew that I was going to get a Jetta-that for the 2 or 3 months between when I knew I was getting one and when I actually got one I saw Jettas everywhere. Had they been hiding before and just came out all of a sudden? Was I conjuring up seeing them and what was actually a Ferrari looked like a Jetta to me? Probably not. It’s because I was a Jetta sentinel, if you will, and because I was looking for them, I saw them.
We are called to look for God and then to do what? To tell others that we have seen him. Because we do not have news tickers wrapped around us, we need to celebrate and share with others what God has done. Actually, to do more than share. To sing about it. It is always amazing to me the impact of song and singing. There’s something about singing that reaches places that the spoken word cannot. Our Sunshine singers could have stood up here and said, “it’s Christmas time, fa la la la, it’s Christmas time, fa la la la” but that doesn’t speak as deeply to us. There’s an emotional connection that occurs in singing. There’s also something about song which sticks with us for much longer than the spoken word. If you don’t believe that then ask a parent who has been listening to their Sunshine singer’s cd with these songs on it. I’m playing basketball and find myself singing, “It’s Christmas Time, fa la la la, Jesus has come to us, the savior of the world.” In other words, we sing in here, but we remember and continue to sing it when we go out from here as a way of shaping more deeply in us the reminder of what God has done, the reminder that we are called to be sentinels, so that in even the darkest of moments we can recall the songs of God’s faithfulness.
So, we must awake to the fact that God is with us. We must look for the ways in which we can see him at work. We sing and celebrate when we see God’s presence. All of these things help us to be more aware, especially in times of exile and darkness, that God is with us and is not silent. But there is one last thing that I think is important for us to keep in mind when it comes to seeing God, especially in difficult times. And that is to make sure that when it comes to seeing God that we don’t look for him in some shallow, cheap, artificial way. I think that at times we don’t see God because we are only looking for the ways in which he is making us happy and not necessarily in the ways that God is changing us, transforming us in deeper ways. Probably the most well-known part of this Isaiah passage is verse 7 which says, “How beautiful…are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” We easily get wrapped up in the poetic beauty of this without reflecting on the less than glamorous aspect which is the fact that most of us would not say that this messenger’s feet were beautiful. The messenger’s feet in most every way would not have been beautiful especially in that time. They would have been dirty and probably callused or cracked from miles and miles of running. They would have run over rock and mud and, to put it bluntly, manure. What is beautiful is not necessarily what we would see as the aesthetic of the foot, but instead is the message that is being celebrated in the midst of their brokenness, their dirt, their smell.
One commentator has compared it with 90-year old spouses looking into one another’s sparkling eyes that are enfolded in the wrinkles of time and strain and joy and thinking, “How beautiful!” Or a husband touching the stomach of his children’s mother and gently tracing the stretch marks that memorialize her maternal labor and saying, “How beautiful!”
That, with great frequency, it is in the difficult parts of life, in those parts where we have suffered, those places that are less than glamorous, where we may most deeply see and experience the beauty of God. It is easy at times for us to see God’s blessings and presence in the good times, but question where he is in the difficult times. Perhaps though, it is actually in those difficult, more ugly and painful periods of our lives where God may be even more evident, where God’s presence can be even more keenly felt, where his salvation is experienced more deeply. It may not be when we were happiest, but it very well could be when we were most able to lean into the good news that God still reigns.
One of the privileges of being a pastor is that I get invited into people’s lives in good times, but also especially in difficult times. I haven’t always seen that as a privilege in fact during my early years it felt more like a curse, to have to see people in pain and to know that there was little I could do to take that away. But one of the things that I have slowly begun to grow in understanding of is that there is something holy about being with people in the midst of pain or tragedy or death. Holy because even in those incredibly difficult times there are traces of God’s grace and love that are interwoven into their suffering. This grace and love don’t take that pain or grief away, just as the messenger’s feet continue to be broken and bruised, but there is something about that suffering that deepens us into a people who, if we choose, can see God in places that others do not yet have the eyes to see. They can see God not only in the beautiful, but in the broken and in the bruised and in the midst of that know that there is still good news that our God truly reigns.
Wherever you are in this Advent season, I hope and pray that you see God. If this is a good part of your journey then I pray that you are taking time to continually see God and to celebrate this. If this is a difficult season for you then I hope that you will not lose hope, but that you will be able to awaken to where God is at work in your life. Look for him, not just in the good but even in the difficult, knowing that he is with you. And when we see him may we have the courage to sing, so that we can encourage others of the good news that God reigns. “It’s Christmastime. Fa la la la! Jesus was born to us, the savior of the world.” Hallelujah. Amen.