November 18, 2018 Isaiah 63:7-19 (Isaiah 66:18-24) O.T. & H.S.

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1 November 18, 2018 Isaiah 63:7-19 (Isaiah 66:18-24) O.T. & H.S. There are those who have most everything figured out. For them the Scriptures speak of certainties, never mysteries. What we are supposed to believe, the meaning of the sacraments, and the truth of the creeds are all supposed to be clear and plain to true believers. The Trinity is declared and explained with almost mathematical precision. Doubt of any kind is for the neophytes and the faithless. The problem is that real life is messy. We are constantly confronted with surprises and things we did not expect. We come to the end of each day with our lists in disarray, and we have to think again about what we should try to accomplish tomorrow. Sometimes the surprises are better than anything we were expecting, and sometimes they seem a little short of devastating. Life is not all wrapped up in neat and tidy bundles. Sometimes we are amazed at where help and friendship come from. Sometimes we are surprised indeed about how support and comfort fade away when we need them most. So the truth is, a faith that has no surprises in it does not match our reality. It may seem comforting at first to believe in absolute certainties and to know exactly what is right and true above the circumstances of our lives, but that s always more something we make up something we invent in the armchairs of our spare time and it is not confrontation with the Living God. The real God is numinous and dynamic and never static. The real God is our Creator, and is therefore unpredictable by us. The God who is Author of universes beyond our counting is neither tame enough nor civilized enough to fit into categories or definitions small enough to be understood by minds as small and limited as ours. The Holy Spirit has long represented or symbolized the mind of God. The Holy Spirit is the intention or purpose of God even before that comes to be. Only, the Holy Spirit is often helping the will of God come to be, so the Holy Spirit influences the agents that God chooses to bring God s plans to fruition. The Holy Spirit is active with Abraham, Jacob, Joseph. In this morning s Scripture reading, the Holy Spirit brought Moses up from the Nile and from the court of Pharaoh in Egypt, and this Spirit walked beside Moses to help him deliver Israel BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 1 OF 7

2 from slavery in Egypt. The Holy Spirit descended from Heaven to infuse a carpenter s son at His baptism our best notion of how God called his Messiah into being. And so, when some people tell us that the Holy Spirit was never real or active until the time of the Christian Pentecost, we must demur. The Old Testament is full of instances which reveal that the Holy Spirit is already real and active in what God is doing in our history. I am not attempting to do some kind of scholarly survey of the Holy Spirit s activity in Old Testament history (not that this would be a bad idea). But today we cut in close to the end of Old Testament history to read this poignant Scripture passage from Isaiah. It looks back on the wondrous times when the people seemed more faithful and the plans of God were more impressive. Isaiah looks back with longing at how he thinks it used to be, and he hopes with fervent longing for the restoration of the time when God was leading the people and the people were willing to follow. It is more prayer than teaching, and we can feel him pleading with God to care again like God used to. Dear God, You led us once why not do it again? We can read this on two levels. First, from a historic view: What was it like for Israel back in the time of Isaiah? Second, we can read it from our own personal histories, and the longings we have for more faithfulness than we see going on around us today. Is it not time for God to come back with power and influence in our own time, in our own country, in our own churches? Have we not been a remnant for long enough? Apostasy is everywhere around us. The sellout to secular values is obvious and overwhelming. Our culture is everywhere moved and moving into objective agnostic perspectives that assume God is no longer caring or real and that we live in a solar system and a universe that have no meaning. The planets are just hunks of rock or gas that circle out there according to the laws of gravity, but there is no Creator, no plan, no purpose, no meaning. Our own world could be destroyed at any moment by these same mindless forces. Not only that, but the spiritual realms beyond our physical realm probably do not really exist either. It was all the primitive imagination of ancient humans, who thought they detected the presence of a Creator back when they thought the earth was the center of the universe. BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 2 OF 7

