A Sermon Preached at University Baptist Church, Columbus, Ohio
4 December 2011
I. Introduction
- We all of us need comfort from time to time – last evening at our annual Christmas event, Devi Monjot needed comfort and ran to her mother in the choir – Kay picked up Devi and Devi was able to calm down – and we all know something of what Devi was feeling – we feel alone and need the voice of a loved one or a friend – we feel fear and we need the presence of someone we trust to calm our fear – we feel distrust and need another person to give us some assurance – we all need the comfort we receive from one another – it is a part of being human
- There are times, however, when another person can give us only some of what we need – there are times when we feel spiritually isolated, when we fear that God has left us, when we wonder if God is there at all, or if there is a God at all – what do we do then? – to whom can we turn for comfort when we are aware of an emptiness in our lives, when we experience what the French mathematician Blaise Pascal is supposed to have called a “God-shaped vacuum”? – where do go for comfort when the only one who can give comfort seems so far away?
- These are questions that I imagine were in the mind of the prophet at a time of particular difficulty and pain – the answer that the prophet gives in ancient times is still an answer for us today
II. A Need for Comfort
- Chapter 40 of Isaiah begins a new section, biblical scholars refer to this section as the work of Second Isaiah, or Deutero-Isaiah, and it makes repeated references to the Exile in Babylon – you remember your biblical history – in the sixth century BCE, the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar, deported the royal household, the religious leadership, and the social elite from Jerusalem to Babylon, and razed the temple to the ground – God’s people in Babylon felt cut off from God – all the symbols of their relationship with God, the temple, the artifacts, the land, everything was gone – the Babylonians had taken away all of it and left them with nothing – and the people felt the loss deeply, so deeply that they would write song about it, a song we call Psalm 137 [Read the Psalm here] – do you hear the pain in the song? – it is real – I do not know about you, but I feel it in my deepest self, the anguish, the loss, the pain – I want to cry out, to scream, to rage against the cause of such sorrow
- Scholars so often focus on the Exiles, sitting by the rivers of Babylon, and on their pain, but there was another group that was feeling loss – the Babylonians did not take away everyone – they left many behind in the area around Jerusalem – the poor, the farmers, the shepherds, the common people remained in the land – there was no one to protect them – they were alone on the frontier of the Babylonian empire – the temple was gone – most of the priests were gone – the things they needed to worship God, the direction, the instruction, the guidance – where were the ones remaining in the land to go for what they needed? – I wonder if this is not some of what the prophet means when he says that the people have received double for all their sins – and God tells the prophet to speak tenderly to Jerusalem, so we cannot forget all of God’s people, whether in Babylon or Jerusalem
- The situation was that all of them were living under the crushing weight of loss, of oppression, of fear – and into this God-shaped vacuum, the prophet speaks a word from God, and it begins and ends with comfort
- The people understood what had happened to them as God’s judgment – they had sinned, the kings had sinned, they had not heard the words of the prophets, and God brought down judgment on them – we can talk sometime about this, but let me say that I do not think the Exile was God’s judgment on a sinful people – it was a political reality of the day – but the ancients lived in a time when they believed that everything that happened came from God, including the difficult things – and seeing as they viewed the Exile as judgment, then that meant that there had to be a lesson for them to learn – the return to the land at the end of the Exile proved that they had learned the lesson – it also proved that God is gracious and forgiving – as they looked back on the Exile, they saw that God had been with them all the time, preparing a way in the wilderness for them to return home
- This word of comfort is almost exactly the opposite of Psalm 137 – instead of a lament, it is a song of comfort and praise – it is a hymn of joy in God, who is at work to restore the people to the land, to take them home, as a shepherd who gathers the lambs of the flock and leads the mother sheep, so God will gather his scattered flock and take them safely to the fold – there was a need for comfort, and through the prophet God speaks a word of comfort
III. A Word of Comfort
- I like to preach from the Hebrew Bible texts when we are in Advent because so often the texts look to the future, as this one did for the people of God in ancient times – but I also want to make it clear that I do not believe that this text refers to the coming of Jesus – the reason that this portion of Isaiah is an Advent reading is because the evangelist Mark uses the text to refer to John the Baptizer (Mark 1.3) – the Evangelist sees the Baptizer as the one who is preparing the way for the coming of Messiah – but that was not the intention of Second Isaiah – we can only see the connection by looking backward
- Still, what I see as the original message of the text, a word of comfort, is just as real and just as vital today as it was two and a half millennia ago
- Where do we find the comfort we need when it is comfort that only God can give? – one place is in the community of the churches – we will find among our sisters and brothers people whose experiences are similar to our own – and even if we have not had the same experiences, we are tender-hearted toward each other and want to walk with each other through the difficulties – we may not be all the comfort we need, but we are an important source of comfort
- Another place to look for comfort is in the Bible – you may think I am being overly pious, but I think it is true – the power of the Bible is not that it predicts the future, as some believe it does – the power of the Bible is that it is full of stories of the relationships between God and people – and I find comfort in the stories, not because they are factual but because they are true
- When we need comfort, God is at work to bring comfort into our lives – God is not about judgment – God does not sit in some divine courtroom looking for transgressions for which to punish us – God is about grace, about forgiveness, about restoration
- Through the prophet God says that the time of judgment is over – the sorrow is at an end – now is the time for comfort
IV. Conclusion
- And that is the message of Advent – why did Jesus come into the world? – according to the Evangelist it was because God so loved the world – God did not send the son into the world to condemn the world, but to restore the world to proper relationship with God
- That is the comfort of Advent – and while Second Isaiah was not thinking of Messiah when he preached this word of comfort, I believe Jesus was thinking of Second Isaiah when he spoke to Nicodemus in the garden at night
- Messiah has come, and Messiah comes to us every day with love, grace, forgiveness, and wholeness – Messiah comes and is a word of comfort now and always
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Tags: Isaiah 40.1-11
