Isaiah 40: 21-31 & Mark 1: 29-39
Fifth Sunday after
Epiphany/ 5th February 2012
We
all go through difficult seasons in our lives, times when we feel weighed down,
weary, and scared. For some, it's a relatively short season. For others,
it's long and feels endless. For those with ears to hear and eyes to see, we know
these are demanding times. As a
congregation we have experienced considerable loss this past year, we said
good-bye to dear saints and friends.
Every week we offer intercessory prayer for members and family and
friends of this congregation who need peace, support, healing, some evidence of
God’s love. Step out beyond the congregation, to family and friends, a wider
community, a wider world, and listen – to the voices of people who can’t find
work, who can’t provide food for their children, who cannot afford medical care
and treatment. Listen to the voices of people who question their value or
worth, of people whose innocence has been betrayed, of people who have lost the
ability to believe and trust – anyone, themselves, others, God; and the voices
that are more difficult to hear, the voices of people who suffer silently,
whose sorrow and sadness overwhelm them and wear them down.
These are demanding times. I hear this a lot. So many are weary. Weary of wars and rumors of more war. Weary
of party politics and warring sound bites and monotonous monologues of hollow
promises. Weary that the Ravens are not in the Super Bowl today. Weary of email
and text messages and more email and weary of hearing about Snooki’s latest escapades on “Jersey Shore.”
Add to all of this, in all
seriousness, that fact that we are living through one of the most significant
moments in 500 years, since the Reformation.
We are beginning to see it as an axial
period, a turning period of enormous, turbulent change – socially, culturally,
morally, politically.[1]
Everything is in flux, including faith, Christianity, and the especially the Church. Phylis Trickle describes the present upheaval
facing Christianity and the Church as “The Great Emergence.”[2] Something new is emerging. We have to realize this, acknowledge this,
wake up to the fact that we are in a new day and it’s a day, it won’t last long before the next change comes along.
Just after the First World War, in 1919, William Butler Yeats (1869-1939), penned these verses to capture
something of what he felt, weary of war and destruction and loss in a world
that had come completely unhinged, whirling around like a gyroscope forming an
empty vortex:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The
falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things
fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere
anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The
blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The
ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The
best lack all conviction, while the worse
Are
full of passionate intensity.[3]
The biblical word for this feeling
of disorientation, this season of loss and confusion and sadness, a time when
even God appears silent or absent, is exile:
to be away from home, to be banished to a foreign land or territory. We think of the Israelites in Egypt, that was
exile. We think of the Israelites in Babylon, in exile, away from home in
Jerusalem and Judah. However, exile can also serve as a metaphor for any
feeling or situation in which we feel lost and confused, far from what feels
like home, far from the way things used to be, when we are forced to leave the
familiar and venture into the unknown. It
can also be used to describe those moments in our lives when we are far away
from God as home, when we question
and doubt, when we enter into the dark night of the soul, feeling utterly alone
in what seems like an impersonal universe that is cold, dark, and expanding.
Into the silence, into the darkness,
comes a word. Into the absence,
confusion and weariness comes another voice, soft, yet strong and
profound. Not my words, which are
fleeting, offered and then blown to the wind, in time forgotten, unknown, but a
different word. Can you hear it? Can you feel it resonate through our flesh
and bones? “Have you not known? Have you not heard?” Isaiah asked. That’s what Isaiah asked Israel to consider. And where does he pose these questions? In their
exile, in Babylon, to a people weary and lost in exile, far from home. His prophetic words here have a way of
calling them home – not back to Judah (that will come in time) – but first to a
more permanent home, calling them back to the truth, that right there at that
moment even though they might be far from Jerusalem they are already home, home
in the everlasting arms of a God who promised never to leave them or forsake
them.
This is why Isaiah is so perplexed
and asks, how can you say God doesn’t exist?
How can you say God doesn’t care?
How can you say God overlooks you, doesn’t see you? How can you say God has forgotten you? “Have you not known?” Isaiah asks. “Have you not heard?” And his question is rhetorical. Have you not known? – of course you do. I know you know. Have you not heard? – of course you
have. I know you have. I know you know the truth. Many of you do. Okay – maybe you don’t know, maybe you
haven’t heard, maybe your life-experience in exile has never exposed you to the
faithfulness of God, maybe your life-experience has never allowed to you feel
and trust and know the amazing grace of God, maybe you think God doesn’t know
your name.
