5th Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B, February 5, 2012

O God of wonder, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

I want to interrupt my preaching on the Gospel of Mark to spend a few moments with you talking about our Hebrew Bible lesson from the 40th chapter of Isaiah. It’s “Second Isaiah,” actually – which is what chapters 40 through 55 get called because they are so clearly written at a different time by a different author than the first 39 chapters of Isaiah and the last 11 chapters of Isaiah. The writer of Second Isaiah might be considered the great poet, rather than the great prophet. This writer never once refers to herself as a prophet. I imagine these words might have come to Jesus’ mind more than once when he found deserted places to pray in the morning while it was still very dark.

What we hear today in Isaiah is a portion of the overture to an opus of consolation. If you can think back nine weeks or so to the second Sunday in Advent (or to the last performance of Messiah you heard) you’ll recall the first part of chapter 40: Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.  Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is more than fully paid…a voice cries out: ‘in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in a desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all people shall see it together. God is going to gather up the lambs and carry them and gently lead the mother sheep.”

What we hear today is the last portion of this tender overture – a continuation of a love song written to bring relief to people who had been in exile for more than half a century. This is a song for those who were the weary and dispirited grandchildren of deportees. These were people living in exile – estranged from the former center of their people’s faith and skeptical about the ability of the Divine to make any difference at all in their circumstances. These were people living in Babylon, which, in our biblical narrative, stands for a rapacious social system of unbridled consumerism and militarism. Walter Brueggemann describes the poetry of this overture as both pastoral and political. It contains assurance that the people are not alone and are not forgotten. The source of life itself is with them, encouraging them to re-imagine and re-construe life in terms of …the creator who brings to naught princes and politicians. And it must have seemed as preposterous then as it does now.”[1]

The prescription here for revival, for spiritual rejuvenation, for rekindling a passion for the Holy One, is laid out in this portion of the overture and I wonder if it might work for us. So let’s imagine that this poet is writing this prescription for us, in our time, right now.

First comes the reminder that we have known and heard, indeed have been told from the beginning, that it is God Who sits above the circle of the earth. Now before you get all boxed in to a mental picture of a hairy old guy in long robes sitting on a throne, in whom we do not believe, take a breath. Think of how cool it is that this ancient poet understood the earth to be a circle. Think of how interesting it is that this ancient poet was using metaphorical language for a Divine One Whose perspective of the world was infinitely larger than a statue or a doll made from wood, overlaid with gold and silver, able to be toppled. Those were some of the gods of Babylon, according to the verses just preceding these and those gods couldn’t stand up to or hold a candle to the God of your grandparents, the God of Israel.

Take a moment to remember the memories of your grandparents. Remember their memories. That gets you back four or five generations. You might have heard them first hand or second hand. You might have to imagine them. You might know something of the faith of your grandparents – it might be some kind of traditional religious faith, but it might be not traditional religious faith at all. Remember the memories of your grandparents. In times of despair, bring them to mind. Remember their future. You are living it. You are it! Remember your own future. What have you known and heard and been told from the very beginning that you are being called to understand in an entirely new way? What might coming to a new understanding require of you?[2] So first, remember what you have been told and make it your own.

Second comes the teaching that the inhabitants of the earth are like grasshoppers. This isn’t a particularly beautiful assertion (to my mind anyway). Grasshoppers are pests! But I also think of David Carradine’s character in that funky 70’s television eastern-western, Kung Fu. For those of you over 50, remember his teacher called him “Grasshopper”? And he used his memories of the zen wisdom of his teacher to confront injustices in the wild west. Although it’s a few weeks early, remembering that we are all like grasshoppers is a little bit like the Ash Wednesday admonition to remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return. I don’t know about you, but that reminder is both comforting and tremendously freeing for me. If we are dust, then I can lower my expectations and see that we’re actually doing pretty well!

And then the second Isaiah poet, for the third part of the prescription, moves to cultivate some awe – some wonder – some amazement. Here is the jewel of this scripture passage: “says the Holy One, ‘lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these?’” Who, as some of you will remember, is one of the names of the Holy One in Hebrew scripture. Who created these? Is the question. And the answer is Yes! (It’s like the question on our door signs that declare Emmanuel Church – 150 years. Who would believe it? And the answer is Yes! Who would and Who does. Abbot and Costello did not invent this ancient play on words!)

This part of the prescription for revival, for spiritual rejuvenation, for rekindled passion for the Holy One, is to look at the stars in the sky, which are not, as the Babylonians asserted, rival gods. They are witnesses – those stars, they burn in testimony to the greatness of the creator. Imagine that the Holy One is bigger than billions of stars that are light years apart from each other and from us. That means imagining that the Holy One is bigger than the next war or the next election; bigger than the next natural or unnatural disaster; bigger than the next cancer diagnosis or layoff or divorce; bigger than life and bigger than death. Part of the prescription is to be still and know the incomparability of the Holy One.

The wisdom of looking at the stars in the sky to get some perspective and rekindle passion for the Holy One is not as quaint as one might think. The poetic description of God Who “stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent to live in” turns out to be amazingly close to a description of dark energy which accelerates the expansion of the universe, and which appears to have been made from nothing. In the mystical traditions of both Christianity and Judaism, God is nothing – no thing. [3] The author of the thirteenth century Kabbalist text, the Zohar, makes Isaiah 40:26 “the linchpin for his whole introduction. He looks up to the sky, to what he calls ‘the place toward which all eyes gaze,’ and asks, ‘Who created these?’…the author of the Zohar answers the question by saying that when you gaze up to that place and ask, ‘Who created these?’ then you will discover that ‘Who created these.” [4]

Let me bring us back from “the vast expanse of interstellar space” (that great phrase in Eucharistic Prayer C in our prayer books) to this poem by Kathie Collins. I think she wrote it with this passage from Isaiah in mind and she makes a similar prescription. She writes from Alabama and so you’ll have to translate a little in terms of the weather:

There’s a lot I don’t know about this world,
the big bang that began it and the big bucks
that make it turn.

This morning I watched carpenters frame a house
next door, a modest feat of engineering
I don’t pretend to fully comprehend,

then went downstairs to carve a storm shelter
from the clutter of cardboard boxes
and old furniture in the basement.

Storms roll in most every night this time of year.
It pays to be prepared. My daughter lost a friend
to the twister that tore through Birmingham in April.

The next morning the papers were filled with aerial
photos of disappeared homes-row after row of tiny cottages
exploded from the inside out,

splintered timbers, porcelain toilets,
and Barbie dolls the scattered shrapnel
of a sneak attack in Mother Nature’s holy war.

By now, I suspect Alabama carpenters are reframing,
happy for the work. And bankers inside bailed-out banks
are writing new loans to those deemed worth the risk.

This is our lot in the war-to restructure,
to build again, to pick up the twigs, re-feather our nests,
and raise young who will do the same.

In the lull between storms, we stock our shelters,
take what we can, knowing that in the end we lose it all.
We are scared and selfish and silly.

But if we act with mad disregard of all evidence
that we are participating fully in our early demise, who can blame us?
Even the cherry beside the front walk is careless,

painting her branches pink each january, all the while
knowing the warm snap is a trick. Driven by reckless passion,
she blooms out of season every year.[5]

To return to your place in the text click on the number of the footnote you read.

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