AU United Methodist Community

Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
December 8, 2002
Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8

I. INTRODUCTION

I wasn’t a perfect kid. I wasn’t exactly the worst kid in the world, on the whole I was pretty good. But sometimes I would get into trouble. I remember one incident trying to start a campfire in the back yard with the cigarette lighter from our ’73 Chevy. I remember a couple of other little adventures in pyrotechnics. When I got into trouble, there was a certain dynamic that went on between my parents. Depending on the infraction, one of them was the disciplinarian and enforcer. It was almost as though they had different jurisdictions. And that person would be the one to read me the riot act, tell me what I’d done wrong, what the consequences were. Later the other parent would come to my room and tell me it would be alright. Sort of the parental good cop/bad cop routine. I don’t know if your family works the same way. I have been told that this pattern is not unfamiliar. There was always a message of judgment followed by a message of comfort.

II. THE TEXT—DISCIPLINE AND COMFORT

Something like that is going on in the Old Testament lesson we heard earlier. Those beautiful words from Isaiah. These are the first words heard in Händel’s Messiah: “Comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry unto her that her warfare is ended, her iniquity is pardoned.” Beautiful words of comfort and assurance.

As always, it is important to note the context in which these words were spoken. The Book of Isaiah as we know it was not written by one person. Most scholars believe it was written by at least two, probably three different prophets. And the first 39 chapters were written by the historical figure that we know as Isaiah of Jerusalem, in the 8th Century BC. The court prophet, ministering to kings, and prophesying in Jerusalem. And the first 39 books of Isaiah are a remarkable piece of theology in which Isaiah tells the kings of Judah what they are doing wrong. He tells them that Judah is not living up to the Covenant that God had established with Israel. And he warns that there will be consequences. In fact in the verses of chapter 39 that immediately precede the text of Isaiah 40 we heard earlier is related to us this story:

5 ¶ Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, “Hear the word of the LORD of hosts: 6 Days are coming when all that is in your house, and that which your ancestors have stored up until this day, shall be carried to Babylon; nothing shall be left, says the LORD. 7 Some of your own sons who are born to you shall be taken away; they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.” 8 Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, “The word of the LORD that you have spoken is good.” For he thought, “There will be peace and security in my days.”

Isaiah is warning Hezekiah that in the future things are going to go very, very wrong for Judah and Hezekiah responds by saying, ‘Well at least my administration will be prosperous.’ Words of judgment, words of consequence. And then in the very next verse we read, “Comfort, comfort my people.”

Now, it helps to know that in the intervening 150 years between those two passages, a great calamity fell upon Judah. The Babylonians did come. They did destroy Jerusalem. They did destroy the Temple. They did carry the best of Judah off into exile in Babylon. And in the midst of that Exile, this prophetic voice begins to speak:

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and 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.

III. FORMER THINGS AND NEW THINGS

We have observed that two parent dynamic here. Except that it is the same parent, the same Father, who says in one word what we have done wrong and with the next that the time of sorrow is over—a time of comfort, a time of peace, a time of restoration of wholeness. Later the prophet continues on with words:

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? (Is. 43:18-19)

And the language of Isaiah 40—that every valley shall be lifted up, every mountain made low, and the rough places smooth—describes tremendous actions in our lives and history that God is promising to bring about. “Comfort, comfort my people.”

A. Former things or new things?

But has there really been a break from the former things? Has a new thing come to pass? I mean, these words were written 2,500 years ago! When has this happened? We look around. There is still injustice. There is still sickness. There is still violence. There are still those random misfortunes of the world where we ask, ‘Why that person?’ ‘Why must such a thing be?’ There are wars and rumors of wars. There is great brokenness in the world. So, in what sense do I get up here and proclaim to you the scripture that says “Comfort, comfort my people”? Am I filling you all with empty platitudes, Hallmark card sentiment?

B. John the Baptist

Now in our second reading, we hear of John the Baptist preaching and baptizing in the Jordan. John is an interesting character. He’s wearing camel hair clothing and a leather belt. The image that John the Baptist takes on is the image of the prophet Elijah. Elijah is the prophet that comes to herald the coming of the messiah. So right away Mark is identifying John the Baptist with a herald of the messiah. And the language that is used to describe his ministry uses the words we heard from Second Isaiah earlier: The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight…” And so we understand that the beginning of Jesus’ story in the Gospel of Mark starts with John’s work in the desert, with the words of Isaiah. In effect, Mark is picking up where Isaiah left off.

