Advent 2B
RCL
Rev.
Adam T. Trambley
December
10, 2017, St. John’s Sharon
In the reading from Second Peter today we hear
that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years
are like one day. This message is
helpful to us in an era when the news cycle is constant, when the Facebook
algorithms pump articles and ads at an ever-increasing pace, and when the cell
phone vibrates every minute or two with some new notification demanding our
immediate attention. So often we feel
like the world will end if we do not respond RIGHT NOW. But God, who is arguably much more important to
everyone and everything else than we are, has let his plan of salvation play
out over millennia. As Peter says, this
isn’t slowness, but patience. God’s
promise of a new heaven and a new earth is so good that he wants everyone to be
able to come to repentance and enter it.
In the meantime, Peter tells us to be at peace while we wait, which can
be hard, and to live good lives.
To give a sense of the unfolding salvation of
God, I want to focus on today’s reading from Isaiah. This passage stands at a pivotal place in the
Book of Isaiah, and is quoted in the gospel reading about John the Baptist as
the fulcrum of a pivotal place in all of Salvation History.
The first thirty-nine chapters of Isaiah are
concerned with the prophetic work of the man Isaiah who lived in the 700’s BC
and with his interactions with the kings and people of Judah.
Isaiah does prophecy judgment on Israel, but he
does not exclusively preach judgment. In
the midst of his judgments are also messages of future hope and
restoration. During his life, the
primary geopolitical problem is the Assyrian Empire, and most of his prophecies
deal with them. At the same time, he is
willing to challenge the kings to be faithful to God so that Assyria doesn’t
destroy Judah as it does to the Northern Kingdom of Israel. His prophecy about a virgin bearing a son
comes out of a conversation with King Ahaz, and he later has numerous
interactions with King Hezekiah, who manages to remain faithful enough to
survive the Assyrian attack – and we have Assyrian records that confirm the
Biblical narrative, albeit with a slightly different spin.
The last interaction between Hezekiah and
Isaiah we read about comes in Chapter 39, right before today’s passage. Some emissaries come to visit Hezekiah from a
far-away country of Babylon. Hezekiah
decides to show off. He takes the
delegation through all his treasure chambers and shows them his great
wealth. They go back to Babylon, and
then Isaiah comes in. He basically says,
“Hezekiah, you are an idiot. Now Babylon
is going to come and invade the country to take all this stuff.” But Isaiah also says it won’t be during
Hezekiah’s life, so Hezekiah decides he doesn’t really care, which is not the
long-term planning you want to see in your monarch.
Sometime between chapter 39 and chapter 40, a
number of things happen. Hezekiah dies
and the Babylonians do come to Jerusalem.
They destroy the city and take all its treasure, and lead most of its
key people into exile. Isaiah the
prophet also dies, at least we assume.
We are never told in scripture about his death, although a number of
interesting stories have grown up over the years. Either before he died he somehow wrote and
preserved the rest of the book of Isaiah, chapters forty through sixty-six; or,
much more likely, at a later time, one of Isaiah’s disciples drew on the many
threads of the prophet’s words to show how they spoke into the new context of
the Babylonian exile and then, later, the very difficult return from
exile. Chapter 40, which we read today,
is the beginning of this second body of Isaian prophecy.
I’m only going to look at some of the links
found between today’s reading and the first part of Isaiah. We could spend all day on them. Knowing they are there is important because
it helps us see the connections between Isaiah beginning his work in the 700’s
and the Babylonian captivity beginning 150 years later, and the restoration and
rebuilding of Jerusalem a few generations after that the exile. By the time we get to Isaiah being quoted in
our gospel, over 700 years have passed.
Isaiah’s prophecies continue to speak about how the salvation God is
unfolding over the long haul.
The setting for this opening of the second
portion of Isaiah is once again the heavenly throne room we first saw in Isaiah
chapter 6. Now, however, instead of a
command to preach doom and gloom, God says to “Comfort my people,” that her
penalty is paid and her punishment is over.
The threads of restoration found throughout Isaiah’s prophecies are
taking center stage.
