Scripture readings: Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2,8-13; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8
Collect: Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
God be in my head, and in my understanding;
God be in mine eyes, and in my looking;
God be in my mouth, and in my speaking;
God be in my heart, and in my thinking;
God be at mine end, and at my departing.
Does anyone else feel a little bit of hope? Anticipation that an end to our horrors is nigh? We’re told that this end is coming, and we’re just now beginning to see it, breaking through the clouds like a single ray of sunshine. I’m talking about the Covid-19 vaccine, of course. We’ve learned to live with the daily messages of doom. We’ve secluded ourselves for reasons of hope, but too often with the result of hopelessness. We’re presented daily with sickness statistics and death statistics and dire warnings about wearing our PPE and staying home. But now, suddenly, it’s beginning to feel like our vigilance isn’t hopeless, and that is because of the “good tidings” we’ve heard about a vaccine that is coming soon. We’re still locked down, still washing our hands vigorously, still maintaining our distance from others, still doing what we need to do to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. But where just a month ago it felt onerous, now it feels like there’s an attainable goal, and that gives new energy. It’s the energy of expectancy; it’s the energy of Advent, of the return of Christ, and of the longed for new heaven and new earth.
That’s the kind of energy we encounter in the long poem-sermon that we find in Isaiah chapters 40 through 55, written by an anonymous prophet who wanted expatriate Israelites to go back to their homeland and rebuild it. The poem was written, very probably, in the year 525 B.C. or thereabouts. Sixty-two years before, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed Jerusalem and its temple. He took most of the people who belonged to the privileged classes, as well as certain artisans, back with him to Babylon. He sent the local serfs —those who had survived the war, anyway — back to their labors, to supply the Babylonian homeland with goods like wine and olive oil. Now Babylon was defeated by the army of Cyrus the Great of Persia, and the exiles started to contemplate rebuilding the holy city and especially the city’s beating heart, the temple of YHWH. Since its destruction the temple site had seen very little use. There were prophecies that it would be rebuilt, but the eagerly awaited return of the LORD to His temple was as yet unfulfilled.
The poem begins with the famous words, “Comfort ye, O comfort ye my people, saith your God.” It’s not clear here whom God is addressing, but it is clear that God isn’t commanding some individual prophetic hero to speak these tender words; the command is addressed to multiple people — who they are is never specified. I’ll use the shorthand “the prophets” to refer to these unnamed people, but it could equally be “the priests” or “the singers” or “the laity” whom God commands. The people’s time of warfare and mourning — which is interpreted as God’s punishment for their sins — that time has served its purpose. The prophetic announcement is both a sign of hope and the means by which hope arrives. There are doomsday prophets, both in the ancient world and in ours, who focus on God’s judgment; but they do not tell the whole story or even its most important theme. The story of God and God’s people is fundamentally a story of reconciliation and peace, ushered in by the compassionate proclamation that enough is enough and punishment is ended.
Over the years I’ve been privileged to know the Rt. Rev. John Thornton, a retired bishop who now has a farm up in Scio. Many of you know him, though he and his wife Jan don’t make it to Eugene as often as anyone would like. But he does preach once a month at St. Martin’s church in Lebanon. He often sends me his beautiful sermons. As it turns out, he too is preaching this week, and his sermon so inspired me that I thought I’d share a bit of it with you. Bishop Thornton started by considering John the Baptizer in todays gospel. John had a true sense of himself and of his place in the scheme of salvation: “I have baptized you with water; but He [Jesus] will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew and Luke say “with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”) John the baptizer was humble precisely because of his clear sense of himself: “I am not the Messiah,” he said at a time when claiming to be the Messiah was not at all unusual, I’m a voice in the desert announcing the return of God to His people. He’s quoting our Isaiah reading, of course. No doubt he also remembered the section a little further down in Isaiah, about how all of us are like the grass and wildflowers that wither quickly in the Palestinian sun. Bishop Thornton goes on, though, to articulate a theme that runs like a golden thread through all of his preaching: You are saints: you who have covenanted with Christ in baptism, are His saints. Today the bishop gets a bit more specific: You, he says, are John the baptizer, baptizing people with water in preparation for the greater baptism with the Holy Spirit that Jesus will bring about: pointing by your baptismal water to a baptism in holiness, pointing by your charity to His charity, pointing by your forgiveness of others to His forgiveness. As Bishop Thornton pointedly says, “You are the one who, by the way you live your life, proclaim, ‘Behold the lamb of God.’”
This thought was just so striking to me, a fresh vision of what it means to bear witness to God’s reality and God’s work. It sent me back to the passage in Isaiah. Because, if I am John the baptizer then perhaps I’m also one of those called to speak words of comfort to people who haven’t heard any really comforting or encouraging words in a long time. Maybe you, too, are such a prophet. And it’s not just our fellow believers who need encouragement, either. The “my people” whom God commands His prophets to comfort is not, or at least not only, Israelites in this poem. A few stanzas down we hear that God has given Israel to the foreign peoples as a covenantal sign, a light to the gentiles (Isa 42:6). The Israelites at their best, with their praise and their testimony about God’s holiness and with their lives that try to mirror God’s holiness, and even by their failures to do so, all point to the God who rescues them from lives of meaninglessness and gives them a high and holy purpose.
All of which isn’t to say that those Israelites, or indeed we ourselves, have to be without fault in order for our testimony to be valid. This is one of the most difficult truths for me, especially as a preacher, to remember and practice. How can I, with my many failings and inadequacies and no shortage of just stupid, banal sinfulness — how can I say anything worthwhile or helpful to anyone? But then I realize that the good news about God’s love applies to me, too. It is the news that He is at work perfecting me — perfecting us — so that all those shortcomings are subsumed into His perfection and made beautiful by it. Even our shortcomings point to the Christ whose sandal thongs we are not fit to untie, because even our faltering efforts to be like Him point to Him.
So let me leave you with this thought: If you want to take up the challenge of speaking and living out the love of God, our baptismal vows are a good place to start. You might want to re-read those vows (they’re in the Prayer Book, beginning on page 304). These are five promises we make to walk the Christian way, and the responses in the liturgy (“I will, with God’s help”) remind us that faithfulness requires both our will and God’s grace.
• We promise to take part in the Church’s sacramental life;
• we give our word that we will resist evil and repent when we fail to resist it;
• we pledge to proclaim the Good News with our words and with our life;
• we vow to seek Christ in everyone and love our neighbors as ourselves;
• finally we commit ourselves to work for justice, peace, and the dignity of every human being.
Doing our best to live in these ways is a task for which we will certainly need God’s help, and in which God will in fact help us. These baptismal vows provide a guideline for how we proclaim comfort and salvation to a world that has suffered enough already. Our lives are frail as grass, and viewed in isolation they’re about that important. But God’s eternal Word of love stands forever. God calls us to take up the mantle of the prophet, or the poet, if you prefer (they’re not very different from one another). God calls us to testify with our speech and with our lives that hope is not lost at all, but that God’s salvation is on its way even now. Sing it out! And rope everyone you can find into singing with you. Live it out, and let your life nourish those around you. Lift up the valleys, bring down the mountains, make the rough places a plain. And the Glory of the Lord will be revealed
