sermons — Page 13 — Andy James

Spring Cleaning in God’s House

March 8, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on John 2:13-22
preached on March 8, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It may be what you call an occupational hazard, but I go to a lot of churches. My work as Stated Clerk takes me to ten or so different Presbyterian churches around the city each year for our bimonthly presbytery meetings and other gatherings. On my vacations to England, Scotland, and Iceland over the last few years, I probably visited fifteen or more churches—and I actually worshiped in at least half of those! And even the chorus I sing in takes me to four more churches around New York City every year.

Many of the churches I visit, particularly beyond New York City, have a donation box for visitors to leave a contribution to help with the upkeep of the building, and a lot of them even charge admission to visit at times when there was no worship. Some even have gift shops for buying religious books, magnets, postcards, and other souvenirs. There was a lot of money changing hands in those churches, but based on the many appeals for money that I saw, all indications were that what they earn through these ventures is not even enough to keep these beautiful buildings open, let alone bring them up to modern standards. Nearly every one of the churches I go in is advertising some sort of campaign to fund more significant repairs that can’t be paid for out of their regular operating budget.

In this day and age, the expense of maintaining church buildings can easily consume the church’s time and attention—but I must wonder what Jesus would say about it all in light of his actions in our reading this morning from the gospel of John. In John’s telling of this incident that he places at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, Jesus ventures into the temple in Jerusalem and finds a first-century version of donation boxes and gift shops and embarks on what could be called some spring cleaning in God’s house. When he arrives in the outer court of the temple, he sees salesmen everywhere—some selling cattle and sheep for those who could afford a substantial sacrifice, others hawking doves as a more affordable option, and still others changing money for those who were preparing to enter the inner courts of the temple.

Now there were actually many good reasons for all these things to be sold in the court of the temple. The pilgrims who made their way to the temple from all around the empire could have brought animals to sacrifice from home, but there was a slim chance that they would make it all the way to the temple without a blemish that would make them worthless as offerings in the temple. Those who were preparing to enter the inner courts of the temple would have been expected to pay a fee, much like the admission charges of our own time, but Roman coins bearing the image of the emperor had to be exchanged somewhere for blank coins that could be used to pay the temple entry tax.

Even though all this commerce in the outer court may have been a necessary arrangement for conducting worship at the temple, Jesus was not happy about it and embarked on a bit of spring cleaning in God’s house. He made a whip of cords and drove the sheep and the cattle out of the temple. He poured out all the moneychangers’ coins and turned their tables upside down. And he ordered the dove hawkers to get their birds out of the temple. The result surely was quite a sight—sheep and cattle all mixed together, suddenly wandering the court and escaping into the streets that led up to the temple; unblemished sacrificial animals suddenly touched by the whip of this amateur cowboy Jesus; and coins of all denominations, for the temple tax and secular use, from all different moneychangers, mixed up beyond distinction in the chaotic courtyard. When Jesus was done, the temple courtyard looked nothing like it did before—his spring cleaning had done its job.

John’s telling of this story goes on to deal with the response of the religious leaders and Jesus’ subsequent proclamation, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” but I think there is plenty here for us to think about in our day and age without even getting into Jesus’ prediction of his crucifixion and resurrection. Jesus clearly had strong opinions about the way that religious life had evolved in first-century Jerusalem, and his actions in the temple on that day early in his ministry as recorded by John can speak to us in our own time, too, as we embark on the spring cleaning work that is our responsibility during these Lenten days.

On this day when we set apart new leaders for our congregation for the coming year, Jesus’ message from the temple can inspire us to think differently about this kind of leadership. In scattering the animals for sacrifice and overturning the tables of the moneychangers, Jesus criticized the ways in which the temple had shifted away from its spiritual focus. As we hear Jesus’ message for ourselves, we must keep our spiritual focus that is so very clear in the way that we will set our leaders apart for their service later today. While our leaders here certainly must do some of the same work as leaders in other community or nonprofit organizations, the spirituality that lies behind their work must shine through all their leadership, for they are ultimately not part of a board of directors but the spiritual leaders of our congregation. While we must manage our life together, particularly our money, staff, and property, with attention to civil law and best modern practices, we must not do these things to preserve our earthly wealth but rather to bear witness to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And while our leaders here have been elected by a democratic vote of the congregation and further approved for this service by the session, their call to serve comes not from any of these human voices but rather from the Holy Spirit.

