The God Who Shows Up

Epiphany UCC

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; 2to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; 3to provide for those who mourn in Zion— to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.

4They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations. 8For I the Lord love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing; I will faithfully give them their recompense, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them. 9Their descendants shall be known among the nations, and their offspring among the peoples; all who see them shall acknowledge that they are a people whom the Lord has blessed.

10I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. 11For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.

I must say that it seems odd to preach on Christmas Eve in a morning worship service, something I’ve never done, and something I’m not sure I’ve actually listened to on Christmas Eve morning in all of the church services I’ve attended since my youth. Interestingly, the last time the Church had both the 4th Sunday of Advent AND Christmas Eve on the same day was in 2006 and that was the first Christmas I spent as Pastor of my former church in Michigan. I checked my files to see if we had a morning service that year – and I found out that we didn’t and I don’t remember why, which again, seems odd that I don’t remember the reasoning for essentially cancelling the 4th Sunday of Advent. Some churches are doing what my former church did some eleven years ago, and I get the reasons why – asking mainline Protestants to come to church twice in one day, that may be a bridge too far for some! As I was mulling what to do with this Sunday, whether or not to propose canceling the morning service or not, I kept thinking that I just couldn’t imagine doing away with the 4th Sunday of Advent – I mean there is a fourth candle on the Advent wreath we need to get lit, for goodness sake! We have to be here to do that, right?! Seriously, though, I did ask myself why that idea didn’t strike me some eleven years ago, why it didn’t seemingly bother me in 2006, when this odd confluence of dates happened? But I’ve been thinking about it for a few days and I’m going to guess that I just think that especially THIS YEAR the more worship of God we can get into the waning days of 2017, probably the better. During these odd and difficult times, when up seems down, and down seems up, and some people claim that up is down and down is up, maybe we do need gather together more often, and listen more often to both music that gives glory to God, and to listen to the Word being preached, and maybe to listen to each other and to the God who calls us into community, even as community seems so strained and impossible in this country right now. Despite the madness of the Iraq War in 2006, 2017 seems so profoundly different and tenuous and frankly scary than even those difficult days. And so we gather this day, before we re-gather again later tonight on Christmas Eve, to hear again, to see again, God’s promises, and God’s hope for the world.

And hearing today’s text itself was worth the gathering together again, I think. You have a voice from the prophets speaking to us, on the eve of Christ’s birth, and this voice offers hope to us, as it did the people of Israel when they heard and read it thousands of years ago. The text is likely from the third person who wrote in the name of the great prophet Isaiah, and this third person wrote after the people of Israel had been set free from their captivity by the Babylonian Empire, and were beginning to rebuild after years of captivity in the city of Babylon itself. The policy of this Babylonian Empire was not to just keep your friends close, but to keep your enemies even closer, and so their strategy included deporting the best and brightest of their conquered lands to Babylon itself, believing that keeping the leaders away from their land and the bulk of their people would diminish the possibility of insurrection and rebellion in these places. Isaiah begins his words by pointing out that the spirit of the Lord is upon him, because God has set him apart to tell the good news that God would free the oppress, bind up the wounds of the hurt, and release the prisoners from their captivity. For us Christians, we have read this text as foretelling the kind of Messiah Jesus would be, and the Gospel of Luke has Jesus himself taking on these words for himself at the very beginning of his ministry (Luke 4). So often we American Christians have overlooked that Jesus came not only to save souls, but to save bodies as well, that he cared deeply about making this world a better place, and was not just about shepherding human souls into a better place in the next world. Jim Wallis, the evangelical writer and ministers tells this story, that makes this point especially clear – he writes: One time, while I was in seminary, my friends and I decided to do an experiment. We got an old Bible and a pair of scissors, and we cut out of the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, every single reference to the poor, every time the poor were named: God is on the side of the poor. The gospel is good news for the poor. We cut all those verses out. When we were done, we had a Bible that was literally in shreds. It would not stay together. I used to go out and preach with that Bible and hold it up high in front of American congregations and say, Brothers and sisters, this is the American Bible, full of holes. - Jim Wallis, How Do We Right the Wrong? Questions of Faith (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990), 80

