{"id":1281,"date":"2011-12-07T20:09:11","date_gmt":"2011-12-07T20:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=748"},"modified":"2017-08-26T15:26:28","modified_gmt":"2017-08-26T19:26:28","slug":"comfort-across-the-desert-jeff-taylor-dec-4-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/?p=1281","title":{"rendered":"Comfort Across the Desert – Jeff Taylor – Dec 4, 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

View Archived Sermons<\/a><\/p>\n

Listen to this Sermon\u00a0<\/strong><\/font><\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Advent II<\/font><\/p>\n

Isaiah 40:1-11<\/font><\/p>\n

The passages read this morning both point to a new coming, or a coming again, of God to God\u2019s people.\u00a0 Isaiah foretells the coming of God to a demoralized, defeated people; and Mark points to John as the one who prepares the way for Jesus\u2019 coming.\u00a0 During advent it is also traditional to proclaim that Jesus will come to us yet again.\u00a0 The editors of the lectionary we usually look to for preaching texts and themes paired the two scriptures we heard this morning with a passage from 2 Peter which refers directly to that coming that has not yet been.\u00a0 And, of course, during advent we await the coming of God in the birth of Jesus.<\/font><\/p>\n

This morning we will focus on the reading from Isaiah.\u00a0 God comes to him and his people, God\u2019s people, in some really, really unexpected ways.\u00a0 Perhaps we will see some ways in which God might also be coming to us, perhaps quite unexpectedly.\u00a0 Listen with me for those comings as we revisit this story.<\/font><\/p>\n

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I have taught the Grade 11 Ancient Civilizations course a number of times, which in NO way makes me an expert of any sort on these times and places – but it has made me curious; and some things have become clearer as a result of getting even just the big picture in mind of the world in which God called forth a people out of Abraham & Sarah.<\/font><\/p>\n

So I\u2019m going down to my laptop and we\u2019re going to look up to the angled ceiling at our planet for a couple of minutes.<\/font><\/p>\n

[locate Mesopotamia (Tigris and Euphrates rivers) \/Babylon, Canaan (Sea of Galilee Jordan River, Dead Sea), and Egypt (Nile and the delta).\u00a0 Trace journey from Abraham in Uhr, to Canaan, to Egypt, back to Canaan, back to Egypt (Joseph to Moses) back to the Babylonian exile.\u00a0 Note that God told Abraham to settle in the middle of the two most powerful ancient civilizations.\u00a0 Note how little time the Kingdom of Israel actually lasted. Now point out Persia.]<\/font><\/p>\n

What had God promised Abraham?: Descendents and a land for them to live in.\u00a0 He got descendents, but the land kept slipping away from them.\u00a0 So here we are with Isaiah and thousands of fellow Jews, captive in Babylon, right back where Abraham started maybe 1100 years earlier.\u00a0 The kingdom of Israel had divided against itself after only three kings (Saul, David, and Solomon).\u00a0 The Assyrian king Sennacherib from the northern part of Mesopotamia took advantage of the situation and had wiped out the northern half of that divided Israeli kingdom.\u00a0 Shortly after, a resurgent Babylon came for the rest, taking the southern kingdom of Judah into captivity.\u00a0 In conquering neighbouring lands en route to Egypt, the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, destroyed what was left of the Kingdom of Abraham\u2019s descendents.\u00a0 Jerusalem (the \u201ccity of peace\u201d) was destroyed; Solomon\u2019s gorgeous temple was broken to the ground.\u00a0 Imagine, the place where animals and crops are offered in sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins is gone!\u00a0 How will we become clean?\u00a0 How can we receive forgiveness?\u00a0 How can we keep the law of Moses?\u00a0 Imagine!\u00a0 Imagine watching a foreign power destroy your holy places, kill or imprison your loved ones, cut off your leadership, and mercilessly leave you without hope.\u00a0 Some here may not need to imagine such things, but need only remember them from your own experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, wasn\u2019t only interested in disarming powerful neighbours and acquiring their land.\u00a0 Though that was his main objective, he also managed something of a renaissance of the glory days of old Babylon from back when king Hammurabi\u2019s court created that great legal code, literally written in stone which you can see today at the Louvre.\u00a0 Nebuchadnezzar also is thought to have created the fabled hanging gardens of Babylon.\u00a0 So Nebuchadnezzar wasn\u2019t interested in only enslaving manual labourers; he also wanted the services of skilled trades people and even scholars.\u00a0 Indeed, as time progressed, some Jews seem to have become important officials and respected scholars in the administration of their captive new home.\u00a0 And most importantly, this horrible catastrophe and imprisonment seems to have give birth to the Jewish Torah.\u00a0 The old testament, as Christians usually call it, was likely written\/edited\/ collated in the form that we know it during the Babylonian captivity.\u00a0 That in itself could easily be enough evidence to support the theme that God comes to us in unexpected times and places.\u00a0 I should be able to end the sermon here and we all ought to be in wonderment at such a thing: the Torah, born out of Jewish captivity in a foreign land while the temple and the holy city lie in ruins.\u00a0 Imagine!<\/font><\/p>\n

Well, I will go on.\u00a0 There are some ways in which those who were left behind in the ruins of Israel may actually have been worse off than many who\u2019d been taken captive to Babylon.\u00a0 Those left behind saw every day the devastation of their homeland; they were without the temple, without the priesthood, without the Torah (as it was evolving in Babylon), and without leadership.\u00a0 They had no protection against any number of foreign invaders and roving militias.<\/font><\/p>\n

