sermonboy.com

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

Isaiah 40
28 Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.
29 He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.
30 Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
31 but those who hope in the Lord
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.


We have a lot of things at Central, but a poet laureate is not one of them.

Sure we have poets, people who put verse to paper and share their creative work. Barbara, Bunny and Jenny immediately come to mind. But we haven’t appointed a poet laureate yet, though I might pass the idea on to the 200th anniversary committee.

Did we mention that you can pass on any random thought that springs into your head regarding the 200th anniversary—which Kathy will happily receive—when she’s not busy reading the lesson or serving up delicious mac ‘n cheese?

Poet laureate is an old tradition, beginning in the classical age, revived in the Italian Renaissance, and made famous in our language with court appointments beginning in the 17th century. John Dryden was the first, appointed by Charles II and handsomely compensated with £200 and a butt of Canary wine each year. That’s 126 gallons, if you’ve never bought a butt of wine before.

And of course, the tradition continues. Canada has a new poet laureate as of January: Georgette LeBlanc, an Acadian from Nova Scotia who writes about the history of her people. She replaces George Clarke Elliot, who writes about the history and experience of African-Canadians. He coined the term Africadian, to identify the uniqueness of Black culture in Atlantic Canada.

So the role has shifted slightly, from the largely ceremonial—writing the occasional verse at the opening of Parliament for example—to lifting up the voices and experience of people from the edges: history that we may not know, and cultural traditions that are uniquely Canadian but outside of what we may have learned the last time we studied poetry in school.

So how does this relate to Isaiah 40? I’m going to suggest that one of the ways to imagine Isaiah, especially the Isaiah of this middle section of the Book of Isaiah, is as the unofficial poet laureate of Babylon. He’s definitely a voice from the edge of Babylonian society, but there is more to it that that—his poetry becomes the strength of the Israelites in exile, and a reintroduction to the God they (and we) worship.

Isaiah is a long book, written by a major prophet (or most likely three) who translates the experience of the Israelites in the pre-and-post exilic period, moving from warning and recrimination and ending up in comfort and hope. Along the way, the prophet feels compelled to reintroduce the Israelites to their God, highlighting God’s majesty, power, and God’s ultimate desire for our lives.

Where to begin? One of the first things Isaiah does in this passage is remind us how small we are:

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.

Seems like an odd place to begin, but entirely needed, and here’s why: We have a very natural human tendency to domesticate God, to transform God into something that suits our purposes, or at the very least our prejudices. Some (without naming names) have made God into a hateful judge, decrying what they decry, condemning what they condemn. Some turned God into a self-help guru, determined to make us rich or happy or both. And some would reduce God to a kind of cosmic buddy, spiritually present by not religious, formed to suit our needs.

So grasshoppers might seem harsh, but it illustrates the gap between the heavenly realm and our own. Our limited view of God, born of experience, mediated through scripture, guided by thinkers, is still akin to grasshoppers looking up (can they look up?) and pondering the night sky. Remember the Breton fisherman’s prayer, which President Kennedy had on his desk on the Oval Office? "O God, the sea is so great and my boat is so small.” Remember when there was some humility in that office? The next time someone asks you why God might do this or that, you need simply remind them that you are a grasshopper. A clever grasshopper, of course.

So now that we know how small we are, God turns to how ill-informed we are. In many ways it’s an echo of Job 38 (or perhaps the other way around), nevertheless reminding us of all we cannot know. Poor Job and his friends try to understand the ways of God, but cannot. And then God speaks from the whirlwind—this section on a winter theme:

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow
or seen the storehouses of the hail,
which I reserve for times of trouble,
for days of war and battle?
From whose womb comes the ice?
Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
when the waters become hard as stone,
when the surface of the deep is frozen?

Job and his friends, facetiously called “comforters,” do not know, nor do the exiles who first read Isaiah, asking some of the same questions:

25 “To whom will you compare me?
Or who is my equal?” says the Holy One.
26 Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
and calls forth each of them by name.

You do, O God, and we see the sun and stars on their course through the heavens and can only wonder at your glory. We admit that our knowledge of you could only be described as partial, and a generous description at that. Yet in our ignorance we seek to know more, to understand more fully, to see what your would have us see. We need your hope, and we need a glimpse of your desire for our lives.

And from this prayer, comes an answer:

28 Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.
29 He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.
30 Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
31 but those who hope in the Lord
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.

Isaiah’s task, like all good preachers, is to remind the people who they are and to whom they belong. To remind them that they look through a glass darkly, and now know only in part. The fullness will come, but for now we know that God is bigger than we can imagine, more apt to forgive that we deserve, and an abiding source of comfort in the time of trouble.

Even with the trouble is of our own making, even when life conspires to test us and or simply confound us, God remains our strength. And this was true for the Babylonian exiles as it continues to be true for us. The longing for home, the longing for wholeness, the longing for renewal—all these will come to those who hope in the LORD. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.

Who we are and to whom we belong. Like the Israelites, we are mostly exiles: exiles in a world that seeks to live farther and farther from God, exiles from the kind of society we wish existed, exiles from the divine realm we can only begin to imagine. We have a vague sense of Jerusalem, but continue to live in Babylon. But we are God’s people in exile, the very community that Isaiah addressed and continues to address even now.

May we hear and heed the prophet, trusting in God’s promise of hope and strength, now and always, Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 6:08 AM