3 So why still read these ancient texts? Because I still believe there is a Creator. And I still think Jesus came to reveal this Creator s purposes and love for us. The amazing history of Israel was forerunner to the Christian church, and it is still important hugely important for us to repent and turn back to the purposes and plans of our God. So we still try to understand what happened before we came on the scene. We can still learn from what people experienced and went through before our turn came. So this morning I have three things to bring before you: 1.) The connection between the Old Testament and the New Testament. 2.) The prejudice of the prophetic tradition the belief that Israel is above and more important than the other nations. 3.) A reminder that Jeremiah is the source and genius even behind Isaiah that he is the true forerunner of Jesus. Behind all of it, I am hoping we will all start taking our TNC Bible with more seriousness. Our Bible is the same as any normal Bible except we have underlined or highlighted every passage that mentions the Holy Spirit. It is astounding to realize how important the Holy Spirit is to the stories and proclamations of the Bible. To be sure, that greatly increases in the New Testament. But contrary to some conservative claims that the Holy Spirit is not real or active until Christian Pentecost, the first mention of the Spirit is in Genesis, chapter one, verse two: The earth was a vast waste, darkness covered the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the surface of the water ready, of course, to help with creation. Even God has to think before acting. Of course, it s all human conception and understanding, but it was human understanding that all creation was a combination of earth, air, fire, and water. Today we are considering AIR: the logos the mind and purposes of God, which ends up the Holy Spirit. What is the plan? How will it come to be? The logos hovers over the surface of the water. It even precedes the light. It conceives of the light, and then God says, Let there be light. I am not trying to invent a new creed; just saying that our ancient forebears thought in this manner. And so there are inevitable connections between what happened before and what comes afterward. None of you are the first step in any direction. You all come from a long line of ancestors and traditions. BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 3 OF 7

4 You are all the products of histories and heredity and the unimaginable efforts and sacrifices of those who came before you. Had there been a single break between you and your forebears, you would not be here. Your ancestors stretch back in an unbroken line from you into the distant darkness of prehistory and to the very beginning of life on earth. Which merely brings us to the realization that when Jesus is inspired and infused by the Holy Spirit at His baptism when Jesus is chosen and becomes God s true Messiah our understanding of God and of God s purposes is dramatically changed forever. Jesus is incredibly new. But even Jesus does not come out of nowhere. All of the history and traditions and heroes of Old Testament Judaism are poured into Him. We do not start from scratch. Cut behind the virgin birth and all its false implications. Spiritually speaking, Jesus is God s Son, and because of Him all of you are God s sons and daughters. But physically speaking, Jesus is Joseph s son. And that connects Him to all that came before and to all of us who come after. So we cannot comprehend the life of Jesus without knowing about Abraham and Jacob and Joseph. Samson, Samuel, King David, Elijah, and Jeremiah are part of who Jesus was part of His story. Talking about Jesus and claiming to spread His Message without knowing where He comes from cheapens and distorts everything. That is both good news and bad news. Most of us have good reason to be proud of our heritage, but we also have reason to be ashamed about some of it. The glories are mixed with things we wish were not true. We killed too many Indians. The darkness of slavery dogs our memories. We are grateful for freedom and rejoice in how many people found this new world a place of opportunity and abundance, but we have never managed to create a just society, never mind a Christian one. What about Jesus heritage? Was it all peace and light? Why do we imagine that Jesus broke with so many of the assumptions and beliefs of His own time, much of it embedded in the very warp and woof of the religion of His time? I am still amazed at how often we slough over the glaring errors and contradictions of the Judaism we come from. Joshua and the Israelites kill every man, woman, and child when they enter the towns of the Promised Land. Today we call it genocide, but Joshua thinks this is the will of God and his orders come straight from Moses, who speaks for God. Does God hate all BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 4 OF 7

