October 22, 2006
Title: One More Time
I was thinking this past week that this sermon was going to be one of
those difficult ones, because when I first chose this passage to preach
from, I fell in love with its beautiful language, something you find a lot of
in the book of Isaiah. And I got the title down on paper so I could put it
out on the church’s signage outside, but I don’t know why I chose this
title, to be honest, except to say that this theme is spoken over and over
again in Isaiah, perhaps not exactly like this, with these words, but the
central message that God will redeem the people out of bondage, out of
the slavery in Babylon, and restore the holy city of Jerusalem to once
glorious status—that message is said yet one more time in the book of
Isaiah. Isaiah is one of the favorite books of the church, with our own
Gospels often referencing it to make the case that Jesus indeed was the
Jewish Messiah. But, as often the case, we Christians have often
ignored the other message it contains within the text, beyond our desire
to make a case for Jesus—and that other message is as timeless as God
is, and maybe as eternal. It is about hope, about the human need for
hope, about the divine response to our hopelessness, about nature of
foolish hope, and our need to have hoped if we are to be fully human in
this world. These words are written in response to a situation that
seemed hopeless—the best and brightest of Israel’s people are being
held hostage in Babylon; Jerusalem, holy Jerusalem in ruins for decades
now, and the few broken people left within its ruins reflecting the broken
buildings all around them. The world has become a mess and the lives
of God’s people, of Israel, captive in Babylon and also captive within the
ruins of Jerusalem, they have lost hope and faith in the future, in the
possibility that something better may yet come to them and their
children. And so the writer of Isaiah writes, he writes with great passion
and generous grace and powerful beauty, hoping to give his ancient
readers in Babylon the hope that they do not have within themselves at
the moment. There is something about these words that are beautifully
and authentically desperate, as if the prophet is fearful that the people
will no longer believe in the God who has promised them a homecoming
to Jerusalem.
We all probably know of that kind of desperation—you can sometimes
find it in the lives of our friends, and even in our own lives—the dying
glimmer of hope in ourselves or in others, and we spend time stoking the
embers so that we can go on, because without hope life seems
impossible. I’ve seen people almost demand that others they are trying
to help have hope, that they believe what does not seem reasonable to
the hopeless one to believe; these good people demand that others
continue to hold onto hope even it feels as if hope has walked out of the
room for the person they are trying to help. Sometimes people get
desperate with each other—if you don’t have hope, if you don’t believe
there is a way home, a better ending than the one we’re looking at, then
somehow your lack of hope and faith diminishes me or threatens me,
some people mistakenly think. I often see that with people who are trying
to help their love ones struggle out of the deep darkness of personal
depression: they think they can somehow talk their loved one into having
hope, hope that is not visible to the one who is sitting in their world of
shadows. Sometimes the writer of Isaiah feels that way to me—there is a
desperation to his writing, even within its beauty and power—he knows
that the people are on the edge of hopelessness, of giving up, and he
writes to ask them to have hope yet one more time, to believe yet one
more time in the possibility that God will once again bring the people
home, as God did in Egypt hundreds of years earlier. It is a crazy
proposition, really, because it didn’t look good—and it didn’t seem likely
that they would ever go home again, and certainly it was an ever crazy
idea that Jerusalem, now in ruins, now haunted by the jackals of the
countryside, would ever return to its former glory.
But the prophet knows that we cannot be fully alive if we do not have
hope, if we do not believe that God can make a way in a world in which
we believe that there is no way. Hope is what keeps us alive—that is why
depression is probably the most difficult human struggle, because when
hope dies within us, everything starts to die within us. Lisel Mueller, the
gifted poet, has written that hope
…hovers in the dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
it shakes sleep from its eyes
and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads
of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels
that sail from the tops of maples.
It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment
surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs
from the eyes to the tail of a dog,
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.
It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.
It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another,
it is in this poem, trying to speak.
Exactly—that is what hope does: it offers the possibility of something
else, of yet more of life, of the goodness found within the world, even if
the darkness seems more overwhelming than the light at this moment.
But hope is a hard thing to come by nowadays: its interesting that most
of the polls that try to gauge the optimism of my generation find a
profound lack of hope for the future—most of us believe that we will not
live as well as our parents did, that our futures will not be as bright as the
present, and that is something that is a new phenomenon, according to
the pollsters who study these sorts of things, at least new in the last 50
years or so in this country. For some reason, we look into the future,
and it does not look better than it does now—in fact, it looks worse—we
seem to be a generation without hope.
And yet that is nothing new, of course. The Jews in Babylon knew what it
meant to look into a future and wonder whether or not the future will ever
get better. The prophet Isaiah knows that the people are on the edge of
hopelessness, and the abyss that stands before them is more
dangerous than what ANY empire, whether it is Egyptian, Assyrian, or
Babylonian, could ever do to them. To be a people or a person without
hope is to walk off into that abyss, and not come back. And, as someone
who has sometimes struggled with depression myself, and who comes
from a family that has struggled with it as well, I know what the prophet
fears as he looks at hopelessness of his people—in seeing his people
without hope, he sees a dying nation, and possibility that Israel will be yet
another nation added to the dustbin of history. But the writer of Isaiah
will not let this happen; he will not let them sit in the darkness without
pointing them to the light. He knows that we know what darkness is
because we have known what it means be bathed in the light, to be
immersed in hope, immersed in the possibility of the future. He points
them to their light, to what he knows will give them hope, to Jerusalem, to
that sacred city now sitting in ruins hundreds of miles away, he points
them back home, and shares with them the hope that God, in all of God’s
divine power, will bring them back home.
