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Sunday Message
December 12, 2004
Richard L Sheffield
Text: Isaiah 35:1-10
'Tis the season. 'Tis the season for good news. For, "Tidings of Comfort and Joy." For, "Angels singing, Noels ringing." For, "Joy to the world!" 'Tis the season for, noise and traffic, and buying and selling, and cooking and trimming, and all that other stuff that goes with celebrating something "silent," something "holy," something "calm." Except that, "silent, holy, calm," hasn't described any Christmas that I know of since the first Christmas; and from the story in Luke's Gospel, the one that begins, "In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus ..." I don't think that one was silent or calm either! Holy, yes. Quiet, no.
The one whom Advent says we should expect, came unexpectedly the first time, into a world just like ours. A world where peace and quiet are more the stuff of hymns and carols, than of holidays and all the other days of our lives. A world just like Isaiah's world. A world, where along with all that we wish for, and ask for, what most of us long for, is just a bit of good news. Good news about ourselves, our nation, our family; good news about our friends, our church, maybe even our credit rating!
The Market Street Church has stood on this corner for over 50 years, and in Lima for nearly 175 years, proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ – come at Christmas, and coming anew into our lives. Bringing good news into a bad news world is our "business."
Someone decided last week, though, that we'd missed something. That there's a bit of good news we've neglected to proclaim. So they decided to help us out. Thursday night, as I drove to the church I found several of these stuck in the ground near our church sign at Market and Cole. It's a yard sign. But it's not a political sign. It reads:
BAD CREDIT,
NO CREDIT
CALL FOR IMMEDIATE
AUTO APPROVAL
DRIVE HOME TODAY!
1-866-883-XXXX
I quickly decided that that would be bad news for anyone who might think it was good news – loan sharking came to mind – so I took the signs down. I for sure didn't want anyone driving by to think that that is the good news The Market Street Presbyterian Church is proclaiming this year. (And when I print this sermon their phone number will be wrong.)
On the other hand, as I thought about this sermon, and this Advent Sunday, I wondered what folks must've thought about Isaiah's yard sign!
DRY LIFE,
BAD DAY
CALL FOR STRENGTH
DO NOT FEAR
DO YOUR DRIVING TODAY ON
GOD'S HOLY WAY!
1-419-229-9040
That number is right. That's the church phone number.
What I read a few minutes ago is obviously not a "yard sign." But what Isaiah had to say is even more unlikely than what that credit-come-on says. In fact, I'm pretty sure that if I took a poll I'd find that more of us could believe that somebody could fix bad credit ratings, and help us buy a car when we can't afford it, than could buy the words of the prophet saying God's going to fix the bad in our world. We may not like it but we understand it, when someone preys on the poor who don't have a prayer if they buy into Christmas credit come-ons. But, we are as clueless as anyone, when it comes to someone who writes of people who have known great sorrow, "They shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away." 1 I can explain that. I think. But can I believe that?
So much of life, symbolized for us even in this season by events since 9/11 says no. "Homeland security" used to be the Atlantic and the Pacific, and friendly neighbors to the North and South. Now it's bureaucracies and bombs, and we're not sure which to fear more. How naive could Isaiah have been! No one in their right mind would believe the world described on his yard sign. A world in which, "The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing." 2
What world is that? Where in the world is that? At Ground-Zero? In underground caves? In a place where politics includes poisoning your opponent? In a world where millions of people starve while billions of dollars intended to help lie in hidden off shore bank accounts? As a matter of fact, says Isaiah, that's exactly where it is – the world he describes – in all those places.
You see, the world in which Isaiah lived was not so different from our own. The people to whom Isaiah wrote were not so different from you and me. It was a world where people wanted to find a reason for courage and hope and joy. Where what many people found was fear and despair and sadness. To such a people, in such a world, Isaiah wrote:
"Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, 'Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God.'" 3
He didn't write that because he saw something in the Jewish people in exile that they didn't see in themselves. They saw things pretty clearly. Things were pretty grim. After a hundred plus years in exile in Babylon, the Jewish people despaired of ever returning to the land which God had given to their ancestors. What Isaiah saw was not that the people had it in them to prevail over adversity, but that in their adversity they had God still with them. God was still God. For Isaiah that was crucial.
