Comfort, Comfort My People
Second Sunday of Advent (Year B)
Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8
Homily delivered at the Congregation of the Good Shepherd
Beijing China
4th December 2011: 10:00 Holy Eucharist
God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
The year 2011 has been hard on many of us here in the Congregation of the Good Shepherd. While our multi-national, multi-denominational composition is a point of joy for us—we have Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders, Australians, British, Bahamians, Fijians, Guyanians, Japanese, Chinese, and many more—it does make us a bit vulnerable as a group when bad things happen over the globe. In March there was the horrible Christchurch New Zealand earthquake and its aftershocks. Right after that, there was the horrendous earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor crisis in Sendai Japan. In August, we had major rioting, looting, and burning in London, Bristol, Birmingham, and Liverpool.
In addition to these catastrophic disasters, we as a group faced other problems. Several members of the congregation were diagnosed with major illnesses. The political process of China seems to be hunkering down in reaction to the popular uprisings in the Middle East and in preparation for changes in the top Chinese leadership next year. As a result, in the cooperation projects and business for which many of us are here for, it has become hard to move things forward. The entire world continues to suffer from a depressed global economy, and some of our congregants have had to split up their families on a temporary basis in order to pursue their livings in separate locations where the work is. In November, people from the United States sorrowfully commemorated the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and in so doing were brought face to face with the cost of how the American public and it political leaders reacted to that attack: two seemingly unending wars on foreign soils have produced such deficits that the nation seems unable to respond to the economic crisis. The American political process has become paralyzed, the constitutional government of the land seemingly moribund due to entrenched ideologies and an unwillingness to cooperate or compromise with anyone of differing opinions. The Tea Party demonstrated on the Right and was met with hoots of derision from the Center; Occupy Wall Street demonstrated on the Left and was met with beatings, arrests, and pepper spray.
Despite the occasional moments of grace and blessing we also have experienced, all told, I think that we can agree that 2011 has indeed been an annus horribilis, a year to make one's skin crawl, if only for the catastrophes we saw.
In 587 BCE, a great catastrophe befell the people of the tiny kingdom of Judah. One of the world’s first trans-national Empires, Babylon, after a decade of dealing patiently, in their lights, with the fanatic and ultra-nationalistic people of Judah, came down hard. After killing all insurgent combatants and activists, they deported the entire ruling class of the nation, letting them off with their lives but placing them far away in secure and safe provinces in Mesopotamia far from where they could do any damage by stirring up opposition to the Imperial rule. They blinded the king they had put on the throne of Judah only ten years before, only to be rewarded by his treachery and disloyalty. They placed another puppet, this time non-royal and hopefully compliant, in the role of governor of the now newly-named province of Judah. They burned the capital city, Jerusalem, and leveled to its foundation the symbol of the obstinate, uncompromising national religion that had in some ways been the driving force in the rebellion of the district, the Temple of the Jews’ God, Yahweh. No stone was left standing on another stone.
This was a disaster of overwhelming and unfathomable proportions. They had believed that Yahweh had promised to protect his people them and keep them from harm. He had promised, they thought, to protect and preserve the line of the kings descended from David and protect their rule. Now all that was gone.
They had tried to keep God’s commandments, and in the very doing of this had provoked the wrath of the Babylonians. Judah had ceased to exist. All that was left was a small group of exiles in Babylon and a large mass of “the people of the land” living under foreign domination and rapidly accommodating and assimilating to ways of the occupiers in order to get by. The Jewish way of worship had ceased; the Temple was a mere memory. Almost all families had lost members, if not been wiped out entirely.
It is hard for us to understand how hopeless and desperate this situation was. It was as if all of New Zealand had been leveled, or all of Honshu wiped off the face of the earth by a tsunami, or if the terrorists had exploded nuclear bombs instead of crashed airplanes over New York City and Washington DC. Arguably, the disaster facing the Jews in 587 was greater than even that of 70 C.E. when the Romans leveled Jerusalem or in the 1940s when the Nazis systematically sought to exterminate all European Jewry,
Such was the level of desperation and hopelessness. The nation simply didn’t exist any more. God had broken the covenant with his people. Indeed, they were no more his people, no more even a people. And he was no more their God. How could one understand these events any other way?
Among the exiles in Babylon was a prophet who wrote in the tradition of Isaiah, and whose oracles have been preserved in the latter part of that book. In the midst of that national disaster, he wrote:
Nahumu, nahamu 'ommi, “comfort, comfort my people.”
The Hebrew is a soft, lilting, lullaby. It is a plural command—“you all go out and comfort them, comfort them, for they are still my people. I am still their God.” Thus begins the Book of Consolation in the larger book of Isaiah.
The words are achingly beautiful and full of love. “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and call out to her. She has served her time in prison; her penalty is paid. Her suffering is so great that it cannot be the mere punishment for past sins—it is at least twice as worse as that.”
This Second Isaiah then introduces several separate oracular pronouncements as the different voices giving this message of comfort.
The first proclaims that as low as things have gotten, Yahweh is about to perform the ultimate turning of the tables by wondrously and unexpectedly bringing about the return of the exiles from Babylon to Judah. God will do the seemingly impossible—he will turn the impassible barriers between Mesopotamia and Judah into the route of return. Metaphorically, the hill and canyon filled desert where Jordan, Syria, and western Iraq currently lie will be leveled into a smooth highway that will speed the exiles’ return. And this will be a sign of God’s glory not just for Jews, but for all of humanity:
A voice cries out:
‘In the wilderness prepare Yahweh’s road,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
Then Yahweh’s glory shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of Yahweh has said it.’