Beyond this challenge for our leaders and all of us to keep a spiritual focus in all that we do, Jesus’ actions in cleansing the temple point us to the importance of looking at all we do with fresh eyes. The sales of cattle, sheep, and doves and the exchange of coins in the temple courts likely did not begin with the intention of spoiling the spiritual experience of those who gathered there and in fact were very likely intend to facilitate the spiritual practices of the faithful in this holy place. Yet by the time Jesus arrived in the temple courts, the trade there existed not to support the spiritual life but for its own sake, so by scattering the animals and overturning the tables, he called the religious leaders and the people to reexamine their belief and their practice to make sure that they were in alignment.

In the same way, when we hear this story, we are called to take a closer look at our own practices in our lives and in the church to see how they align with our beliefs and the blowing winds of the Spirit in our world. Are there things that we are doing in our church or our lives that need changing? Are we open to the kind of reformation and revolution that come with following a man who is not afraid to confront even faithful religious practice when it goes awry of its original intent? Where would Jesus step into the temples of our lives, shape a new whip, drive out the things that we have come to love more than him, and overturn the tables that we have so carefully set?

In this cleansing of the temple, we are called to remember the many ways in which God continues to guide and direct us to reassess and reform our religious life so that it might conform more to God’s own intentions. But as theologian Joseph Small rightly reminds us,

The reform of the church is not simply a cherished sixteenth-century memory, but neither is it a contemporary stream of managerial fixes to organizational woes or easy acquiescence to cultural trends. (Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 2, p. 94)

Instead, in our Reformed and Presbyterian tradition, we have come to describe this continuing work through a seventeenth-century motto that translates,

“The church reformed, always to be reformed according to the Word of God” in the power of the Spirit. (Foundations of Presbyterian Polity, F-2.02)

And so Jesus’ cleansing of the temple reminds us that we have some spring cleaning to do ourselves this Lent, that God’s house still needs a check of its practices every now and then, that everything is up for review and reconsideration based upon the Word of God in Christ Jesus and the blowing winds of the Holy Spirit so that we might be more faithful along this pathway to the cross.

So as we gather in a few moments to set these leaders apart for their special service in our church in the coming years, as we look around us for those places where Jesus might want to drive some things out and turn some tables over, and as we continue walking this road to the cross with Jesus, may God give us wisdom to see the places that need some spring cleaning, guidance to reshape and reform these things in a new and right direction, and hope for the renewal and resurrection of all things that is sealed for us in the resurrection that is before us on Easter Day. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

The Path to Follow

March 1, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 8:27-38
preached on March 1, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

He had talked about the importance of following him from the very beginning. The first time Jesus saw his first disciples Peter and Andrew fishing by the sea, he invited them to follow him and start fishing for people. Over time, he accumulated a notable little band of followers—tax collectors and sinners, among others—soon joined those first fishermen, and others came and went from the large crowds who gathered to witness his healing and hear his teaching in his ministry across Galilee. By the time of our story from Mark this morning, they were quite experienced at following him. They had become accustomed to his strange detours across the lake and his sudden departures from the beaten path so that he could find a quiet place away from it all, though they never quite could figure out what all he was up to.

So it wasn’t a total surprise when one day Jesus addressed the disciples and the crowd who had gathered with them and began to tell them what it meant to follow him. He had just talked with the disciples about his identity, and for the first time one of them—Peter—had identified him as the Messiah, leading him to describe what this would mean for him along the way. Jesus had planted the seeds then with the disciples that this would not be an easy path: he would undergo great suffering, be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, all before he would rise again three days later. But the disciples didn’t seem to understand this, and Peter even confronted him to vow that this should never happen. However, Peter’s insistence that Jesus should never suffer like this only seems to have made him want to help others understand what he meant even more.

