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| In the Wilderness Prepare the Way, ©Jan Richardson janrichardson.com |
The first road is actually a crossroads. And poor tiny Israel --or what's left of it, the southern Kingdom of Judah --lies right at the connection of several major roads that tied Asia, Europe, and Africa together. Israel, already a small country, divided herself by inner bickering and made herself vulnerable two division by conquering armies, armies that often passed through Israel and the pinch point that she occupied on their way to take on their rivals at this juncture of three continents. That's where the book of Isaiah begins: Disaster looming on the horizon, disaster that the prophets believe is recompense for the people’s waywardness and faithlessness. Thirty-nine chapters later, that disaster arrives, and the elites are carried off into captivity.
Then a silence falls. One hundred and sixty years of silence. Years in which, undoubtedly the captive priests and rulers felt God’s silence deeply, and the people of the land left behind struggled mightily under the harsh expectations of their foreign overlords to produce food for their captors. As Psalm 137 describes it, years in which the people carried off into captivity mourned,
By Babylon’s streams,
there we sat, oh, we wept,
when we recalled Zion.
On the poplars there
we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors had asked of us
words of song,
we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors had asked of us
words of song,
and our plunderers—rejoicing:
“Sing us from Zion’s songs.”
How can we sing a song of the LORD
on foreign soil?(1)
Chapter 40, which begins a prologue to the second part of Isaiah, starts sixteen decades later. A new prophet has taken up Isaiah’s mantle, but reluctantly. We start with a silence, and then a conversation. Because the verses we hear are not spoken by one voice, but by three different voices: God, the heavenly hosts, and the second prophet to call herself-- yes, there is evidence that points to her being female—Isaiah.
God speaks first—as God always does. God speaks to the heavenly court, commanding them to deliver comfort to God’s people, communicating to Jerusalem, who had been completely leveled by her enemies, that she has been released from her shame of faithlessness. The double command (Comfort, O Comfort) adds extra urgency. Yet the focus is not on punishment (a sentence), but forgiveness.
A voice in the heavenly court cries out a word of hope, describing a scene of victory in which the exiled leaders of Jerusalem return from their bondage –but not along the terrible road upon which they were led away, but upon a new road. God’s highway, along which God’s glory will be revealed. Then another voice commands the prophet, who has been listening in disbelief, to cry out herself. The prophet objects, pointing out that humans are too fleeting in their existence to be able to join in this discussion; she has been worn down by the trials of exile alongside her people.
The heavenly host respond, yes, human life is fleeting, but God’s promises are not.
And so, the prophet takes up the words of reassurance, convinced by her encounter with God, and moved from despair to proclamation of that same comfort that at first was only expressed by the heavenly court. The prophet then calls the people to join her in seizing that hope and proclaiming the faithfulness of God. To proclaim faith and hope and strength where previously they have only bemoaned their abandonment. There is always a time for grief. But that time for grief is passed, and now is a time to renew their faith. So this conversation concludes. Point and counterpoint. And eventually the voice from the wilderness becomes one bearing tidings of tender care from the shepherd who cares for us all.
Haven’t we all felt like we have been in a wilderness at various points in our lives? And haven’t we felt lost and forsaken when all the neat, straight paths we’ve made for ourselves have ended up leading us astray?
In the most hostile of environments --wilderness and desert --the word of God comes to offer comfort, respite, and safety, despite Israel’s sinfulness and fault. It is in these most unlikely of places that God's comfort is offered and maintained. God’s comfort is a gift of grace in a time when all hope had been lost, when the fear of abandonment was seemingly permanent. Yet God’s promise remains true, and doesn’t depend upon human measurements of time to come to fulfillment. It is in this light that we read our gospel introduction of John the Baptist, who similarly is called to cry out from the wilderness to proclaim the comfort that is to come, comfort from the presence of God Godself taking on human flesh and living among the people.
Once again, it is God who takes the initiative. At last, the light appears at the end of a long night. The Babylonian Exile stripped the people of everything that mattered to them. Our own exile—from faith, from compassion, from dedication to community and true justice and equality—has also left us longing for meaning, for purpose.
We think we can make our own pathways straight to success, to crushing our opponents. It’s part of the modern myth of independence that ignores how much we depend upon each other, and upon God.