The God who is to do this is no tribal deity, no special possession of the Jewish people. A second voice of comfort takes up this theme of God’s universal nature, of the fact that all humanity stands in awe of God’s mystery, by surprisingly adding:
‘All people are grass,
their constancy is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the LORD blows upon it;
surely people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades;
but the word of our God will stand forever.’
Note that Second Isaiah’s message is NOT: “ The national disaster was God’s just punishment on us and now he will restore us to our former state. We will be his people and he will be our God, and all our enemies will now get their just deserts and it will be a great thing to be a Jew.”
Rather, Second Isaiah’s message is: “Our suffering was beyond anything just. It is a mystery, just as God is a mystery. But our suffering is part of what it means to be human. All of humanity suffers. We are grass. We are impermanent. But God’s word remains, and that for all people.”
It has always struck me as odd that Second Isaiah here thinks that a voice of joyful news would cry out, “All people are grass. They wither in a day, and fade.” What good news is there in such a saying?
Accepting our common humanity and our facing square-on our limitations is actually a very liberating thing. It is, in fact, good news. It is the start of all authentic spiritual growth and health. It is the thing that makes Socrates a wise man and the sophists around him foolish—he at least knows and accepts that he is ignorant while they go about in self-delusion. It is the process that Buddhists call giving up desire, abandoning the expectations that enslave us, and the start of the process of enlightenment. It is the start of what Muhammad called Islam, “submission” to God. It is what the wisdom tradition in the Hebrew scripture calls the “beginning of all wisdom,” “awe or fear of the Lord.” For those following Twelve-Step spirituality, it is the First Step, “we admitted we were powerless and that our lives had become unmanageable.” It is what Jesus is describing when he says we must first lose our lives in order to find them.
Acceptance of our condition as imperfect, limited, and very temporary people living in an imperfect and sometimes horrifying world is needed to break down the barriers between us and other people. It is at the heart of the process of repentance, of regretting and turning aside from our misdoings, and performing amendment of life.
I think that is why St. Mark in today’s Gospel says that John the Baptist’s preaching of repentance was the “Beginning of the Happy Message” of Jesus Christ. Mark sees John as the “messenger sent before the Lord’s day,” borrowing from Malachi, and as, borrowing from today’s reading from Second Isaiah, the voice in wilderness crying “prepare the way.” John, as dour and unsparing as we usually like to think him, is still a bringer of Good News, because he urges us to accept that we are helpless and hopeless, and this universally so, since all people for him needed his baptism, regardless of their heritage, religion, or family background.
But acceptance is only the start. In order to find the hope and help we lack, we need to turn our lives over to this God who breaks down barriers, smoothes down the barriers and fills up the gaps, makes the rough places plain, recreates the broken nation, and raises the dead to life.
The third oracle in today’s Isaiah passage fairly sings in joy of what it means when we recognize God’s hand in these loving acts of restoring the exiles. Second Isaiah personifies the City about to be rebuilt by the returning exiles, Jerusalem built on Mount Zion, itself as a herald of joyful news, the joyful news of God’s love:
Get you up to a high mountain,
O Zion, herald of good tidings;
lift up your voice with strength,
O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,
lift it up, do not fear;
say to the cities of Judah,
"Here is your God!"
See, Yahweh God comes with might,
and his arm rules for him;
his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.
He will feed his flock like a shepherd;
he will gather the lambs in his arms,
and carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead the mother sheep.
Second Isaiah here takes the commonplace image used by the Hebrew prophets, the image of the coming day when Yahweh will set things right, by rewarding the righteous and punishing evil-doers, and changes it drastically. No longer is this a day that burns. No longer is it a great day of military conquest. It is a day of gentle love. It is a day that God as a loving shepherd feeds his flock, and carries the little lambs tenderly in his arms. “Here is your God,” he says, implicitly saying “and not in those images of blood and fire.” For Second Isaiah, God is a loving shepherd, not a warrior or executioner.
The season of Advent is a season of preparation and waiting. We await and prepare for the inbreaking of God, for the coming of Christ, whether once long ago in Bethlehem, or soon in glory to finish setting things right. The traditional prayer for the season is this:
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
As we prepare, let us remember Second Isaiah’s message in today’s Hebrew Scripture reading: we are all grass, and quickly fade. But God loves us. The coming of God to set things right is a moment of comfort, a moment of joyful news, not just for some, but for all. It is a moment when God as a mother sings lullabies to us, her children, and when God, as a gentle shepherd, carries us in love, his lambs.
Sisters and brothers here at the Congregation of the Good Shepherd. Elena and I have been blessed for the last 2 ½ years to be part of you, to sing and worship with you, and to serve you. We are blessed to share the celebration of the first part of this Advent season with you. We will be moving to Ashland Oregon in just a couple of weeks, for new ministry and new blessings. I want to thank all of you for the great faith you have shared with us, and for the opportunities you gave us here to serve.
May we all during the rest of this Advent season reflect on our limitations and failings, and be brutally honest about this with ourselves. And may we see this, together with God’s offer to help us, as the gladdest of tidings, the best of good news. And may we, in our lives and service, be heralds of this joyful message to all whom we meet.
In the name of God, Amen.
