Right
now might not look to great. It is possible that you may have approached this
time of worship, upset, distraught, or even angry. Some of us may have come to
church this morning thinking there is too much woe, too much inequity, too many
injustices in our world. It seems that hurts and harms surround us from all
sectors this morning. We may be sitting here this morning overwhelmed with
financial burdens, our own failures, overcome by physical limitations or
failings in our body, which simply will not be healed. We have all come to
worship this morning broken people, living in a broken world, and all too often,
we are overwhelmed by all the brokenness, all the destruction, all the chaos.
Despondency threatens to engulf us. Is there no end?
We
join the Psalmist and say:
Out of the depths I
cry to you, LORD; Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for
mercy. If you, LORD, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand? But with you
there is forgiveness, so that we can, with reverence, serve you. I wait for the
LORD, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope. I wait for the Lord
more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the
morning. Israel, put your hope in the LORD, for with the LORD is unfailing love
and with him is full redemption. He himself will redeem Israel from all their
sins. Psalm 130
How long, O Lord?
Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long
must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long? Psalm
13:1-2
The
idea of expectation is built into the fabric of the universe. Humans throughout
history have known how to wait in hopeful expectation. We wait out the winter
months in hopes of the first signs of spring. We all know the joy that the site
of a bud on a tree, the pleasure of seeing the first soft green peeking up from
the cold ground. When it is the coldest, darkest part of the winter, when we
are heavy laden with snow and the cold bites our bones, we know that come April
the weather will begin to turn. We know we can make it through. We know that
there is a waiting period that comes before the birth of a child. We waited
with anticipation before our own children were born, and have waited alongside
friends and family, anticipating the joy we know a new child brings. But before
that, we wait, but the waiting if full of hope.
The
people of Israel at this time in history had forgotten how to hope, they did
not know that expectation could be filled with joy. They lived each day in
expectation, but it was a hopeless expectation. They had lived their whole
lives waiting, but that for which they waited never came. Each spring reminded
them that they had spent yet another year in exile. They were tenant farmers
the land and the crops they grew did not ultimately belong to them. Each new
planting season marked yet another year in which they would plant, tend and
grow food from ground that was not their own. They would work to force the
ground to give up her bounty and then only but the smallest portion of that
bounty would return to them. Their labor was not their own, their work, their
toil, their tears and their sweat all went to feed another and any profit made
lined the pockets of someone else. Spring and the anticipated harvest did not
bring joy, it was all a part of the harsh reminder that they are strangers in a
strange land; they did not belong here, that home was far, far away.
Each
child born also did not give joy, each one born did nothing more than to remind
them that too many among them no longer held memories of their the land they
loved, of the city of Jerusalem, of the homes they had left behind. The strange
land was becoming home to their children and this hurt their hearts because
although they could tell stories of the land they had left behind and to which
they planned to return, home was foreign to their children, where they belonged
was not was a place to which their children felt no connection. Each birth
actually seemed to make home further and further away. If all those who
remembered were gone and all their children had were stories of a place they
had never been, what why would they ever return?
We
currently live in a period of time when we generally take life for granted.
When that long anticipated child is born, we expect that that child will live
to adulthood. Children live. That is our expectation but this is a very recent
expectation, in human history. At the turn of the century, at the time this
building was built, this would not have necessarily been the expectation of
those who sat in these pews before us.
At that time 1 out of every 5 children, 2 out of every ten failed to
live to adulthood. A hundred years before it was half, only half of the
children born lived to adulthood. Statistics tell us that for a city to remain
stable in the year Christ was born, each woman would have needed to give birth
to 10 children. We take the life throughout childhood as a given.
At
the same time, we also live in a time period when we also expect to live a good
long while. It is not rare or unheard of for a person to live to be 90 and
beyond. All of us can hope to live to be a 100, and it is not a completely
unreasonable expectation. Scientists tell us the person will live to be 150
years old has probably already been born. It was not that many generations ago
that, if you made it past childhood,
you could expect to live to be 50 or 55. Sure a few people lived longer than
that, but most did not. At the time, this passage was written, most people
lived to their mid-thirties. I would have been considered an old lady at that
time. If a person lived to be 55 they were considered extra ordinarily lucky.
It was not completely unheard of, but at the same time, not at all expected.
Our
world is so different from the world, to which the prophet of Isaiah spoke that
morning, that we must imagine the world into which the words of this passage were
spoken. Children did not live. Only one out of every 5 made it to the age of
15. The expectation was that a child born would die. Even if it did live, it
served as a physical reminder of how long they had been in exile. Each spring
was not a time to celebrate that another year had passed, that they had made it
through another dark, long, cold winter and could look forward to the warmth and
productivity of the growing seasons. It only served as a reminder that the land
in which they lived was not their own and further reminded that their work and
their labor belonged to the people of the land in which they now lived.