In exile with the elite, Isaiah\u2019s main task thus far has been to explain to his fellow Jews how God could have allowed this catastrophe to happen.\u00a0 He has had at them about their worshipping other gods, and lambasted them for not keeping Moses law, especially that they did not care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in their midst; that they did not keep the Jubilee, or lend without charging interest to one another.\u00a0 He makes it crystal clear that they have brought this upon themselves by not trusting in God but rather in alliances made with idolaters as a means of securing themselves.\u00a0 They broke the covenant and now God is free from it as well; he owes them nothing and they are getting exactly what they deserve.<\/font><\/p>\n

In the midst of this long harangue, suddenly a voice interrupts Isaiah with a totally unexpected message: Comfort my people.\u00a0 Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that her warfare is over and her sins are forgiven.\u00a0 She has received from God double the punishment for all her sins.<\/font><\/p>\n

Then another voice cries out: Prepare a way for the Lord in the wilderness; make a path straight through the desert.\u00a0 Knock down hills, straighten the crooked roads, smooth out the rough spots.\u00a0 God is on his way!<\/font><\/p>\n

That\u2019s crazy, nobody crosses the desert; they follow the Euphrates north and turn south again along the Fertile Crescent.\u00a0 But God is in a hurry to get to Jerusalem and is coming straight across the desert.\u00a0 Notice that not only has the content of Isaiah\u2019s message taken a dramatic turn (from accusation to comfort) but that his audience has shifted too.\u00a0 Speak comfort to Jerusalem, to the ones left behind, the one
\ns living in the ruins still.\u00a0 The poor, the leaderless, the easily victimized, the unprotected; these are the one\u2019s God is finally coming to again.\u00a0 Mind you, when he comes, he will bring many back from Babylon with him.<\/font><\/p>\n

Now a third voice says, \u201cCry out,\u201d and after some cynical venting from Isaiah (Oh what\u2019s the point, we live short lives and die like the grass of the field) this voice gets to finish: go up to a high place \u2013 go to Mount Zion and say to Jerusalem and all the cities of Judah, \u201cLook, here comes our God!\u201d\u00a0 And then a final voice: God comes with strength to protect his people, like a shepherd who is ferocious in defending the sheep but gentle to the sheep themselves.<\/font><\/p>\n

Wow, what an announcement!\u00a0 What a sudden, unexpected shift in message from the great prophet.\u00a0 But who hears these words, and how do they, how do we, respond to them.\u00a0 Really? God is going to deliver us from the great empire of Babylon that even the Egyptians couldn\u2019t resist.\u00a0 And how will this happen exactly?<\/font><\/p>\n

Well in the end, as Isaiah explains a few chapters further on, another empire, the Persians, will defeat the Babylonians.\u00a0 Now that does not sound comforting.\u00a0 That\u2019s exactly how Israel fell in the first place, being rolled over as mega powers warred against each other.\u00a0 Surely that\u2019s what will happen here.\u00a0 But the assurance is that Jerusalem\u2019s warfare is over; she\u2019s not in this fight this time. \u00a0 And that is what happens: a little know local chieftain named Cyrus cleverly manoeuvres his way onto the emperor\u2019s throne in Persia and he conquers Babylon (after Nebuchadnezzar\u2019s death) and he releases the Jewish captives, allowing them to return to Judah to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple.\u00a0 Who would have thought such a thing possible?\u00a0 Imagine.\u00a0 The very situation that seems most fraught with danger becomes a path to liberation and safety \u2013 a path by which God comes again to us, straight across the desert, no delays, eager to embrace us in all our frailty.<\/font><\/p>\n

So, what is our Babylon?\u00a0 Where and how are we held captive?\u00a0 What is our fallen temple, our city of peace now in ruins?\u00a0 Who is speaking a word of comfort, and are we willing to hear it and believe it?\u00a0 Do our political systems seem so corrupted by corporate influence that we no longer trust them, nor see any hope of changing them?\u00a0 Take comfort, God is coming.\u00a0 Are the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer destabilizing the social stability?\u00a0 Are our leaders wilfully blind to what all of us are doing to our only home and God\u2019s very good creation?\u00a0 Take comfort, God is coming. Are you suffering from information overload, aware of every problem that befalls any of your 7 billion fellow global citizens and you just don\u2019t know where to start or what to do about any of it?\u00a0 Take comfort, God is coming.\u00a0 Are your stress levels through the roof with demands at work and demands at home?\u00a0 Do you wish you had work to be stressed about; do you wish you had a family to share that stress with?\u00a0 Take comfort, God is coming.\u00a0 Are you raising children on your own and you are absolutely exhausted?\u00a0 Is your marriage stressed to the breaking point or has it already broken?\u00a0 Have you been forgotten by younger, smarter, healthier, hipper people than you?\u00a0 Is there just too much violence, too much pain, too much sadness in the world, in your world?\u00a0 Is it all just too much?\u00a0 Is it just too hard to believe any more? Take comfort, I tell you truly, in some unexpected place and time and manner, God is coming to you.\u00a0 She is rushing in your direction, ploughing through deserts and knocking down mountains to get to you.\u00a0 Look for him.\u00a0 God is coming to you. God is coming to us all.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

View Archived Sermons Listen to this Sermon\u00a0 \u00a0 Advent II Isaiah 40:1-11 The passages read this morning both point to a new coming, or a coming again, of God to God\u2019s people.\u00a0 Isaiah foretells the coming of God to a demoralized, defeated people; and Mark points to John as the one who prepares the way for Jesus\u2019 coming.\u00a0 During advent it is also traditional to proclaim that Jesus will come to us yet again.\u00a0 The editors of the lectionary we…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons-a-worship-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1281"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3955,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions\/3955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}