Beyond Southern Comfort

Transcription

1 George A. Mason First Sunday of Advent Wilshire Baptist Church 2 December 2012 Dallas, Texas Isaiah 40:1-5; Luke 3:1-6 Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. The first thing to know is that we are not on our own in this world. We are not left to fend for ourselves against the brute forces of nature or nations. A prophet in the tradition of Isaiah is given a word from the heavenly council of God s angels that enough is enough. God s comfort is at hand. A new phase of history is about to begin. Things will be different. Biblical faith declares that we are not trapped in a cycle of meaninglessness. Things can be different. Even better, things can be better. Nobuo Sekine is a Japanese sculptor of the Mono-ha movement, which means School of Things. He creates art from natural and industrial things, showing their equivalence in tension with one another. But part of the message of this art is that there is no message. The world is as it is. Ironically, Sekine uses an art form to communicate that there is nothing to communicate. Against the human inclination to find meaning in things, Sekine has said: [T]he mass of the universe neither increases nor decreases. This is the universe of eternal sameness. When one becomes aware of this, then the futility of modern concepts of creation can be realized. Wilshire s own Mike Hill does installations for the Dallas Museum of Art. He recently gave some of our staff a backroom tour. Sekine s work, called Phase of Nothingness Water, was on display. It consists of two black steel containers standing side by side one a low rectangle and the other a taller cylinder each filled to the brim with exactly the same volume of water. The water tops off the vessels and has the odd effect of seeming in its stillness to be a hard surface. So much so that people would come by the exhibit and touch the top thoughtlessly, only to realize that it was water that then spilled onto the floor. One person actually took a picture of it and then laid her cellphone on top of it, only to see it sink. Another reminder never to touch the art, don t you know?! But as Mike says about it, no matter the artist s intent, you can t stop the meaning making. Art has generative power to

2 make us see differently. For instance, it s hard for a Baptist not to look at Phase of Nothingness Water and not see a baptism waiting to happen. The world of creation is not stuck in eternal sameness; it is open to change and newness. And when you are feeling trapped in a world that others tell you is fixed and unchanging, where is comfort to be found? The people of the Southern Kingdom of Judah, whose capital city was Jerusalem, had suffered for more than sixty years at the hands of the Babylonians. They were waiting for something to happen, but they were discouraged by what felt like eternal sameness. In the year 587 BC the armies of Nebuchadnezzar overran Jerusalem and all Judea. They carted off all the important citizens of Judah and forced them to live under pagan powers and gods. Jerusalem was in shambles, the temple rubble. God s people wondered whether the God who had called them into being, gotten them out of Egypt, and led them into the Promised Land had forgotten them for good. Maybe God had written them off for not keeping their end of the covenant. Maybe their sin had cut them off from God s mercy and they were destined to live forever as a people under occupation in a foreign land. I wonder whether this unknown prophet the one who took Isaiah s name or whom people called Isaiah because he sounded so much like the prophet from generations ago I wonder if even he had been beating this drum about Israel s sin and God s punishment. After all, that s what the first Isaiah had said, and sure enough, the Babylonians had been God s agent of discipline. And then, this breaking word. The prophet Isaiah Jr. or Isaiah the Younger or Second Isaiah, we ll call him steps up in the midst of a crowd and opens his mouth. This time something different comes out, something new. This time the word isn t woe. This time the word is Comfort, O Comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord s hand double for all her sins. This word brings hope and true comfort. As David Winter puts it 2