Oh, it’s beautiful, this homecoming he paints before their weary eyes!
The God who had seemingly abandoned them in the past and had
allowed for their ruin at the hands of Assyrians will not forever abandon
them or Jerusalem—God will bring them back home, and unlike their
hasty exit out of Egypt, this exit will be at their own pace—it will not be
rushed because the Egyptians will not be behind them chasing them, nor
will the Babylonians at that moment. The Lord God will be before them
and behind them, protecting them as they make their way back home to
holy Jerusalem, at a pace and a rhythm that is human and full of dignity.
“Here I am!” God declares to the people, “You have not been
abandoned, you have not been forsaken, you have not been left alone,
in Babylon.” In verse 2, there is even a sense that the people have
been in a grave, in the ground, like Lazarus, like the Christ, because the
prophet asks them to shake the dust from themselves and rise, rise
towards the future, towards their resurrection, towards home.
And that’s all fine and good, I suppose, but most of us who’ve
experienced times of hopelessness—and I suspect that is most of us in
this room—most of us don’t have someone like Isaiah in our lives to
breathe that kind of hope into our hopeless lives. And yet, of course,
maybe we do. All of us can be an Isaiah for each other, and maybe our
work with each other is all about reminding each other that whatever
Babylon we find ourselves captive in, there will be a time, there will be a
moment when God tells us to arise out of the ground, to shake the dust
off our feet, and to make our way towards home. Maybe that is what you
need to tell me when I am in Babylon and I feel homeless, and maybe
that what I need to share with you when you are in Babylon and you feel
homeless. Maybe that is one of the reasons we gather with each other
each and every week—to draw upon each other’s hope when our hope
is seemingly spent and gone.
William Hoffman, in his short story called THE QUESTION OF RAIN tells
of a story of a well-meaning minister who is beset by his congregation to
hold a worship service specifically calling for rain for the drought stricken
farming land of his congregants. But Wayland, the minister, is reluctant,
in good Calvinistic fashion, he’s simply reluctant to specifically ask God
for rain, since rain may not be in God’s will for the people of that county,
at least not at the moment—but more than anything he is especially
reluctant to conduct a specific service for rain, where everyone comes
together with the singular purpose of asking God for nothing else but
rain.
When first asked to lead the prayer service by some members of his
congregation, the minister promises to pray personally but declines their
suggestion of a prayer service—“I’m not a medicine man,” he thinks,
“and I’m not going to do a rain-dance, as if I could manipulate or prompt
God into action by doing something, as if God was just waiting for us to
pray to open up the floodgates above.” But again and again he is asked
by yet more members a worship service for rain, and eventually even
people outside the church begin to ask him about it, and it soon
becomes a crisis of faith for him—“are we afraid to put our faith to the
test?—one of his church member’s asks him, a member he respects for
his faithfulness and wisdom. The pastor in Hoffman’s story is right, in a
way, or his instincts are right, at least—he’s skeptical about trying to
convince God to send rain—after all, he just assumes that God wants
the best for them, which we would all assume would be rain for the
farmers in this county. But what he forgot in the midst of his desire to not
set up God for failure is that the congregation was never really asking for
rain as much as they were asking for a chance to gather together and be
transformed by the act of asking for a miracle, by the act of hoping
together, of believing together. And even more importantly, unlike the
pastor in the story, they did not fear an answer that might include a “no”
—they just needed to ask God for help, and to hope together that God
would answer their prayers. They didn’t fear a negative answer from
God as much as they feared not asking God in the first place, of not
hoping together that rain might fall, and of not hoping together that
deliverance from their own captivity might just happen as well, just as it
did for Israel thousands of years ago. And so, in the end, the pastor
says yes to their requests for a prayer service for rain, and I conclude
the sermon with the end of Hoffman’s story, right after the prayer service:
[Wayland, the pastor,] would not anticipate. Rain wasn’t necessary.
He and his congregation had acknowledged God’s fathership, which was
the main thing. He turned his back to the window, so he wouldn’t be
tempted to judge the quality of the afternoon sunlight edging the drawn
shade.
Yet he felt a stillness, the absolute hush of the day. Even the
locusts were silent. A distant rumble had to be a truck. He stood, went
downstairs, and walked out onto the screened porch where [his wife]
Mims sat. She wore her lavender church dress in case of visitors, but
had pushed off her white pumps so that her heels were free.
The expression on her clean face was strange as she gazed
upward. He looked at the sky and, tingling, saw the dazzling cloud
growing, building rapidly into a thunderhead, the underside purplish, the
crown of radiant whiteness seething as it mounted into a cathedral of a
cloud. People came from their houses to stare. Then Wayland felt a
coolness, a nudge of air, and knew rain must be close.
In wonder Mims watched the sky. Wayland’s amazement gave way to
rapture as the majestic thunderhead conquered the heavens. He
realized his mouth had opened as if to catch the rain on his lips. The
pressure of gratitude brought him near to weeping.
During the slashing, luminous rain, he put on his shorts to walk in the
yard. With his face uplifted, he gave thanks. Children, despite lightning,
ran in the streets, and across glossy lawns. Adults too splashed through
puddles. The artificial pond in his rock garden overflowed. The
telephone rang so often that Mims, now wearing her pink bathing suit,
took it off the hook.
That is what we are to do, I think, to hear those words of hope together
and then to hope with each other, and then to finally to dance with each
other, when the rain finally falls, and we get to wind our way out of
Babylon, back towards home, back towards our own Jerusalems.
Amen.