Jesus’ instruction to the crowd was a bold response to Peter’s attempts to sanitize his message:

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

He took the core idea of following him that he had been talking about since the very beginning and used it to shape his teaching to a new place. No longer could they think that wandering around the Galilean countryside was enough—even though many of them had already left behind their homes and families to follow him, they needed to deny themselves completely. No longer was it enough to just carry a knapsack worth of belongings along the way—they had to carry a cross, the ultimate sign of disrepute assigned to the greatest criminals who had threatened the Roman empire itself. And no longer could they come and go, following Jesus when they wanted—they were to follow everywhere he went, even to death.

If that wasn’t enough to sort out the imposters from the real followers, Jesus continued to explain things a bit more. Next he explained that their attempts to save themselves would be futile:

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

If they were following him just to be saved, then they weren’t denying themselves after all—they were seeking their own well-being rather than truly following to join in Jesus’ mission and ministry.

So Jesus insisted that the real profit came from giving everything up, from the biggest loss imaginable, as the great hymn writer Isaac Watts declared so well:

My richest gain I count but loss
and pour contempt on all my pride.

And finally Jesus made it clear that acceptance of this seemingly-disgraceful path was not optional—those who were ashamed of it would find even more shame directed at themselves “when [the Son of Man] comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

As much as Jesus talked about following with his disciples, you’d think that we would take it just as seriously. The Christians of the early church probably thought about it quite a bit, for they faced many challenges from the culture around them and struggled even more with a government that didn’t welcome any group claiming any other way than the Roman way. But over the centuries, the idea of following Jesus put forth so clearly by Jesus in the gospel of Mark has largely been replaced in the church with a focus on belief that builds largely on the word of Jesus as told in the gospel of John. The sort of radical, self-giving action proposed and lived out by Jesus has become a much less demanding challenge, for it is far easier to affirm a creed and accept belief than to take action that has the potential for consequences as it did for those who first journeyed with Jesus. In our day and age, following Jesus has become about as difficult as following someone on Twitter, where all it takes is to click a button to start getting status updates and keep up with what is going on.

So what does it look like for us to follow Jesus in our world today? What is required of us if we are to truly deny ourselves and find a new way? How can we take up the cross of Christ in our own lives today? Following Jesus today is not about wearing a cross around our neck every day, about showing up to church on Sunday, about writing a check to show our financial support of the work of this congregation or some other good group, or even about getting others to join us on the journey. Instead, following Jesus today means taking his words seriously in our lives and standing up in our world as he did for the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized.

When he tells the crowd to deny themselves, he is speaking to us too. He is not telling us to deny who we are or set aside the gifts that we have been given to share. Instead, he is encouraging us to place our hope and trust in God, not in ourselves. He is calling us to set aside any personal benefit that might come from the work that we do or the things that we believe, for we cannot do these things out of hope for a better life for ourselves or our children or even the promise of eternal life but rather for the sake of God’s reign to be realized in our world.

When he tells the crowd to take up their cross, he is speaking to us too. He is not telling us that we must carry a cross everywhere that we go or display it in a way that shows off our faithfulness, for the goal here is not so much to make those around us aware of our faith but to commit ourselves to a path that we do not fully understand. And so in calling us to take up our cross, Jesus is encouraging us to go where he goes, to sacrifice the things of this world so that the world might be different, to walk and talk and live each day in a way that points not to ourselves, our human government, or our particular culture, to place the transformation of this world at the forefront of all things, not our hopes to be around in the next.

And when he tells the crowd to follow him, he is speaking to us too. He is not telling us that we must live exactly as he did or spend our days worrying about the number of people who will join us along the way. Instead, he is calling us to get on the move, to step out of the ways that we have lived for so long and seek people along the road, to make our way into the world where the great need stands ready and waiting for God’s presence to be realized in people like us.

In these Lenten days, it seems incredibly important to recommit ourselves to following Jesus in our changing world, but we can’t approach this following in the same way that we have approached it before. We can’t just do what we’ve always done and say that that is enough. We can’t simply acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and go on about our lives as if nothing has changed. And we can’t leave ourselves or our world the same as before we set out on this journey.

The specifics of this path are not mine to set before you. The specific path for each of our individual lives to follow Jesus will emerge as we spend these days in prayer, penitence, and exploration. The path before us as a congregation as we seek to follow Jesus will only become clear when we commit to this individual exploration and begin to share what we learn along the way. Even so, what is clear to me is that we are called to follow Jesus in the same way as those who first heard him, denying ourselves and the things of this world that get in the way of our relationship with God and taking up the challenge of whatever cross we must bear in our lives and in our world.