Yet our paths to God don’t have to be straight. It is often the most indirect, wandering stop-and start journeys that end up being the truest, because they don’t fool us into thinking that the life of abundance can actually be acquired. The broken road is often the road that leads us to God, because it strips away all our defenses and resistance to God.
The wilderness is no barrier to God-- God loves the wilderness just the way it is. And God spends a lot of time in the wilderness with us. It is us who want the wilderness leveled, not God. Since when does God see the wilderness and respond with a construction crew and truck full of asphalt? God’s time is NOT our time, and God’s schedule is not our schedule. God likes to take the long way home, reminding us once again that God’s home is everywhere, wherever God is but not limited to one place.
A friend of mine shared these words earlier this week: “I imagine God taking one look at the straight paths we’ve scarred into the wild earth and either laughing or weeping or both, wondering if what we wanted was a tamer God or just one on speed dial who is always waiting to pick up. But isn’t God perpetually going out into the wilderness, out with the wandering Israelites or searching out a lost sheep, out beyond the cell towers, voicemails, and text messages?”
Instead, God walks in the opposite direction our straightened paths lead, just to see if we want a God who follows us or if we want to follow God.” (2)
The life of abundance that God offers to us starts with opening ourselves to the wonder of God’s creation all around us, and of celebrating our place in a web of relationships that each offer us a chance to ourselves bear the light of God into the world. Have you ever heard anything more absurd than the idea of anyone making a path straight for God to amble down?
It is in the midst of the wilderness that the people are urged to faith. And the kind of faith the people are being urged to embrace is not an easy faith. It is faith that seems to fly in the face of all evidence. The people are being asked to sing joyful songs even from the chains of exile and oppression. Being challenged to take up this confident proclamation of God’s presence even when all evidence points otherwise is a call to faith that doesn’t deny fear but responds to fear by proclaiming the power of unity and community over those forces that attempt to use division and loss as levers of control.
We, too, may feel like there has been a long silence, these last many months as this pandemic has stretched on here in 2020. For us, who expect instantaneous responses, eight months certainly can feel like an eternity. In the face of that pause, two doubts commonly arise to plague our spiritual lives: we either believe that God is powerless to change our suffering, or that God is indifferent to us and possibly even inflicts the silent treatment upon us. None of these take into account, as we are reminded in our epistle, that God’s time is not our own, and that God doesn’t wander from us. When we feel God’s absence, it is when we have wandered from God, allowed ourselves to drift, or believe that God is punishing us when we go through trials.
We may feel that we do not know the way out, the way of God’s highway—and how can we be blamed for that? Even Jesus’s own disciples and apostles cried out the same plaintive plea when they couldn’t follow the path he walked right before them toward wholeness, wellness, and peace.
The wilderness is where God’s word will be proclaimed, by Isaiah and by John the Baptist and Jesus. It’s a place that strips us bare of all our illusions and vanities and pretended pride. It’s a place where are defenses against admitting our wrongdoing are shredded, but not so that we can be punished. So that we can be moved to repentance—to the turning joyfully to a new life that is more pure and truer to God’s commandments. And this awakening to our own waywardness, our own privilege—that has become such a loaded word but it is a word that MUST be spoken if we are ever to move to reconciliation and healing in our world. That acceptance of our own benefit from injustice is there, and it must become visible by looking at life through the perspectives of others when they offer us their truth. has to be seen not as a source of shame but as a starting point for accepting the relief of God’s incomprehensible grace.
But perhaps God is calling us to embrace a long pause, a resetting of our priorities away from our worship of the god of our unending appetite for more, and is calling us to see creation ongoing all around us. We are reminded that the arc of human experience is short, and that for all our technology the processes of nature-- the mutation of a virus, in this case, that has always been around us in one form or another—can call us to an accounting that we cannot just wave away every challenge in an instant.
After the long pause, God promises a way through the wilderness, not an exemption from the wilderness. God calls us back from the exile we have put ourselves in, through fear and faithlessness. The story of the Exodus reminds us that we cannot allow our fears to master us: when that happens, we often end up longing for the familiar chains of slavery rather than taking up the hard work of the journey to equality and true justice, which can only be found when we proclaim community and insist upon it.
