GIVING  AWAY  THE  STORY

Isaiah 40:21-31

 

The theatre lights go down. Our film starts in silence with dust-colored streaks moving fast down the screen. As the camera gradually rises we find ourselves flying over a wide plain. We pass a solitary farmer scraping a plow through dry soil, but for the most part the landscape looks desolate. The terrain starts to rise and soon we can make out a city in front of us. But something seems ominous as we get closer. The city walls have huge crumbling gaps. We see long streets of abandoned houses and torched buildings. A voiceover breaks the silence, saying "How lonely sits the city / that once was full of people." Two bells go off in your mind. First, you're pretty sure you just heard the first verse of the book of Lamentations. Second, wasn't that Susan Sarandon's voice?

We've just watched a scene that sets the background for exploring our text today from Isaiah 40. It's not so hard to imagine the prophet as a filmmaker, because the poetry and oracles in the book of Isaiah are so rich in visual imagery.

That empty city was Jerusalem, several hundred years after Israel's glory days of Kings David and Solomon. After Solomon's reign, the nation's history became complicated and tragic in Shakespearean proportions. If you are taking part in the Year of the Bible, you'll get all the details from the books of Kings and Chronicles, and from reading the prophets. For today's preview I'll just remind you that the kingdom split in two (Israel and Judah), many of the kings were brutal, they formed questionable political alliances, and the people repeatedly turned away from the Lord God. Several times prophets arose to decry injustice and idolatry in the land. They prophesied God's condemnation and called for national repentance. All too often they were ignored or imprisoned.

For Jerusalem and the surrounding southern kingdom, the prophesied judgment finally came in the form of waves of Babylonian warriors. About 600 years before Christ, Jerusalem was destroyed by King Nebuchadnezzar of the Babylonian empire. Almost everyone who survived the battles was taken to Babylon in exile, banished from their own land for decades. The people of Judah lost nearly everything in this disaster: their capital, their pride, their temple, thousands of human lives, their sense of God's presence. 

Which brings us back to our text. To these devastated Israelite exiles God sent Isaiah to preach comfort. Biblical scholars name this prophet of good news "Second Isaiah." That is to distinguish him or her from the more gloomy prophet who spoke two hundred years earlier, whose words are recorded in the first half of the book of Isaiah. God called "our" Isaiah to active ministry among the exiles in Babylon.

Exile means banishment, being driven from your home, or sent where you do not want to go. You give up control of your own life, your own story. That is exactly what Israel suffered. Israel's story of exile and suffering becomes a huge theme in the Old Testament. It shaped Israel's national identity and their understanding of God. What does their exile have to do with us? Israel's experience seems very far off and long ago. Mercifully, you and I live in a time and place where most of us enjoy stability and prosperity. We are not in imminent danger of being taken in slavery to a foreign country. But we certainly know the pain of more subtle, insidious forms of exile.

For example, think about someone you know who is afflicted with chronic physical or emotional pain. Pain can easily transport a person to places one does not wish to go. It can make the sufferer's world very small. And whether because of pain, or stress, or sheer neglect, many of us live as if we are exiled from the gift of our own bodies.

Addiction can so alter the landscape of someone's life that it feels like being banished to a dangerous foreign country, isolating the afflicted person from his or her family and community.

Grief and loss, although universal human experiences, can also lead to a sense of exile. We feel like no one can understand or share our specific mourning, or that the world just goes on ahead while we are left shattered.

And I want to mention mental illness, partly because of this church's longstanding support for the mentally ill. Last summer I had the privilege of working with mentally ill residents at the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. The people I met were as diverse as any other large group of humans. But most of them shared a common grief about being set apart and shunned because of their mental illness. I worked as a chaplain intern on wards where I had to pass through three sets of dead bolted doors just to reach the patients. Talk about exile. As good as the medical care was, patients wanted so badly to be freed to live in the world. The very first patient I met--let's call her Anna--was experiencing an angry manic episode. In the middle of her ranting, Anna looked over at me and said in a surprisingly quiet voice, "Why is God letting this happen to me?" As I look back on it now, Anna's question was really the same as Israel's complaint in today's text: "My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God." Who is God for people in exile?

"Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable." (40:28)

God sent this prophet of hopefulness to exiled Israelites who felt bereft of all hope. Isaiah meets the exiles' despair not with accusation nor with pity, but--strangely enough--with theology. Bitter exile has clouded the people's communal memory. So the prophet answers Israel's complaint by reminding them of what they as a people have known since their beginning: that the Lord God created and sustains everything that is. At first the effect is to set God far apart from us. Isaiah says, "It is God who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in" (40:22). God not only lives in the heavens, according to this vision, but God names and welcomes each one of the myriad stars. Nothing in the cosmos is out of God's hands.

Isaiah speaks of God being "above the earth," reclining in infinity, beyond all human frames of reference. But how could we relate to such a God of otherness? How is that comforting? Well, the prophet continues by pointing to the character of God. Verse 29 tells what God chooses to do with all that sovereign power: "God gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless." It turns out that the God of the stars gets lovingly involved with us grasshoppers, us vulnerable creatures of dust.

With this word of grace Isaiah strengthens the exiles, reminding them that God's love for creation does not waver. God remains the protector of God's chosen people, sustaining them even in exile, and preparing them for the next step. Here I'll give another small preview for the Year of the Bible folks. If we read farther into Isaiah, the prophet prepares the people for something shocking. The Persian king Cyrus--a foreigner!--will be anointed as God's righteous servant. Under Cyrus's wise reign Israel's deliverance and restoration will begin. In the process, the people of Israel will have to loosen their sense of privilege and exclusivity. By relinquishing their "ownership" of God, they will be more ready to recognize God's saving activity in the world. And also well placed to fulfill the promise that God gave to their ancestor Abraham, that all nations would be blessed through him.

Our gospel text (Mark 1:29-39) illustrates that promise most clearly. Jesus Christ brings blazing particularity to God's loving involvement in our world of exiles. In this passage, early in his ministry, we see Jesus literally giving power to the faint. He takes the hand of Simon's fever-stricken mother-in-law and lifts her up to health. Of course once word of that gets around the town of Capernaum, everyone with a need gatecrashes the house where Jesus is staying. Jesus meets the individuals at their points of need, by healing an illness or casting out an evil spirit. Jesus gives of himself all that evening, but when the townspeople want to keep him there the next day (who wouldn't?), Jesus gathers his disciples and sets out for the neighboring towns so he can preach good news to them as well. The kingdom of God grows by being given away.

What about those of us who live on this side of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection? We receive with thankfulness the gift of God's very self in Jesus Christ. We have known, we have heard the story of God's gracious forgiveness and the promise of new life in Christ. But we can still experience times of agonizing exile. What do we do then?

Isaiah tells us: "[T]hose who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength…." Waiting. Waiting is something most of us Americans do poorly. To wait means giving up some of my personal sovereignty, giving up my tenacious control over my own life. It means acknowledging my own deep need of help from somewhere outside of myself. My story is not my own, but rests in God's hands. One of the best ways to practice waiting, and to practice opening one's self to God, is to cultivate a life of prayer. I like what songwriter Bruce Cockburn said about it: "Sometimes you can hear the Spirit whispering to you, but if God stays silent, what else can you do but listen to the silence…" That is prayer.

Through Isaiah God promises not only restoration in the future, but that the hearts of the faint will be strengthened even in the midst of their trials, for those who wait for the Lord. Waiting for God is in itself an act of faith. Waiting is trusting that God continues to act graciously in the world to accomplish our salvation and freedom. And here in the church community we need not wait alone for God. Old Testament scholar Dennis Olson points out that the shared experience of exile binds us together, makes our differences seem less critical.

One sign of God's restorative work is that healing from weakness usually requires waiting. Waiting for the waters to go down. For the wound to mend, or a disease to run its course, or for the grief to abate. God has built healing into our bodies and into the creation.

Certainly we can rejoice with many among us who have already experienced God's rejuvenating presence in their lives. As God renews our strength, restores us from exile, let's pray that in Christian love we may in turn give of our strength to the weary. If you think that sounds suspiciously like a mission statement, you're right. This is, after all, our Haiti Mission Month! Our partner Pastor Luc writes to us about the ministries he runs and about the many kinds of exile in which our Haitian sisters and brothers exist daily. May our gifts and our prayers join in mission with the God of love whose Spirit is already at work in the slums of Haiti. Pray that one day the exiles of Cite Soleil "shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint."

Meanwhile, wait for the Lord so that you may experience God's healing. And in that healing, may the infusion of God's power make you God's agent of healing for others who are weary and faint.

Amen.

February, 2006

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