So as we journey this Lent together, may God open the path to follow all the more so that we might join Jesus in both the challenges and the glory that lie ahead. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Strange Celebration

February 22, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 1:9-15
preached on February 22, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

What do you do after a marquee moment in life? How do you celebrate a major accomplishment before moving on to what is next? Athletes and others used to proclaim that they would be going to Disney World, but what do you do?

Our reading from Mark today tells us about one of Jesus’ most incredible moments, after all, so I wonder a bit about what we think he might best do next to celebrate. When he went out to the Jordan to be baptized by John, he knew that he would submit to John’s baptism for the repentance of sins, but he didn’t necessarily know that he would hear the voice of God speaking to him so loudly and boldly, declaring from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

So after this marquee moment, what did Jesus do? As Mark tells it, “the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness… for forty days.” That was quite a strange celebration! Mark doesn’t tell us all that much more about these forty days for Jesus. Matthew and Luke, the two gospels who built their own accounts of Jesus’ life, ministry, and death on Mark’s telling of the story, both go into great detail about these forty days, explaining very carefully the particular temptations that Jesus faced and sharing his responses to them with us. But Mark simply tells us that after his baptism and the words of affirmation from heaven, Jesus was “tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him” before he emerged from the wilderness to begin his ministry and proclaim his message in Galilee.

For Mark, this time in the wilderness matters less for the specific temptations that Jesus faced and more for the ways in which these forty days enabled him to explore and understand his call to ministry. This is the beginning of everything we know about Jesus from Mark, after all—there’s no virgin birth, angel visitations, or boyhood antics described here—and everything that follows from this for Jesus in Mark builds on this time of temptation and exploration in the wilderness.

When he emerges from the wilderness, Jesus is definitely not the same as he was when he went in. Mark tells us that after his forty days in the wilderness, Jesus set out to Galilee to proclaim the good news of God:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

Jesus is a changed man after his sojourn in the wilderness with Satan, the wild beasts, and the angels. This man who approached John without reservation to receive a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins now has a message of repentance of his own to share that cleanses the heart, not just the body. This man who entered the waters of the Jordan as something of a blank slate emerges from his time in the wilderness insisting that there is something more to his life than what there was before. This beloved son came to understand his status and his calling in a new way after these forty days and so set out to proclaim and live a new message that called all people to trust that God’s kingdom was coming into being in the world and that all things would be made new once and for all.

For centuries, Christians have used this story of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness as the basis for a time of penitence and preparation for Easter. The emphasis for this season of Lent has traditionally been on giving something up—on building up spiritual strength to overcome the temptations of everyday life, on fasting from food or other earthly things as a way of embodying in our physical bodies the sort of spiritual change that we desire in these days, on setting aside things that we can control that impede our spiritual growth. But when I look carefully at Mark’s version of this story, the tradition of giving something up for Lent doesn’t seem all that connected to Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. We hear so little here about the temptations that he faces that we can’t build a season of practice around them. And the wilderness mentioned in Mark doesn’t look very much like our world.

This wilderness is a strange place. It can bring the danger of encounters with Satan and wild beasts or the safe comfort of angels ready to serve and care. In the first thirteen verses of Mark’s gospel, we hear about the wilderness four different times. It is the place where John the Baptist comes from and the place where Jesus is driven by the Spirit after his encounter with John. On the whole, it is a place of hostility and conflict that emerge not from the pains of giving up coffee, chocolate, or alcohol for six weeks but from the ongoing conflict between the forces of good and evil that stand at the center of Mark’s understanding of the world.

So when Jesus was driven out into this wilderness, amidst all the real challenges that he faced, I think he took up far more than he gave up. In his time in the wilderness, Jesus came to truly understand what the voice had said to him in his baptism. In the midst of his temptation by Satan, he sorted out what true repentance meant. As he journeyed through the wilderness of conflict between good and evil, Jesus discovered what it meant to live faithfully in the day and age when the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near so that he could share that message with others. And as he emerged from the wilderness, the time was right and ripe for his proclamation of the new thing that God was doing in the world in him, through him, and because of him.