So, let me proclaim this word yet
again. Know this. Hear this. Feel this. Allow these words to wash over you: “Yahweh is the everlasting God, the Creator
of the ends of the earth. Yahweh does
not faint or grow weary; Yahweh’s understanding is unsearchable. God gives power to the faint, and strengthens
the powerless. Even youths will faint
and be weary, the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the LORD
shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they
shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
How?
How does this happen? When? “Wait,” says the text. But this is more than empty waiting. It’s not like Samuel Beckett’s (1906-1989)
absurdist play “Waiting for Godot,” in which two men, Vladimir and Estragon
wait on a street corner for someone named Godot, whom they really don’t know,
who never shows up. Estragon gives into the absence and eventually says,
“Nothing to be done.”
That’s not the kind of waiting
Isaiah is talking about here. It’s not
an open-ended waiting; it’s not wait and see.
It’s far more hopeful than that.
It’s really closer to wait, as in wait in, here, stop, trust,
rest in, rest into – maybe even fall into,
lean into the arms of God. It means
letting go and then leaning, falling into a presence, a force, a strength, a
power that’s underneath, deeper than our resources, deeper than our strength or
will or wisdom or reason.
Wait. Trust. Rest. Lean.
Fall. That’s the way out of
exile. The way home calls us to wait,
trust, rest, lean, fall into the deep, abiding, faithful presence of God, trust
and rest in God’s goodness and compassion and love. This way of being, of waiting is true all the
time, but especially true in times of exile, in seasons of weariness, when we
feel exhausted and faint, and are at the breaking point. Notice that we’re not told here to “toughen
up,” we’re not told to “pull yourself together,” we’re not given the ridiculous
dictum “God helps those who helps themselves,” we’re not told to find strength
within our own resources or to “pull yourself up by our own bootstraps.” No
– instead “wait” is God’s word to us given in the midst of weary times, when we
are forced to realize and acknowledge our personal insufficiency, our
inadequacies, our weaknesses, when we confess that we are not strong
enough. We are called to yield to
Someone greater.
When I was a boy, I had a large poster
on the wall of my bedroom. I “won” it in
church school. It was an award for
perfect attendance. It was a sketch of a
large, strong, confident lion, sitting with two young cubs resting in his arms.
Off to the side of the lion were words from Isaiah 30:15, “In quietness and in confidence
shall be your strength.” I drew a lot of
comfort and assurance from that verse, especially during a period of
considerable loss and pain in my life. I
remember looking at it as if it was a word spoken directly and only for
me. We find this same theme at work throughout
Isaiah – yielding, trusting, confiding, returning. It’s how Isaiah understands
“being saved,” found less in what one believes than in resting into the safe
arms of God. The memory of the poster
returned to me this week. Since then,
there have been plenty of times when I applied that verse, the majority of the
time forgetting it. But it seems to me
now, perhaps more than before, all the more profound for the wisdom and truth
contained here.
It’s also there in the way we see
Jesus moving through the world. Yes,
full, busy days of healing, preaching, serving.
But look how he gets up early in the morning to go to a secluded place
to pray. This doesn’t mean we all have
to get up early to pray, which wouldn’t be good news if you’re not a morning
person. This is good news, however: Jesus
prayed. Now it’s probably not wise
to guess what Jesus’ prayer life was
like. I might be going out on a limb
here, but I’m pretty confident that his prayer wasn’t a sanctified “wish-list,”
full of petitions of what he wanted God to do for him. What do you imagine it was like? I imagine that it was probably full of
silence, of deep listening, of dwelling, of resting, of falling into the depths
of his being, down to the sure and solid rock-like strength of God animating
his life.
When we wait for the LORD, wait in
the LORD, trust, rest, fall into the LORD, we will discover – I promise – that
that’s the source of our strength, that’s the source of our life, and when we
are trusting and resting and dwelling in God’s presence, especially in deep prayer,
we will discover that something – Someone
– is there lifting us up, like the wind that carries the wings of an eagle, or
the energy, stamina, and drive of a long-distance runner, or the steady
confidence of someone who walks sure-footed on the road that leads to home.
[1] The term axial age or period (Ger. Achsenzeit, "axis time") was first used by the
German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) in Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The
Origin and Goal of History), to characterize the period from 800 to 200 BC
in India, China, and the Occident.
Today, it is generally used to describe a pivotal, revolutionary moment
in human history.
[2] See her book with the
same title, The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why
(Baker Books, 2008).
[3] William Butler Yeats,
“The Second Coming,” in Michael Robartes
and the Dancer (1920).
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