The closing image of our reading from this section of second Isaiah is the image of God not just as a mighty warrior, but also as a tender shepherd—a shepherd who endures all things alongside their sheep. This is one of the most common claims about true leadership that runs throughout scripture. A leader is called to unify the flock, not scatter it. The flock itself is called to observe this tender care for the weakest of its members, and likewise stand in solidarity with them. God calls us to order our societies in such a way that the leaders share in the burdens of the flock, knowing their needs intimately because that leader is not aloof to them but intimately familiar with those needs. God will act as a shepherd, and calls each of us to take up our duty and responsibility to each other likewise—to order our lives so. That we too will carry the youngest or the frailest in our arms. God as our shepherd calls the flock to likewise never abandon the least of their members to the wolves that prowl often in the shadows and out of sight of the most privileged among the flock.
Perhaps we can listen and hear God calling us to embrace the way of mercy and steadfast love, the way that lies straight and true before us, if only we will put our feet to the path and our shoulders to the wheel of mercy and compassion. And once we embrace that pause, seize hold of the chance to cleanse ourselves of all that draws us from love and faith, perhaps we, too, could then hear a word of comfort, and embrace a promise of renewal and resuscitation, of God’s Loving coming down and walking among us, teaching us to walk in the Wilderness Way of God.
“Sing us from Zion’s songs.”
How can we sing a song of the LORD
on foreign soil?(1)
Chapter 40, which begins a prologue to the second part of Isaiah, starts sixteen decades later. A new prophet has taken up Isaiah’s mantle, but reluctantly. We start with a silence, and then a conversation. Because the verses we hear are not spoken by one voice, but by three different voices: God, the heavenly hosts, and the second prophet to call herself-- yes, there is evidence that points to her being female—Isaiah.
God speaks first—as God always does. God speaks to the heavenly court, commanding them to deliver comfort to God’s people, communicating to Jerusalem, who had been completely leveled by her enemies, that she has been released from her shame of faithlessness. The double command (Comfort, O Comfort) adds extra urgency. Yet the focus is not on punishment (a sentence), but forgiveness.
A voice in the heavenly court cries out a word of hope, describing a scene of victory in which the exiled leaders of Jerusalem return from their bondage –but not along the terrible road upon which they were led away, but upon a new road. God’s highway, along which God’s glory will be revealed. Then another voice commands the prophet, who has been listening in disbelief, to cry out herself. The prophet objects, pointing out that humans are too fleeting in their existence to be able to join in this discussion; she has been worn down by the trials of exile alongside her people.
The heavenly host respond, yes, human life is fleeting, but God’s promises are not.
Haven’t we all felt like we have been in a wilderness at various points in our lives? And haven’t we felt lost and forsaken when all the neat, straight paths we’ve made for ourselves have ended up leading us astray?
In the most hostile of environments --wilderness and desert --the word of God comes to offer comfort, respite, and safety, despite Israel’s sinfulness and fault. It is in these most unlikely of places that God's comfort is offered and maintained. God’s comfort is a gift of grace in a time when all hope had been lost, when the fear of abandonment was seemingly permanent. Yet God’s promise remains true, and doesn’t depend upon human measurements of time to come to fulfillment. It is in this light that we read our gospel introduction of John the Baptist, who similarly is called to cry out from the wilderness to proclaim the comfort that is to come, comfort from the presence of God Godself taking on human flesh and living among the people.
Once again, it is God who takes the initiative. At last, the light appears at the end of a long night. The Babylonian Exile stripped the people of everything that mattered to them. Our own exile—from faith, from compassion, from dedication to community and true justice and equality—has also left us longing for meaning, for purpose.
We think we can make our own pathways straight to success, to crushing our opponents. It’s part of the modern myth of independence that ignores how much we depend upon each other, and upon God.
The wilderness is no barrier to God-- God loves the wilderness just the way it is. And God spends a lot of time in the wilderness with us. It is us who want the wilderness leveled, not God. Since when does God see the wilderness and respond with a construction crew and truck full of asphalt? God’s time is NOT our time, and God’s schedule is not our schedule. God likes to take the long way home, reminding us once again that God’s home is everywhere, wherever God is but not limited to one place.