In these forty days of Lent, we too are faced with the challenges of discovering a way through the wilderness of life in our increasingly complex and challenging world. We hear how God has claimed us and promises to make us and all things new, and we have to sort out what that might look like. We encounter the challenges of temptation and uncertainty in the wilderness of these days and must decide how we will respond. And as we seek a way through this wilderness, we must still be ready to share what we have encountered and learned along the way with others when we emerge into the new life on the other side.

This year, in our life together as the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone, we’ll be taking this approach of taking up something new during these Lenten days as we explore a few of the possibilities for mission and ministry in our midst. We have discovered quite well that we are active and engaged with our community and our world in ways that speak to our varied interests and passions, and the session is hopeful that we can continue to deepen and broaden our commitments to mission in our life together. Beginning today and continuing for the next four weeks, each Sunday you will hear about some of the mission work that we are already doing—and some possibilities for you to get more involved. As we make our way through this Lenten season, it is my hope and prayer that you will find some new place to participate in our work of reaching out beyond these walls and being a part of the kingdom of God coming near in our world.

Even if you’ve already given up something for this Lent, I hope that you will take up something new for this season that will continue well beyond it, for the journey of penitence and renewal that we share in these days is not so much about the things that we give up for forty days but about the ways that we continue to grow in faith, hope, and love each and every day so that we too might proclaim that message that Jesus offered to those who would hear:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

So as we journey these forty days together, wandering the wilderness of our world, may we discover the pathway to live in the time that is fulfilled and the kingdom of God that has come near so that our Easter celebration may be filled with faith, hope, and love enough to enjoy and share. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Glimpse of Something More

February 15, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 9:2-9 for Transfiguration Sunday
preached on February 15, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

They had been plenty of strange places with Jesus before, so when he asked them to go up the mountain with him, Peter, James, and John were not particularly surprised. It had only been six days earlier that he begun talking his disciples about the journey that would be ahead for him. Right after Peter had recognized him as the Messiah, they learned that he would “undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” It was a stark contrast for them all. It seemed impossible that their beloved teacher and friend could face such horrid things, especially considering that he had just been revealed to them as something more than what they had understood before. How could this man they had come to know so well, this man they had dropped their nets to follow, face rejection that would lead to his death?

So as Peter, James, and John ventured up the mountain with Jesus, their heads were surely swirling with questions. They had already started to get a new and different image of him, and what they would see that day on the mountain peak would only change it even more. It was a solitary, reflective journey for all four of them—Mark tells us that Jesus “led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves,” requiring three different words to make it clear how distant they were from their everyday experience and how disconnected they were from any others who might have usually gone with them along the way.

When they reached the top, “he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white.” Something was happening to Jesus before their very eyes, and even if they could not understand it, they would witness it. Then, before they could figure out what was happening, Elijah and Moses appeared there too, talking with Jesus. The disciples were suddenly surrounded by the Messiah, the Law, and the Prophets. The fullness of the Jewish tradition of the past and the emerging witness of Jesus was present with them on the mountain, and they were witnesses to this glimpse of incredible glory.

Peter’s reaction to this incredible sight was pretty strange. Only a few days earlier, he had just become the first to confess Jesus as Messiah, only to make it clear a little later that he didn’t understand what that would mean as he sought to keep Jesus from taking the road of suffering and death. But as Mark puts it, after witnessing the transfiguration Peter “did not know what to say, for they were terrified.” Rather than just taking it all in quietly, Peter broke the silence strangely, mumbling and bumbling and rambling:

Rabbi, it is good for us to be here;
let us make three dwellings,
one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.

But before any of them could respond to Peter’s incredibly ridiculous suggestion, a cloud came over them, and a voice called out from it:

This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!

As quickly as the voice had spoken out, the visitors from the past had appeared, and Jesus’ clothes had turned a dazzling white, things all went back to normal. When they looked around again, “they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.” The reason for their journey complete, the three stunned disciples and Jesus headed down the mountain, and as they made their way back to the other disciples, Jesus “ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” They had glimpsed his glory and seen the fullness of who he was, and yet they could not describe it to anyone—until it would be visible to everyone.