The Christian Church has always understood John the Baptist to be the forerunner, the one who prefigures Jesus’ coming and the prophet necessary for the messiah to come. The Gospel of Mark begins with the words “The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God… John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness….” So we understand that John the Baptist, preaching the message of Isaiah, is telling us about the arrival of the messiah, the arrival of Christ. So when we hear “Comfort, comfort my people” we’re not necessarily thinking of the Babylonian exile as Christians. We’re thinking of Händel. And how Händel in the Messiah understood those words. All of this makes us think of Jesus. And the Church has always maintained that the promises of the prophets of old are fulfilled with the arrival of Christ.

C. Spirituality

There’s still a problem: there’s still hunger, and oppression, and injustice, and disease, and death. What do we make of this? Do we just close up our Bibles and say, ‘It was a nice religion while it lasted but it didn’t really bear out’?
Some in the Church have reacted differently. One of the things I hear all the time that really grates on my nerves (more than when people say “Just between you and I”) is when people say to me, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.”

Now, it’s not just because I work for ‘religion’—but it’s because I’ve had about as much as I can stand of spirituality. That spirituality as popularly understood as meaning that everything that’s material is wicked and everything that’s spiritual is good. This idea that truth lies in the spiritual realm. And the reason this is a problem is because when we didn’t begin to see this stuff working out in the material realm—we weren’t seeing the hungry fed and we weren’t seeing injustices righted—we spiritualized everything. Christ saves us in some spiritual fashion and we stopped waiting for Christ to save us in the real way. That is, we cut God some slack. We got tired of waiting for the valleys to be lifted up and the mountains to be made low. We got tired of waiting for peace and justice. God saves us in our eternal souls not in our physical bodies. This idea that God levels mountains and raises valleys and will come in glory to save his people—well that must be metaphorical language talking about spiritual matters. We decided that it all must work out in some spiritual sense.

I don’t know that that makes me happy. I don’t think that’s what we were promised! All those promises sounded pretty physical. I want there to be an end to disease. I want there to be an end to war. I want there to be an end to injustice and suffering and poverty and all of that. When is that going to happen? When is God going to save us in that way? That is the salvation we were promised and that salvation cannot be spiritualized away.

IV. CONCLUSION

Now, this is probably the lousiest evangelical sermon you’ve ever heard in your life. You’re probably thinking, ‘What is this faith all about?’ This is a time of Advent. It is a time when we prepare ourselves by waiting. But we don’t wait in futility. The first candle that we lit on our Advent wreath last week is the candle of hope.

We are waiting. We do believe that with Christ the reign of God was inaugurated. But as Christians we are honest and we admit that it is not fully realized in our lives. We cannot simply spiritualize everything away. There are still things in this world that need fixing. There is still brokenness. There is still hunger. There is still pain. All the things that little beleaguered Judah felt 2500 years ago when Second Isaiah wrote those words: “Comfort, comfort my people.” So, we acknowledge that the world is still a tough place. God’s reign is yet to be made fully realized among us. But we do not sit and wait like fools—we wait in hope because when we read those stories of Jesus coming to be baptized by John, when we read the stories that we will hear throughout advent and at Christmastime of the little baby in the manger, we’re not reading stories about just anyone. We are reading stories about a person who suffered a humiliating death on the cross and whom God raised to new life in the resurrection.

The resurrection is the reason we have Advent. The Resurrection is the reason we can light that one candle of Hope on the first Sunday, and we light the second candle for Joy and to show us the way. We don’t do these things because they are fun to do. When we proclaim the risen Christ—the one who was crucified, who suffered the ultimate injustice, the ultimate brokenness of death—when we proclaim his Resurrection we proclaim that God is in the process of making things right.

And so we wait in Advent. We wait for Christmas and we wait for the kingdom—but not in vain. And we wait full of hope, full of joyful hope, that can energize us to be honest with the world. To declare “That is injust and as Christians we speak against it.” “That person is starving, and as Christians we feed them.” “That person is alone and as Christians we are by their side.” Even as we look around us and we feel no less isolated and threatened than the people to whom Isaiah wrote two and half thousand years ago, we can still read those words and they can still be powerful for us. And because we are confident of the Resurrection, we are confident of Christ, and we are confident of the way Christ’s love lives itself out in us, and in each other, and in the Church, we can turn to a broken world, and we can say, “‘Comfort, comfort, my people,’ says your God.”