A friend of mine shared these words earlier this week: “I imagine God taking one look at the straight paths we’ve scarred into the wild earth and either laughing or weeping or both, wondering if what we wanted was a tamer God or just one on speed dial who is always waiting to pick up. But isn’t God perpetually going out into the wilderness, out with the wandering Israelites or searching out a lost sheep, out beyond the cell towers, voicemails, and text messages?”
Instead, God walks in the opposite direction our straightened paths lead, just to see if we want a God who follows us or if we want to follow God.” (2)
The life of abundance that God offers to us starts with opening ourselves to the wonder of God’s creation all around us, and of celebrating our place in a web of relationships that each offer us a chance to ourselves bear the light of God into the world. Have you ever heard anything more absurd than the idea of anyone making a path straight for God to amble down?
It is in the midst of the wilderness that the people are urged to faith. And the kind of faith the people are being urged to embrace is not an easy faith. It is faith that seems to fly in the face of all evidence. The people are being asked to sing joyful songs even from the chains of exile and oppression. Being challenged to take up this confident proclamation of God’s presence even when all evidence points otherwise is a call to faith that doesn’t deny fear but responds to fear by proclaiming the power of unity and community over those forces that attempt to use division and loss as levers of control.
We, too, may feel like there has been a long silence, these last many months as this pandemic has stretched on here in 2020. For us, who expect instantaneous responses, eight months certainly can feel like an eternity. In the face of that pause, two doubts commonly arise to plague our spiritual lives: we either believe that God is powerless to change our suffering, or that God is indifferent to us and possibly even inflicts the silent treatment upon us. None of these take into account, as we are reminded in our epistle, that God’s time is not our own, and that God doesn’t wander from us. When we feel God’s absence, it is when we have wandered from God, allowed ourselves to drift, or believe that God is punishing us when we go through trials.
We may feel that we do not know the way out, the way of God’s highway—and how can we be blamed for that? Even Jesus’s own disciples and apostles cried out the same plaintive plea when they couldn’t follow the path he walked right before them toward wholeness, wellness, and peace.
But perhaps God is calling us to embrace a long pause, a resetting of our priorities away from our worship of the god of our unending appetite for more, and is calling us to see creation ongoing all around us. We are reminded that the arc of human experience is short, and that for all our technology the processes of nature-- the mutation of a virus, in this case, that has always been around us in one form or another—can call us to an accounting that we cannot just wave away every challenge in an instant.
After the long pause, God promises a way through the wilderness, not an exemption from the wilderness. God calls us back from the exile we have put ourselves in, through fear and faithlessness. The story of the Exodus reminds us that we cannot allow our fears to master us: when that happens, we often end up longing for the familiar chains of slavery rather than taking up the hard work of the journey to equality and true justice, which can only be found when we proclaim community and insist upon it.
The closing image of our reading from this section of second Isaiah is the image of God not just as a mighty warrior, but also as a tender shepherd—a shepherd who endures all things alongside their sheep. This is one of the most common claims about true leadership that runs throughout scripture. A leader is called to unify the flock, not scatter it. The flock itself is called to observe this tender care for the weakest of its members, and likewise stand in solidarity with them. God calls us to order our societies in such a way that the leaders share in the burdens of the flock, knowing their needs intimately because that leader is not aloof to them but intimately familiar with those needs. God will act as a shepherd, and calls each of us to take up our duty and responsibility to each other likewise—to order our lives so. That we too will carry the youngest or the frailest in our arms. God as our shepherd calls the flock to likewise never abandon the least of their members to the wolves that prowl often in the shadows and out of sight of the most privileged among the flock.
Perhaps we can listen and hear God calling us to embrace the way of mercy and steadfast love, the way that lies straight and true before us, if only we will put our feet to the path and our shoulders to the wheel of mercy and compassion. And once we embrace that pause, seize hold of the chance to cleanse ourselves of all that draws us from love and faith, perhaps we, too, could then hear a word of comfort, and embrace a promise of renewal and resuscitation, of God’s Loving coming down and walking among us, teaching us to walk in the Wilderness Way of God.
Amen.
Preached at the online 10:30 am Morning Prayer service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO. during Coronatide.
Readings:
Sources:
1) Robert Alter, The Hebrew Scriptures, Volume 3: the Writings
2) The Rev. David Henson, quoted by my friend the Rev. Anne Lane Witt
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