“Comfort,
comfort my people!” says Isaiah. Then, also, “The people are grass.”
Isaiah hasn’t had a lot of pastoral
training. Few prophets have. That’s not really their job, to be completely
honest. Prophets are free agents, who are really just God’s agents, subject to
nobody. It’s actually a bit strange that Isaiah leads with comfort, because so
often the prophets burst onto the stage and can’t seem to help themselves but proclaim
judgment and justice and all those things. Comfort is a softer kind of word,
more a pastoral word than a prophetic one.
But Isaiah is also bringing a
different kind of message. For the last several weeks now I’ve been preaching
on the change in the prophetic imagination as we leave behind old covenants and
discover the new covenant. This new covenant is whispered in first Isaiah—an
earlier prophet known as Isaiah, who we read about even before Harvest
Festival—then in the reforms of Josiah, then in Jeremiah, and today, finally in
second Isaiah. These are, in fact, the first words of 2nd Isaiah,
and it is the first time we hear in the book of Isaiah that Jerusalem has been
destroyed.
Perhaps that gives some clue why
Isaiah leads with comfort. You preach comfort to people who need it, not to
people who need to know about the impending judgment looming over them. No,
these people have experienced the trauma of losing their homeland, of the
desecration of their religious capitol, and the loss of their history in that
place. These are people that need comfort, and, yet, that comfort comes not in
a promise that they will one day return home.
Earlier prophets dealt with the loss
of land. Most famously, we had Moses, called by God in the burning bush to tell
Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go from slavery in Egypt. God worked to
return his chosen people to their promised land. Eventually, they returned, but
it didn’t last. Judges turned to kings and kings forgot God’s law. Israel and
Judah lost their way and were conquered by foreign powers. In Jeremiah last
week we heard God’s response: A new covenant, not like the ones of old—one not
dependent on how faithfully the chosen people behave, because, let’s face it,
they’d proven that that doesn’t work. No, the new covenant would be written on
their hearts apart from their faithfulness.
That’s where we come to Isaiah.
Comfort, comfort my people, he writes. But also “The grass dries up, the flower
withers. Surely the people are grass.” This is a pretty low view of humankind,
and, yet, it is exactly the point of view we need to understand the coming
messiah. Jesus does not come into the world in power; he comes in the most
humble of circumstances. Jesus does not come to restore the kingdom of Israel;
he comes to manifest the kingdom of God. Jesus does not come to lift the chosen
people up as they once were; he comes to save the world—the whole world—from
sin and the power of death.
Jesus comes to offer a deeper
comfort, not the kind that says your life will be easy but the kind that says
“Even when your life seems impossible, I’ve got you.”
I’ve preached this scripture three
times since coming here. The first time was one of the first sermons I ever
gave at GRR in December of 2011, then I preached it again in December 2015 and,
here we are, a full lectionary cycle later in December 2019, and as I was
checking what I said on those occasions I noticed that there were funerals both
times on the same week, and on both occasions the funeral scripture was Isaiah
40 as well. This is what happens during Advent when I have plenty on my plate
and families say, “Preach on whatever you want.”
But, honestly, I think I did it
right, because Isaiah is real and honest and hopeful. It is comfort of the best
kind, needed comfort, real comfort. There’s a lot of opportunity for shallow
comfort in the world. A lot of it is needed. People need hugs, and they need to
be told, “It’ll be alright.” But, at the end of the day, without the kind of
comfort we have from the Christ-child in the manger, “it will be alright”
doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. If comfort is a promise that everything you love
and hold dear will be protected, then it’s a dishonest comfort. We don’t have
that promise at all. We can glide through life pretending that we are safe, but
at some point we may be smacked in the face by the reality that not everything
is fine. True comfort requires a promise not just up to death but through it.
The people of Israel needed such a promise on the other side of losing their
homeland; they needed a messiah who set everything right.
We need real comfort, honest
comfort, and true comfort, the kind of comfort that the Christ-child brings.
I don’t how many of you went to see
Tim Denney on Wednesday evening. I couldn’t, because we had Confirmation class
and it was the worst Confirmation class we have had in a long time. I couldn’t
figure out why nobody was listening; it was like some part of their brains had
shut off. And it wasn’t one or two of them; it was legitimately all of them. I
chalked it up to something in the weather and moved on, that is until the next
day when the other pastors in the area got together for our monthly Conference
gathering in Roseau. During the meeting, Kathy Levenhagen and Pr. Caitlin
Jensen both remarked on how terrible their confirmation students had been as
well. One class is a fluke; two is curious; three is a trend.
That’s when Kathy pointed out that
it was only natural that the kids were a mess. They had all listened to Tim
Denney speak on mental health, and they didn’t know how to process that.
Immediately, I understood. It’s hard
to ask adults to process real, honest questions about our own emotional
well-being. When you do it with adolescents in the midst of puberty and the
cocktail of hormones that that entails, you’re basically setting their world on
fire. I’m not saying it wasn’t good for them; in fact, I think it’s absolutely
necessary that they deal with these emotions, because they are real and honest.
It’s just that we can’t expect them to figure it out on the first try. Our
young people need comfort in and through those difficult emotions, not apart
from them. They need real comfort, honest comfort, true comfort. They need the
Christ-child in the manger more than they will ever realize.
But it’s going to take time. The
people are grass, after all, and it takes a long time to realize the depth of
meaning in that metaphor. We are temporary and fleeting, but we are also the
ground of God’s being in the world. We are the fertile soil capable of creating
a world that is beautiful and majestic. Comforted by God-incarnate, we are set
free not to be kings but to live humbly as grass—not as much and, yet,
strangely, as the most wondrous of all things.
True comfort allows us to be true in
our emotions, honest about our disquiet, to grieve over losses and to imagine a
better world beyond this one. That is the kind of comfort we need and the kind
of comfort we are promised.
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