This story of the transfiguration is one of the most mystical and mysterious in all the gospels, but I think it is probably one of the greatest because it gives us a very real glimpse of who Jesus is. The transfiguration is a rare moment when the veil of heaven is pulled back, the divisions between this world and the next are set aside, and we are given a glimpse of God’s glory. It stands in a line of rare and wonderful moments in the Bible where God reveals God’s self to us: Abraham and the strange visitors, Moses and the burning bush, Moses on the mountain receiving the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, Elijah in the cave encountering God in the sound of sheer silence, and even Jesus in his own baptism by John the Baptist, as a voice from heaven again declares, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” In the transfiguration and all these moments, we see a little more of who God is, sometimes in mighty and powerful ways, sometimes in quiet and mystical ways, and always with a bit of a veil continuing to conceal a portion of God’s glory, leaving us to await an even greater vision of something more than our human minds can comprehend and our human eyes can see.

But I think that the transfiguration may actually be about more than just this. As we discover more of who God is in this moment when we gain a glimpse of Jesus’ glory, I think we also gain a glimpse of the transfiguration that is possible for us. When we see the transfigured Jesus shining in dazzling white clothes, we catch sight of what we will one day be. When we watch with wonder as Jesus gathers with the Law and the Prophets atop the mountain, we see the beginnings of a conversation that will one day be ours to share. And when we hear a voice from a cloud declaring that Jesus is beloved and worthy of our careful ear, we can learn that we too bear the beloved image of God into a world that needs such a gift even in us.

On the mount of transfiguration, as Jesus is transformed before the eyes of the disciples, so we too witness the possibilities of transformation in our lives and in the life of our world. Like Jesus, we will one day be more than we are today. Like Jesus, we will one day participate in transformed life where we will understand the Law and the Prophets in a new and deepened way. And like Jesus, we have heard and will hear again and again God’s voice in the waters of baptism and the food of this table proclaiming that we too are God’s beloved children. In this glimpse of glory for Jesus and us, in this moment when the heavens are torn apart and God’s wonder is revealed, we are strengthened for all the things that are ahead—for the struggles of yet another depressing week of winter, for the challenges of repentance and renewal in this coming season of Lent, for the joys and sorrows of our lives in these days, for living, for dying, and for life eternal.

So as we come down from this mountain and gather around this table, may we be strengthened by this glimpse of what is ahead for us, that all our living might embody the new life we have already seen in the transfiguration and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord so that we might join him and all creation in being made new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

The Marks of Divine Comfort

February 8, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 40:21-31
preached on February 8, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

When someone you know and love is hurting, how do you show them comfort? Do you listen carefully to their story of pain and seek to do something to respond directly, assuring them that you care for them very personally and won’t leave them until you have to? Or do you try to explain the technicalities of it all, maybe how an injury or illness triggers a response from the nervous system or how the complexity of the world has set them up for failure, leaving them with no way out but to suffer? I for one hope you aim for the former approach!

Today’s reading from the prophet Isaiah, though, takes something closer to the latter approach. In trying to bring comfort to the exiles of Judah, the prophet sets out to give them a sense of the larger picture and assure them that a mighty and distant God is yet present with them in strange and wonderful ways. The prophet starts out with some rhetorical questions that hardly seem like they might be able to bring comfort and hope.

Have you not known? Have you not heard?

These provocative questions are designed to trigger memory of the past and reconnect the people to what they somewhere deep down know and have heard about God’s presence with them, but they are also painful reminders of the people’s forgetfulness and misunderstanding that stand at the center of their pain and sorrow.

Then the prophet turns to a description of this God that they have known and have heard but yet is very different from what many of us might expect to bring comfort. The God who comforts here is not so much a personal presence amidst pain but rather a powerful, sovereign being who acts with wonder and majesty. As commentator Walter Brueggemann puts it,

The picture of God proposed here is of a God who sits atop the vault of heaven, that is, on top of the earth, in regal splendor, so high and lifted up, so elevated and exalted, that the human inhabitants of the earth are seen only at a distance, as small as insects. (Texts for Preaching Year B)

In our day and age, this seems like a strange way to bring comfort!