President Tom Gillespie of Princeton Theological Seminary says it still is. Writing shortly after 9/11, Dr. Gillespie said:
"We live in a culture that has not valued theological education for a long time. Our society has, for the most part, dismissed differences of religious conviction as irrelevant. Popular wisdom has contended that it does not matter what you believe so long as you are sincere. Superficial comments like that are no longer plausible. For those who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and were responsible for the crash in a Pennsylvania field were not the godless atheists we had feared for so long in the Cold War. They were believers convinced they were doing the will of God.
"Now we know that what someone believes about God can be a matter of life and death.
"Now the doctrine of God is recognized as crucial. Who is God really? Who really is God?
"So is the theodicy question. [The question of evil.] As Archibald MacLeish put it in his play JB, 'Either God is God and not good or God is good and not God.'" 4
That's the question the people of Israel faced in exile in Isaiah's day. That's the question our world seems to bring us face to face with every day. Either God is all powerful, but not very good because he allows evil to wreak havoc on the lives of people in high places and hovels alike; he could do something, but he doesn't. OR, God has good intentions; he's not just good, but very, very good; but he's really not much of a God when it comes to getting anything done.
How to reconcile God's goodness with life's badness is a question that has haunted humankind since at least the writing of the book of Job. The answer is not an explanation but a promise, and a person. That in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, God is with you!
That I would put on a yard sign out front!
IN SPITE
OF ALL
THE EVIDENCE TO
THE CONTRARY,
GOD
IS WITH YOU!
That's what Isaiah said. That's what the hymn we sang last week said:
"God is working his purpose out,
as year succeeds to year,
God is working his purpose out,
and the time is drawing near,
nearer and nearer draws the time,
the time that shall surely be,
when the earth shall be filled with the
Glory of God as the waters cover the sea." 5
And what that will look like is what Isaiah described in the passage I read. The poetry of that passage is not explanation but proclamation. If I counted right, the word "shall" is used 24 times in 10 verses. "Shall be glad ... shall rejoice ... shall blossom ... shall leap ... shall sing for joy ..." 6
No ifs, no ands, no buts, no maybes, in Isaiah's vision of things. Only the certainty of God's presence with his people. And when God seems absent? Again, the Bible offers no explanation to satisfy our curiosity or our "need to know." Instead, the Bible points to Jesus Christ. And says, "Where is your God? There is your God!" In a manger. On a cross.
"Christ, by highest heaven adored,
Christ, the everlasting Lord! ...
Pleased in flesh with us to dwell,
Jesus, our Emmanuel." 7
Which means "Jesus, our God with us," in the world as it is, and as it shall be.
Saturday about lunch time, I was sitting in my office, looking out at a pretty dreary day. It was supposed to snow and be pretty like we think Christmas should be. It was gray, and damp, and cold the way so much of life really can be. I smiled, though, as I watched out the window, about 20 of our children at "Christmas Camp" lining up in the courtyard and walking across the parking lot to Market Place Apartments up on Cole Street to sing Christmas carols to old folks they don't even know. Folks who've grown old in this world as it is, for whom young voices, perhaps, would a reminder of the world as it will be. We built Market Place for folks like that, you and I. Saturday, our children who weren't even born when we did that, reminded them and us of why.
'Tis the season to be reminded once again.
1. Isaiah 35:10, NRSV.
2. Isaiah 35:1-2, NRSV.
3. Isaiah 35:3-4, NRSV.
4. Thomas W. Gillespie, inSpire, Winter, 2002, p. 2.
5. The Hymnal, XXX.
6. Isaiah 35 selected, NRSV.
7. "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," The Presbyterian Hymnal, 31.
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