Jim Wallis is right, surely, and everything after the first few verses of our text imagines a figure, prophetic or Messianic, depending on whether one sees is through Christian or Jewish eyes, everything after the first few verses is intertwined with that image of this person bringing good news to those who needed some good news, to people who were in need of solace after a time of great injustice. After a season in Babylon, after decades in Babylon, God will provide garlands around their necks rather than ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. After Babylon comes Jerusalem, after a time in prison comes the homecoming, after the destruction of all things comes the time to rebuild. For everything there is a season, writes the wise one who gave us the book of Ecclesiastes, and for those of us awaiting God’s appearing in Jesus both today and in the future, we are surely ready for the justice and goodness and salvation that he surely brings with him. And yet, we must wait, especially during this time, we wait for the spirit of the Lord to arise and alight on someone, somewhere to speak for the Christ, to speak of his call to justice and his call for healing of both soul and body – salvation is just another word for wholeness and thus salvation means that what is eternal is saved from sin and despair, and that also means that what is temporary, our bodies, our presence, our world, even our social systems must be also saved from sin and despair. The devil, so to speak, may have his day, or may even have a season, in our lives and in the life of this world, but it is ONLY a day, and ONLY a season. The world and our souls, both of them, they move hesitatingly, sometimes stumbling towards more love, more justice, more wholeness, but still the world moves forward, even now in these odd and difficult times.

I know that for the more cynical among us these words might ring hollow, and I have to admit that I have found myself questioning them more now than I have in the past – certainly even more so than I did in, say, 2006. I looked over an old sermon I preached on this text from 2008 to see what I had said about it, and in that sermon I echoed that hope, the hope that seems to be right there in the text, and I wondered if I still believed it, I wondered if I still believed that the world is moving towards more justice, more light, more wholeness, more salvation – that God is still helping us build up the ancient ruins, repairing the ruined cities, still believed that there is still an everlasting covenant with God to lean into, when there is nothing else to keep us upright in this life. And that is when I remember that the world has experienced far darker times than even this, these odd and difficult days, far worst, and after each time in Babylon, God’s people, which is ultimately all of humanity, all of us eventually come home again to Jerusalem, to something better. I’ll never quite understand why God created this kind of world, where moments of progress are then followed by moments of retraction or retreat, or distraction from God’s good purpose. You would think God could have created a different kind of world, but God didn’t and one can argue with that reality, with the world as it is and with the God who created that world, one can argue with that reality all one wants to, but we’ll only lose that argument with reality and the God of that reality 100% of the time.

And so we pilgrims, we followers of Jesus, who can look at the birth of Christ as good news, and the death of Christ as good news, we look for wells of hope on the journey, and this season, this Advent is certainly one of them. Just a few minutes ago we baptized two babies, Bailey and Tinsley, both of who are great gifts to their parents and their families, but for us in need of hope, surely they are signs that the world moves forward, and that life goes on and on. Signs of hope are needed in this time of resistance to greed, meanness and cruelty, and we have them all around us, and we’ve got to keep looking for the ways God is present even in Babylon, whatever the Babylon we find ourselves in, personally or collectively. The signs are there, the flashes of God bringing us home are there, the time of rejoicing is possible even now – and surely this day is one of those times of rejoicing, on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, when we lit the Love candle, a reminder that God is love, and that we are loved, and all are loved, both prisoners and prison guards, oppressed and oppressors, the heartbroken and the breakers of hearts.

So, friends, maybe in this time, when we are asked to trust these words from Isaiah that there will be a time of rejoicing coming soon, soon and very soon, maybe even tonight, and maybe we need to think about what to do in the meantime, about what to do in the in-between time, the time between cross and resurrection. Whatever our circumstances, individually, or collectively, one of the things that the people of Israel held captive in Babylon never did was to forsake hope, to forsake their faith, forsake their sense that there was a future before them, or at least before their children. They resisted hopelessness, they resisted giving into despair, and that resistance came from a core belief that they were God’s people, people of great worth, and never, ever ultimately abandoned by the Holy, who would someday make a way out of no way. There is short story by Tillie Olson called I Stand Here Ironing, which tells of a poverty-stricken mother who is working at an ironing board while anguishing over a note she has received from school calling her to come in and discuss her daughter, who needs help. The mother contemplates all this as she irons other people’s clothes: She was a child seldom smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old ... She was dark and thin and foreign-looking in a world where the prestige went to blondness and curly hair and dimples; she was slow where glibness was prized. She was a child of anxious, not proud, love. We were poor and could not afford the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother; I was a distracted mother ...My wisdom came too late. She has much to her and probably little will come of it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear. Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom, but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know, help make it so there is cause for her to know, that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron. (I Stand Here Ironing [New York: Dell Books, 1971], 20-21.) The people of Israel knew that to be true, that they were more than helpless before the iron that was Babylon, that they mattered, and there could be, and would be, another day, a better day, when our whole being shall exult before our God, the same one who has clothed us with the garments of salvation, who has covered us in the robes of righteousness, and with garland, and with jewels. To resist in times of hopelessness, we must remember we are not helpless before the iron, and that hope and justice and love will come again, as it did 2000 years ago in a manger in Bethlehem, as it does now for us on the cusp of celebrating that birth this very night. Amen.