Children died, their harvests were taken away, home was far, far away and each
year marked yet another year in which they lived in a broken world. In the past
they might have lived in expectation. In a time before that they had lived in hopeful expectation. They had long ago forgotten
how to hope. Even now, they had given up on expectation. They just lived. The
world passed by, people died and life was just a thing to be endured. That was
their reality and they could not see life any other way.
It
is into a world that bleak, to a people completely devoid of all hope that the
prophet speaks these words. He tells them that the world will be new! The dull
dark grey bleakness in which they were now living would be replaced with a
vibrant world FILLED with color, FILLED with life. THIS was not the way they
were meant to live; God had something better for them, sometime unimaginable,
something completely beyond fathoming.
In
God’s world children lived, not just some of the children, not just most of the
children, ALL of the children would live. No longer would a mother weep on her
birthing bed knowing that this precious child would die, no she would weep from
joy knowing that the child will live! Not only would ALL the children live, and
not die before reaching adulthood, but adulthood would be redefined. People
would live so long, that 100, twice the age to which a few blessed one lived,
would be the years prior to full maturity, anyone who did not live at least
that long would be considered accursed.
Not
only would living and long life be an expectation, but how they lived would be
radically different as well. The homes they built would be theirs and the land,
which they work, would belong to them.
They shall live in houses that are their own, not lent or borrowed. No
longer would they labor and toil for another. They shall plan fields and
vineyards and all the bounty, which
will come up out of the land, would be theirs.
The
new world, which God was giving them, was a world of peace and stability. It
would be a world without fear and without calamity. God gives them their
greatest fears, the lion and the snake and renders them benign. The Lion shall
be so gentle that it will live alongside, eating beside, sleeping next to the
lamb. And the snake, which could strike, and kill not only you, but also your
livestock, would eat nothing but dust. The prophet is presenting them with a
world of peace, of prosperity, of hearth and home, where labor is not in vain,
where children, as well as the elderly lived.
God
was promising a world, which seemed impossible to them. What God was promising
was so beyond what could be imagined, so unexpected that it could not be
imagined, much less something for which even one among might dare to hope. They
wanted to go home. They wanted to live in Jerusalem as it was. They might have
dared dream of living in a peace-filled version of the land, as it was when
David was king, but that might have been the most any of them dared dream, on
their most optimistic day. But God was promising them their homes, their land
filled with the bounty of the harvest, a land for all intents and purposes
without out death, a world where neither the children or the very old do not
die, where old age it but youth and to die before twice the expected age is
calamity.
But,
that’s not all! They would live in peace, not strife or conflict. There will be
no threat from the lion or the snake, the world around them would live in
harmony.
We
live in world of chaos, a broken world, a world, which seems to continually be
dark and bleak. Perhaps you came here this morning filled with despondency.
Perhaps hope is beyond even the possibility of imagining. It would be a good
day, if you could find yourself in a place where you might dare to hope. But
God speaks into the chaos; God speaks into our despondency, in to our
hopelessness. There is more, our God says. This is not how it will be forever.
One day, one day soon you will live. Our God believes in hope, our God believe
in expectations. Our God calls us to live lives that are grounded in hope and
in the expectation that there is more than the darkness. But not only does God
hoped but God wants us to live into those expectations. We should not live
expecting to die; we should not plant expecting to be robbed of our harvest. We
are not to enter each winter without expectation that the spring will come.
But
we are not to wait, to expect, and to hope, while cowering in fear, in a locked
room waiting for the world to magically become the world God tells us it can
be. God calls us to hope, so that we can live into the hope. God calls us to
live lives of expectation preparing and making ourselves, and our world ready.
We are to live as if our hopes our expectations have come to be. We are to
usher in the kingdom of God by living as if God is king and as if God’s kingdom
has already come.
Living
lives of expectation means that we live as if the world God promises is. We are
the people of God and live our lives knowing that the bright and beautiful
world God promises will one day come to be AND we live today, now, here in the
midst of the brokenness, as if all is made whole, we lives which work to bring
about wholeness and healing. We live into our expectations. We desire peace, we
want peace, and we work to be agents of peace in our own lives, in the small
worlds in which each of us live. We desire justice, we know that God promises
justice, so we work to bring justice to our world, righting the wrong, which we
have the power to right, working against systems which enslave and disempower
people, and committing to not be complicit in participating in ways which
perpetuate these wrongs. As the people of God, we live out God’s vision for
this this world in our own lives, loving all those whom God loves, empowering
the powerless, raising up those who are crushed beneath the heels of the
systems in our world. When others call out, “fear, fear”, we say, “be not
afraid.” When others see hopelessness, we work to bring hope. We are agents of
change in our world, remaking this world in God’s image. God calls for us to
envision a world where all is made right, where there is peace and life, and
then we are to live this out in our daily lives. We bring the righteousness,
justice and the love of God into our world by being the very image of God, each
and every day, being righteous, living out God’s justice, and loving our world
with the very righteousness, justice and love, which God instills within each
of us. We dream of a better world and then live that dream so that all the can
know the dream we dream and then and then only then will God’s reality become
the very reality in which we all live.
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