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Holy Trinity Anglican Orthodox Church
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Words of Comfort to an Uncomfortable World |
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Isaiah 40:1-11 Fourth
Sunday of Advent December 21, 2008 The world is an uncomfortable place. It is a place of floods and famines and sickness and death. As if that were not bad enough, we add to our discomfort when sparks of competing ideas, religions, and desires fan into the flames of hate, violence, and war. In a misguided attempt to make peace, we are officially blending all our religions and moral views into one homogenized lump. Let me explain what I mean There was a time when people thought of God as holy and righteous, and authoritive. God was God, the Creator and Master, and He gave commandments to us. Breaking His commandments was called sin and wickedness and evil, and God held us accountable for our actions. He also held us accountable for our beliefs. He had revealed His truth in Scripture, and we were responsible to believe it. This accountability included punishment for our sins as well as rewards for righteousness. People actually believed God sent people to Heaven or Hell. God was powerful. God was sovereign. God was the great Lion of Judah, and the world trembled when He roared. But we have tamed God today. We have made Him more user friendly. The Lion of Judah is now a circus lion who performs tricks for our benefit and amusement, without ability to harm or control us anymore. He no longer roars, He purrs. This homogenized god no longer requires orthodoxy. He speaks to all people, and he speaks to them in their own ways. The homogenized god does not require people to repent and conform to his will and commandments. Rather, he blesses them in all things. He accepts them without requiring anything from them. His sole suggestion is only that they love themselves and don’t hurt anyone. But millions of thinking people see through this homogenized religion like “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” They see that if everyone’s view of God is right, then no one’s view is right. If all moral views are equally valid, then none are valid. If everything is true, then nothing is true. Everything is arbitrary, and all claims of personal meaning and truth are phony. In human relationships, this means all rules are arbitrary, forced upon us by whatever group is in power. This makes many people uncomfortable. In fact, the more we progress toward this humanistic goal, the more uncomfortable many of us become because we realize this goal can only lead to despair. Ours is not the first generation to do this. Israel followed the same course nearly three thousand years ago. The Bible makes it clear that Israel was called for a purpose. Israel, was called by the grace of God to be something that the rest of the world had abandoned. God did not call Israel because of her great wisdom, or her great power, or her great influence in the world. God called Israel precisely because she had none of those things. Abraham was the head of a small tribe of nomads. He never had a permanent home. He never owned any property other than a cemetery plot. His descendents were a nation of shepherds. They were not warriors or statesmen or philosophers. The world in general ignored Israel, and she was swept along by world events rather than leading and shaping those events. In short, Israel was called by God to show forth His glory and grace precisely because she had nothing to offer and everything to gain. In His grace, God gave His revelation to the people of Israel. He gave His Law and Prophets to them to teach them His ways, the ways of truth and life. He promised to bless them with the knowledge of Himself, and to give them life with real meaning and purpose because it would be rooted in who and what He is. In grace, He called Israel to a life of holiness. In grace He called Israel to be different from the other nations, and even to separate herself from them. In grace God called Israel to be saved from the destruction towards which the other nations were racing with all their strength. But Israel constantly proved herself to be a rebellious and ungrateful people. Rather than following God, she embraced the worldliness and greed of the Gentiles. Her people became self-centered, devoting themselves to the gratification of their physical lusts. They wanted to be like the other nations, so they began to incorporate the ideas and religions of the other nations into their own. They became homogenized. It just so happens that the idea of moral, religious, and cultural relativism was sweeping the ancient world at the time in which Isaiah ministered in Jerusalem, and the Jews desperately wanted to be a part of it. So they did not “abandon” their own religion, they simply “expanded” it. They incorporated the views and the gods of other peoples into their own religion. They acted on the assumption that all religions are essentially the same, therefore, it doesn’t matter which one you follow. They all lead to the same gods and the same heaven. To think one religion or view of the gods is authoritive and exclusively true is the height of arrogance and hate. To insist that the gods demand holiness, or that He/She/They have said some things are absolutely right, and must be pursued, and others are absolutely wrong and must be discouraged, is hateful and harmful to the good of mankind because it hurts the feelings of many “good people.” In the inclusive and relativistic world of arbitrary values into which the people of Judah longed to plunge, only the unsophisticated extremists thought of their culture and religion as the one given by God and the one by which they, and all humanity would be measured. There were many other factors going on in Judah and in the world. It would be wrong to characterize the competing empires of the era as good willed attempts to unify humanity for the good of humanity. That idea was a part of empire building, but so was greed and pride, and the lust for power, and even the love of violence. But the point of the book of Isaiah is that the people of Judah adopted the world’s views and discarded the Biblical teachings. As a result, God was going to bring judgment upon them. The nations and cultures, so admired and emulated by the Jews would actually become their oppressors. So bitter would be their captivity, the Jews would actually cry out for deliverance. We know this was literally fulfilled when the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C. and the Babylonians conquered the southern kingdom of Judah in 586 B.C. And yet, this word of judgment and wrath was not the final word from God. The final word was “grace.” “Comfort ye my people” God says in Is. 40:1. What is the message that comforts Judah? Your warfare is ended (vs. 2). Your iniquity is pardoned (vs. 2). He will not leave you in Babylon forever. He will come to you again in mercy, forgiving your sins and calling you back into His grace. On that day; “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs in his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those who are with young” (Is.40:11). He is telling Judah that He will rescue them from their captivity in Babylon, and He will lead them home again to Jerusalem and Zion where they will again know His joy and blessings. What is God doing to Israel? He is recalling them. He is calling them back into that purpose and life to which He had originally called them. He is calling them back into holiness of life. He is calling them to be a unique and even peculiar people again. He is calling them to come out from among the other nations, and to be separate from them. God is restoring them. He is putting them back together in their original form and calling. He is restoring them to the purpose He told them of through the prophet Moses, saying, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (Dt. 6:4-5). So this is not a mere political restoration so they can have their own land and their own homes and enjoy worldly peace and prosperity. It is primarily a spiritual restoration. The Jews are being restored to God and to their place in God’s purpose. Like the ancient Judeans, we, too are being recalled and restored through Christ Jesus. We were gone astray like lost sheep, following the ways of the world, expanding our religion to fit in with the humanism around us. We too were under the wrath of God living in our own Babylonian Captivity, cut off from Zion and the things of God. In grace Christ came to be the sacrifice for our sins. In grace He came to be the Highway in the desert that leads us to the heavenly Jerusalem. In grace He came to make us what we could never accomplish on our own. He makes us righteous in God’s eyes. He make us holy. He makes us His own and He restores us to our original purpose, which is to love Him with all our heart and soul and might. Our warfare is ended. Our iniquity is pardoned. We are His sheep, and “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs in his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those who are with young.” Amen. The Rev. Dr. R. Dennis Campbell, Vicar, Holy Trinity Anglican Church,
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