Epiphany 5B, 4 February 2024. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
- Isaiah 40:21-31. Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? [Yes!]
- 1 Corinthians 9:16-23. In my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge.
- Mark 1:29-39. So that I may proclaim the message.
O God of wonder, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
I’m going to interrupt my preaching on the Gospel of Mark this week to spend a few moments to talk with you about our Hebrew Bible lesson from the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, because it’s one of my favorites. Actually it’s Second Isaiah, which is what Chapters 40 through 55 get called, because they were so clearly written at a different time by a different author than the first thirty-nine chapters or the last eleven. The writer of Second Isaiah might be considered the great poet, rather than the great prophet. This writer never once refers to herself as a prophet. I imagine her words might have come to Jesus’ mind sometimes, especially when he was able to find a deserted place to pray while it was still very dark.
What we hear today in Isaiah is a portion of the overture to an opus of consolation. If you can think back nine weeks or so to the second Sunday in Advent (or to the last performance of Messiah you heard) you’ll recall the first part of Chapter 40: “Comfort, O comfort, my people, says your God.” Do you remember that comfort means with strength? [1]
With strength, O with strength, my people, speak tenderly to the ransacked city of peace, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is more than fully paid….A voice cries out: in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in a desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.
In other words, do whatever engineering is necessary to facilitate the reunification of God and her people. “Then shall the splendor of Love be revealed, and all people will see it together.” God, Who is Love, is going to gather up the lambs and carry them and gently lead the mother sheep.
What we hear today is the last portion of this tender overture, a continuation of a love song written to bring relief to people who had been in exile for more than half a century. This is a song for those who were the weary and dispirited grandchildren of deportees. These were folks living far away, estranged from the former center of their people’s faith and skeptical about the ability of the Divine to make any difference at all in their terrible circumstances. These were people exiled in Babylon, which, in our biblical narrative, stands for a rapacious social system of unbridled consumerism and militarism. Walter Brueggemann describes the poetry of this overture as both pastoral and political. [2]
It contains assurance that the people are not alone and are not forgotten. The source of life itself is with them, encouraging them to re-imagine and re-construe life in terms of …the creator who brings to naught princes and politicians. And it must have seemed as preposterous then as it does now.
(It does seem preposterous, doesn’t it? All the more reason to lean into it, in my view.)
So let’s imagine that this poet is writing a prescription for us, in our time, right now, whenever we are weighed down with sorrows. Let’s imagine that this prescription might provide some healing for whatever despair threatens to swamp us. First comes the reminder that we have known and heard, indeed have been told from the beginning, that it is God Who sits above the circle of the earth. Now before you get all boxed into a mental picture of a white-haired guy in long robes sitting on a throne, in whom we do not believe, take a breath. Think of how cool it is that this ancient poet understood the earth to be a circle. Think of how interesting it is that this ancient poet was using metaphorical language for a Divine One, Whose perspective of the world was infinitely larger than a statue or a doll made from wood, overlaid with gold and silver, and able to be toppled (knocked off a shelf). According to the verses just preceding these, those were the gods of Babylon. The great poet said, “They couldn’t stand-up to or hold a candle to the God of your grandparents, the Holy One of Israel.”
Take a moment to think about the memories of your grandparents: not your memories about them, but their memories. That gets you back four or five generations. You might have heard those memories firsthand or second hand; or maybe you didn’t hear any of their memories; and you might have to imagine what their memories might have been. If you’re lucky enough to have grandparents living, you might find a time to talk with them about their memories of childhood and young adulthood.
You might know something of the faith of your grandparents: it might be some kind of traditional religious faith, but it might not have been traditional faith at all. Re-member the memories of your grandparents; in times of despair, bring them to mind. And remember their future: you are living it; you are it! Remember your own future. What have you known, heard, and been told from the very beginning that you are being called to understand in an entirely new way? What might your coming to a new understanding require of you? [3] So first, remember what you have been told, and make it your own.
Second comes the teaching that the inhabitants of the earth are like grasshoppers. This isn’t a particularly beautiful assertion (to my mind anyway); grasshoppers are pests! I also think of David Carradine’s character in that funky 70’s television eastern-western, “Kung Fu”. For those of you over sixty, remember his teacher called him “Grasshopper”? And he used his memories of the Zen wisdom of his teacher to confront injustices he encountered. Although it’s ten days early, remembering that we are all like grasshoppers is a little bit like the Ash Wednesday admonition to remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. I don’t know about you, but that reminder is both comforting and freeing for me. If we remember that we are dust, specks of dirt, then I can lower my expectations and see that we’re actually doing pretty well!
Finally, the great poet Isaiah is calling out to the people of God, in the midst of so much suffering and death, to look up at the eternal beauty of the starry sky and see what God has created. It reminds me of an Oscar Wilde quotation on a magnet in my study at home: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” The great poet of Isaiah is cultivating some awe, some wonder, some amazement with her command: “Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these?” That’s the question from our first reading. Who, as some of you know, is one of the names of the Holy One in Hebrew scripture, according to the tradition of Jewish mysticism. Who is a name for God. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner writes that the author of the thirteenth-century Kabbalist text, the Zohar, makes Isaiah 40:26 the linchpin for his whole introduction. “He looks up to the sky, to what he calls ‘the place toward which all eyes gaze,’ and asks, ‘Who created these?’…The author of the Zohar answers the question by saying…[yes]…‘Who created these.” [4] Who? Yes, of course.
The great poet’s prescription for revival, for spiritual rejuvenation, for rekindled passion for the Holy One, is to look at the stars in the sky, which are not, as the Babylonians asserted, rival gods. They are witnesses – those beautiful stars; they burn in testimony to the greatness of the creator. Imagine that the Holy One is bigger than billions of stars, which are light-years apart from each other and from us. That means imagining that the Holy One is bigger than any war or famine; bigger than the next natural or unnatural disaster, the next election, the next cancer diagnosis, layoff, or divorce; bigger than any disagreement or argument; bigger than life, and bigger even than death. Essayist Diane Ackerman says, “Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.” Part of the ancient and great poet’s prescription for consolation and revival is to be still and know the incomparability of the Holy One. One medicine for despair is to cultivate some wonder, some amazement, some awe, even a tiny fleck of it.
Listen to this contemporary poem from Chelan Harkin. It’s called G-AWE-D.
[5]
I don’t like the word God.
G-O-D
God.
Two hard consonants
shut
like solid doors
around the ‘O’
the Oh!
the Awe
the softly infinite.
But crack open the hard walls
around this name
as far as your hinges have learned
to give
and throw the ‘G’
and the ‘D’
like twigs
into whatever you want to call the enormity
of that blaze
that feeds the ‘O’
the Awe
the Circle
fed brighter by all things
that once seemed to stand
in light’s way.
- Isaiah 40: 1-5 & 11.
- See Walter Brueggemann’s Isaiah 40-66 volume of the Westminster Bible Commentary series (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998).
- Andy Kille’s question in Bible Workbench 19:2, February 5, 2012.
- This story is best told in Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s novel, Kabbalah: A Love Story (New York: Morgan Road Books, 2006), pp. 56-7.
- Chelan Harkin, Susceptible to Light (self-published, 2020).