3 in his forty-days devotional book on Handel s oratorio Messiah, this isn t cold comfort or false comfort. It s not the shallow It s all right now when it clearly isn t. Real comfort is to receive strength from another, and to receive it tenderly. Comfort is the person who doesn t simply put steel into your backbone, but also puts an arm around your shoulders. That at last is what the people of Jerusalem were being offered, and that is what God offers to any of [God s] children who turn to [God] in their moment of despair. 1 Isaiah 40 announces that captives would be released to go home to Jerusalem, that slaves would be freed to serve only God and not their Babylonian masters. The glory of the Lord will return to Israel. And sure enough, it did. King Cyrus of Persia, who had conquered the Babylonians, became God s anointed one the word for messiah. He would allow Israel to go home and begin to rebuild. And so the prophecy of First Isaiah is fulfilled in Second Isaiah. God s word has its way in the world. And God s word has 1 Forty Days with the Messiah (Abingdon, 1996), p made a way in the world for Israel to have a new hope. But prophecy has a way of spilling over, even after being fulfilled. The season of Advent begins with hope that leads to the birth of the messiah as Jesus of Nazareth four weeks from now. When God became flesh and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus, God s prophetic word to Isaiah reached ahead, spilled over like water that could not be contained. It broke into the world anew. God was coming up close, bringing comfort to the world by bringing a just peace. This time Israel is in its homeland, but now that is an occupied territory. The ruling masters were Roman rather than Babylonian. And it all seemed so hopeless again. Second Isaiah s prophetic word was not one and done. It had the power to give comfort and hope in the sixth century before Christ, and it reappears now to give comfort and hope again through a kind of Later Isaiah called John the Baptist. John is now the voice crying out in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord. And Jesus would be the latest and greatest fulfillment of Isaiah s prophecy. He would bring good news to Israel that

4 the empire they lived under every day, with its burdens of taxation and limits to religious freedom; it was temporal, not eternal. God reigns on high, regardless of who sits on a palace throne or behind a desk in an Oval Office. God s reign is evident wherever, and under whatever circumstances, people live in spiritual freedom and grant it to their neighbors in acts of lovingkindness. John the Baptist quotes Isaiah, but with a special emphasis on the last line. Isaiah promises that the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and that all people shall see it together. In its first fulfillment, the old Southern Kingdom of Judah took that to mean that they would return to Jerusalem, become a strong nation again, and that all the nations and people of the world would recognize their special place in God s concern by the glory of their national success in the land God had promised them. But John as Later Isaiah speaks of how all flesh shall see the salvation of God. And then Luke launches into telling the story of salvation through Jesus in a way that goes through and beyond Israel although it does not in going beyond leave Israel behind. It overreaches. God s comfort is more than Southern comfort, if you will pardon the pun. It s never parochial, never regional, never nationalistic, never limited by who you are over against someone else. God s comfort and hope are for any and all who are captive to sin, oppressed by enemies, afflicted by illness, or wracked by guilt. God s promised comfort is universal, and it can be rightly experienced now by you and me and anyone whether we are Jew or Gentile, Israeli or Palestinian, American or Asian or African, black, white or brown, rich or poor, school-educated or only street-wise, with one qualification: to experience it, you must heed John s call to the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The new movie Lincoln drives home this very point in an unforgettable way. The scourge and oppression of slavery stained the soul of this nation. There could be no comfort without first the repentance that altered the facts on the ground. God would not stand idly by and see those whom Christ died for treated as less than human. The 13 th amendment struck a blow for freedom when all the 4

5 arrangements of society seemed to depend upon it keeping things as they were. It s hard for us today to imagine the fear of a future with freed Negroes everywhere. But what our country came to understand was that no one was really free until all of us were free. All flesh means all flesh. So let me ask you. Is there anyone you would deny God s comfort to? I mean, if God s intent is that not just Israel, not just the church, not just you, but also them whoever they may be should know God s comfort, how will you repent in order for you and them to experience it? To know the comfort of our salvation, we have to move beyond southern comfort, beyond personal comfort, beyond religious comfort or national comfort. If we are to know the true meaning of God s salvation in Jesus Christ, we will embrace it anew by being that good news for others. Handel s Messiah begins the telling of the story of salvation through Jesus by recalling Isaiah s prophecy first. The first part of Messiah begins with this text that ends with The Glory of the Lord, which is our Advent theme this year. But the glory of the Lord is never-ending. It moves beyond one time to the next, the same way Advent moves us every year to a new experience of God s coming. My two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, Finley, still has to learn this lesson. Her mother found a great children s craft idea on Pinterest and created a large green felt Christmas tree that she fixed to the wall. Finley then took the felt ornaments and lights and decorated the tree. When she was finished, she stepped back in admiration at her work. Cameron praised her, of course, but then she wondered whether Finley might want to take it down and do it again a little differently. Finley looked at her mother as if to say, But I finished. God s work is never finished until it s finished for all of us for good. That s why we keep observing Advent. Isaiah s word is becoming Scripture again in our day and in your life and mine. The good news of Advent is that the coming Christ tarries until God s word of comfort spills over everything and overreaches to everyone, and at last all flesh see it together. 5