Yet the prophet insists that a proper remembrance of the majesty and otherness of this God will bring greater comfort than we could ever imagine. The marks of divine comfort described here are quite different from any of our human comfort, but they are no less real. The prophet catalogs them at great length in these eleven verses. The God who comforts sits above the circle of the earth and stretches out the heavens like a curtain, spreading them like a tent to live in and giving space for God’s people to call home. The God who comforts brings princes to naught and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing, proving that the welfare of all the people matters far more than the wealth of a few. The God who comforts intervenes when life tries to take root in other soils, reminding us that there is no life apart from this great divine presence. The God who comforts knows all of the host of heaven and earth by name and recognizes when even one of them goes missing, proving that even one of such greatness can care deeply about each and every one of us. And the God who comforts does not faint or grow weary and in fact gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless, not holding on to this majesty but seeking to share it for the good of all creation.

In our culture where direct and personal comfort is the norm and preference, imagining that the presence of such a God can bring us comfort is not always easy. I confess that I myself am dismissive of those who seek to comfort others with platitudes describing how God is present amidst pain and suffering, as I find little or no comfort when someone tells me in a time of distress that “God is in control” or that “God has a plan for you in this.” In the everyday struggles of our lives—the pain of everyday illness, the sorrow of loss in our lives, even the uncertainty of most change that we experience as our lives shift and move—we look far less for reminders of God’s great power and majesty in the grand scheme of things and far more for assurance of God’s presence with us in our time of trial.

But when the foundation of life is shaken as it had been for these exiles, reminders of God’s sovereignty and majesty would make a lot more sense, especially considering how much they seemed to have forgotten about God’s presence with them. It seems like that was the real problem here—the people had forgotten so much about God and God’s goodness, not just the ways that God brought them comfort in difficult times but the ways that God’s presence defined the world from beginning to end and brought transformation to every corner of life. They needed the prophet to remind them that God is everlasting, that God’s mind is unsearchable and yet caring, that amidst God’s complete and total otherness God created us and all things and remains ever watchful, that God’s creation did not end in the past but that God’s transformation of creation continues even now.

So what does this kind of word bring to our lives and our world today? What are we to hear and understand in the prophet’s reminders to the returning exiles? What significance can we attach to these things in our world that does not find value in the marks of divine comfort?

First, these words of Isaiah remind us that we must be people who remember. We are called to remember the gifts of God in our lives and in our world. We must remember how God’s presence matters not just for our individual lives or for our church or community or country, but for the whole world. And we must remember how we are divinely insignificant and yet deeply loved by God, for we inhabitants of the earth are like grasshoppers even as we are known and loved by name.

Beyond all this, though, Isaiah’s words can remind us of God’s great power to transform our lives and our world. God is not afraid to disrupt the order of things as it is now so as to make it better for all creation. God’s concern is far less with preserving the here and now and far more with opening up new possibilities for the powerless and hopeless of the world. And God’s power will not be used to prop up the powers and principalities that exploit this world but will instead displace them and strengthen the powerless to lead us to a new way.

And finally, Isaiah’s words help us to understand the myriad ways that God is beyond our understanding. This strange attention of an all-powerful God to those who are powerless just doesn’t make sense to our human minds. The ways that God stands so high above everything and yet remains very much present with us aren’t easy for our minds to fathom. And the incomparability of God and our experience of God to so much of our human experience makes it difficult if not impossible to do anything more than simply stand in awe.

So in the midst of such human pain and despair, the marks of divine comfort are exactly these strange and wonderful things: the memory of God’s presence and being, the power of God’s transformation, and the wonder of a God who is beyond our human understanding. From these marks of comfort, we are assured that those who wait on this God “shall renew their strength,” “mount up with wings like eagles,” “run and not be weary,” and “walk and not faint.”

These promises mean all the more in our world where forgetfulness of God’s presence is the norm, where nothing seems to really change for the better, and where human understanding seems like everything. Yet these marks of divine comfort show us that these are marks of the world that will be set aside, for God comes to us beyond our expectations and transforms us in ways that we could never imagine, opening us to a new way of thinking and believing and living that brings us a different and yet greater comfort than we could ever understand.

So may God show us these strange and wonderful marks of comfort so that we might know this comfort in our lives and our world, share it with those who need it even more than we do, and join in the transformation and new life that come from this God here and now and always. Thanks be to God! Amen.