Then the prophecy of salvation comes forward
with one of God’s heavenly servants crying out, “Prepare the way for the
Lord.” The thrust of this passage in
context of Isaiah is that the presence of God is coming for all people to
experience it. Since getting to where
God is going requires passing through the wilderness, that is where this
highway of God is to be prepared.
A heavenly voice then says to cry out, but the
response is skeptical. “What shall I
cry?” another voice asks, noting that people are weak and fickle and quickly
disappear. Then the first voice answers,
noting that yes, “the grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our
God will stand forever.” The heaven
instruction here is saying two things.
First, generally, even if we can’t rely on people, we can rely on the Word
of God and God’s promises. But more
specifically, the voice is reassuring us that all of Isaiah’s original
prophecies that were over a hundred years old then and are even older now, are
still reliable because the Word of our God will stand forever. Now the holy city of Jerusalem is to be the
messenger proclaiming to all God’s people that God is here and is coming with a
reward, feeding his flock, gathering his lambs, and gently leading the mother
sheep.
This prophetic Word of God proclaimed by Isaiah
and then applied to a new context will unfold in another new way in our Gospel
passage. The voice crying in Isaiah 40
is identified in Mark as a prophecy looking forward to John the Baptist. He is the voice in the wilderness crying out
“Prepare the way of the Lord.” He is
calling the people to make straight paths for God to come. Finally, centuries after this prophecy of God
coming to his people, God is actually coming to his people as, among other
things, the Good Shepherd feeding his flock.
John the Baptist also gives details about how
this prophecy will be fulfilled. He has specifics
about what it means to make straight the paths and to experience the Glory of
the Lord that is to be revealed.
Preparing the way means repenting and being baptized for the forgiveness
of sins. That preparation in the
wilderness of the heart allows an encounter with Jesus, who will baptize with
the Holy Spirit, allowing us to know his presence with us always. For John, these words had a particular
understanding during his life and ministry, but we know they continue to be
relevant even for us today. We don’t
have to go out to the Jordan riverbank like the people of John’s day, but his
words still matter for us. As we repent
of our sins, we open the way for a full experience of God, and when we receive
the Holy Spirit of Jesus in our lives, we come to know the power and the love
of God in an abiding and intensely personal way.
Imagine, though, that you were a faithful Jew
living at the time of John the Baptist.
You may have been waiting your whole life. Your people had been waiting for hundreds of
years to finally have this important prophecy of salvation come to fruition. We know from Luke’s gospel the stories of
Anna and Simeon who had waited their lives to see the coming of God in Jesus
Christ. Why God took as long as he did,
I don’t know. But we can trust that God
had a plan.
That trust and patience is the message of
Second Peter. While we are waiting
eagerly for Jesus to come back in power and put things right, we can know that
the delay is allow for a fuller measure of salvation. Peter says that God wants all to come to
repentance and none to be lost, so he is taking his time, which is not the same
as our time. We can be grateful for the
hundreds of years that Isaiah’s prophecies percolated to bring us to the
message of John the Baptist and the coming of Jesus. We can be grateful, too, that God is doing
something that will be good for us and for many others as we wait for the
fullness of the love, joy, and peace of the coming Kingdom of God.
A good practice this month would be to live
into God’s long-term perspective. The
holiday season often adds to the tyranny of the to-do lists and the press of
the immediate. Remember, that whether we
check all the boxes or not, Jesus is still coming back on his schedule and he
is bringing the fullness of salvation. We can have faith in him, even if he
seems to delay a bit. As we live into
that trust, our anxiety should abate and our peace increase.
I want to end with a story about Archbishop
Desmond Tutu. He had a habit of spending
24 hours each month on a retreat with his spiritual director, and he didn’t
allow anything to interfere with that time.
During the most tumultuous period of apartheid’s end, people like the
President of South Africa or other leaders sometimes felt like they had to talk
to him NOW. But if Archbishop Tutu was
on retreat talking to God, he didn’t take their calls. In retrospect, they said that his dedication
to something greater helped them keep things in perspective and have a greater
peace about their own situation. The
Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient
with us. While you are waiting…strive
to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; and regard the patience
of our Lord as salvation.
