We all encounter from time to time, moments when our powers to control outcomes seems small to negligible. The longer we live the more aware we become of powers beyond our finite scope. You don’t have to look far. For me, I think of a friend, a classmate, who had just been diagnosed with cancer, and another friend of the family who lost his wife. For you, what is it that convinces you of your limitations? Age, aches, pains, disability, influenza A or B, COVID, ALS, Alzheimer’s, loss of capacity? Are you grappling with issues of caring for children, parents and relatives? Are you grieving the changing climate, the threat to water supplies, the fires that rage, the droughts and the floods? These are some of the personal reminders of who we are as mortal and human. We are so dependent on one another and the soil, water and air that sustain life.
History doesn’t present much greater estimation of our powers. As intoxicating as each new technology can be at times, it can also be a mere smoke screen covering our inability to make substantive change in the human situation. Unlike some previous generations, we have seen too much to bow before the ephemeral current god of progress, each idol of human supremacy. We recognize that humanity has much yet to struggle over. And by history, by experience, by the Word we are also aware that the answer to humanity’s needs is from outside, it is not the voice within.
That might feel more than discouraging, if humanity is all we had to go upon. But there is a higher authority. And it is to that higher court that we are going in prayer for our friends and family. We have come to understand what was revealed to Elijah, that the “still small voice” he needed to listen to was not inside him, it was a gift from God, guidance from a loving creator.
Today we heard Isaiah preaching to a discouraged gathering of listeners. In fact, they may have been so discouraged, and had the tar so kicked out of them by life, that they didn’t want to listen to any preacher. Maybe they had heard it all and none of it fit their lives. They believed that if God existed, and they had their doubts about that, that he didn’t stack up to the gods of the land of their captivity. And so they were giving up and accommodating to the culture around them. I’d say Isaiah had a tough assignment. Consider the situation; the people were stuck in Babylon, they were a powerless people mired in the middle of the world’s greatest power at the time, and God gave Isaiah a word of hope to share with the exiles.
What is the hope of this sermon which Isaiah preached? That your God is not to be underestimated. That your vision is limited, and your imaginings of God are myopic. And all of this is not intended as a way of criticism, but as corrective. Because everybody feels trapped by trouble, or exiled from hope, or captive to fear time and again. And we need God. I hear this word from God telling me, look deeper, look farther, look closer and use the lens I will provide.
Like the runaway best seller many years ago and rather cute book, All I really needed to know I learned in Kindergarten, Isaiah is very specifically telling his listeners to remember what they learned in their version of Sunday school in Yeshiva. Isaiah asks them, “Has it not been told you from the beginning?” Go back to your foundational lessons. “Our God is an awesome God; he reigns from heaven above.” And then Mark the Gospel writer provides the other foundational lesson: “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
God’s Word presents the juxtaposition of an intellectual imaginative trajectory that begins in the mystic void before creation and follows a star to Bethlehem – it is awesome and awe inspiring! Isaiah begs you to enter into that wonder struck estimation of the width and breadth and authority of God, and then the gospel writers all call us to recognize that the same God walked, healed and taught through the heartbeat, pulse and breath and touch of a man from Nazareth named Jesus. That this same Jesus represents an invasion of sorts. An entrance not only into the grand scale, but into Peter’s home and there to heal Peter’s mother in law. Up close and personal, every day meaningful. God rushing into lives that are teetering and even toppling, reaching out with power to renew our strength, with command and ability to order our days in a new creation.
The message of Isaiah is a corrective to an image of God which is helpful but inadequate. I mean the image that God is Jesus, defined as your good friend and one who will always affirm you and never contradict you. The God of Isaiah, who came to this world in the mystery of the incarnation, is beyond our capacity to fully understand and certainly not ours to control. Isaiah challenges us to make friends with the discoveries and speculations of astronomy and quantum physics to appreciate the God whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are not our ways. The God who brings out the host of stars and calls each star of the expanding universe by name is not a God you can ever encapsulate in one word “friend”. The God we encounter in the text of Isaiah and the God we encounter when we take the wonder of creation seriously is not a God to address as “hey you,” but always with reverent “Thou.” For this is God, the creating God whose work is evident in the birth of each new star in the Great Nebula in Orion’s belt, and each new baby born in every maternity unit, and each new place prepared in our Father’s house for a departing saint to be with him always. And yet, and yet, what must have continually amazed the disciples after the epiphany of the resurrection and the post resurrection appearances of Jesus was the fact that this One who had indeed called them ‘friends and no longer servant’ was none other than the One who brooded over the chaos on the very first day of creation, and the One who will sit enthroned on the last day of time. The One who inspired the jaw dropping moment for Thomas when he saw the scars of his closest friend on the evidence of God in front of him, and his eternal testimony “My Lord and My God” is now our most perfect creed. And yet, and yet, this one came to Peter’s house and cared for a specific person in her distress. What does this mean? What does this mean to you?
We wrap our hearts around this promise. The God of all, the one God, is the One who comes today to you in all your finiteness, in all your limitations, in your times of trouble, in the frustrations, in the fevers of this life, in your feelings of abandonment or exile, spreads a table before you in the presence of your enemies and then bids, asks you to come and dine, to take and eat, to come and follow, to commit yourself to his cause, he asks you to lose yourself and in the process to find yourself through surrender to the one - the only, the highest truth, the most abundant of life, the surest of way. When you reach out and touch this One, and take this One into yourself, all the worry and confusions, are put on hold for a moment, sometimes longer, for a lifetime and beyond.