5 Amalekites just because Moses hates them? We have huge honor for the great prophets of the Old Testament, but do we never hear how they think Israel is superior to all other nations, and how they assume that it is God s will for the Jews to be the dominant and superior race on earth? Does that cease to be racism just because it s in the Bible? And the prophets think the only thing holding it back is Judaism s unwillingness to keep the Covenant that was made on Mount Sinai. Someday you should read chapter sixty-six of Isaiah, the very last chapter in the book. Many people think that Isaiah is the most loving, the closest to being a Christian, the most poetic of all the prophets. But what is he picturing as his book closes? Jerusalem is the center of the world, all the enemies of the Jews will be devastated, and Israel will be supreme on the earth. Where do so many Americans get their assumptions of superiority over all other nations, and their belief that the United States should always be the best, wealthiest, and most powerful nation on earth? We call it patriotism, but it s like we transferred such assumptions straight from the Old Testament prophets. In that vein, it is important to realize that there are two prophets named Isaiah. They live at different times and speak out of very different circumstances, yet they are included in the same book. First Isaiah is the wonderful prophet who is a teammate with King Hezekiah (700 B.C.). Together they are trying to reform Judah (the Southern Kingdom) in the hope of staving off the disaster that apostasy is bringing on the nation. Another great king/prophet team come about a hundred years later: Jeremiah and Josiah. By then the threat is Babylon rather than Assyria, but Josiah dies in a useless battle alongside Egyptians, and Jeremiah lives on at the tail end and demise of Judah, as they are deported in what is called the Babylonian Captivity. Second Isaiah is a prophet who lives during the Babylonian Captivity itself. He tries to encourage the people to stay faithful and wait for Yahweh s deliverance. This begins at Isaiah chapter forty, Comfort ye, comfort ye my people... In defeat and shame, we sometimes stop being rebellious smart-asses, return to faith, and wait upon the Lord. But that is hardly the message of First Isaiah. And you will notice that today s Scripture passage is toward the end of Second Isaiah (chapter sixty-three) written after Jeremiah, and picking up on his hope. The Bible is difficult for many reasons, but if we smear it all together (like with the Christmas stories), it turns into gibberish. BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 5 OF 7

6 As an aside, there were other famous prophet/king teams, some infamous: Samuel and Saul; David and Nathan; Ahab and Elijah; Herod and John the Baptist. Back to the time of Second Isaiah: Astrologically, this was the only era in recorded history in which the Uranus/Neptune cycle, the Uranus/Pluto cycle, and the Neptune/Pluto cycle coincided. (Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas.) All three planets were within two degrees of exact alignment near the middle of this period ( B.C.). This also roughly coincides with the birth of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Jainism, as well as with the transformational rebirth of Judaism that came out of the Babylonian Captivity. It is a chance to think, to pray, to ponder, to get quiet. They that wait upon the Lord... Time for genuine prayer often brings startling new awareness and repentance. Called or not called, God will come. Jung had this inscribed above the door of his house on the shore of Lake Zurich. * * * As already mentioned, Jeremiah is the forerunner and pattern for the best awareness of Second Isaiah. The Book of Isaiah comes before the Book of Jeremiah in the Old Testament, which can be confusing. First Isaiah does precede Jeremiah by about a hundred years. But First Isaiah, despite his brilliant prophecies, never even faintly imagines a time when there will be a New Covenant. Jeremiah lives during the last forty years of the Southern Kingdom of Judah. We do not know the dates for Second Isaiah, who is a prophet during the Babylonian Captivity itself. King Cyrus allows the Jews who want to return to Jerusalem to do so, and there they begin to rebuild the temple. This is in 538 B.C. So Second Isaiah, we can guess, is telling his countrymen in Babylon not to lose heart perhaps around B.C. But that is forty years after the time of Jeremiah. Second Isaiah gets his best insight from the prophet Jeremiah. Hopefully all of you by now have memorized the designation of Jeremiah 31:31. Six hundred years before Jesus, Jeremiah tells of the coming of a New Covenant. And he describes something very like what happens to the Christian church at the time of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit of our Resurrected Lord comes to guide and direct the life of the Christian church. Jeremiah s concept of the New Covenant is forever memorialized at the Last Supper: This cup is the New Covenant in my blood. Drink it in memory of me. (I Corinthians 11:25) BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 6 OF 7

7 So we have a little bit of history and the awareness of Second Isaiah that the Holy Spirit has always been active and part of God s plans and purposes. And we have some sorrow over the ways and attitudes that still keep us alienated from God and from each other. Sin and alienation always dog our steps here on this earth. But mostly we have new Life in Christ Jesus, new Life guided and directed by the Holy Spirit if we are willing to listen and obey. This is our New Covenant, given to us by the Messiah, who sacrificed His life to make it clear to us. Only, death could not hold Him. And so, in dimensions beyond all our full realization, the Holy Spirit is our crucified and Risen Lord. We are His people, in a faith community that still lives to believe in Him and to follow Him wherever He chooses to lead us. BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 7 OF 7