Isaiah 40:21-31
21 Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? 22 It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; 23 who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. 24 Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows upon them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble. 25 To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One. 26 Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? He who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name; because he is great in strength, mighty in power, not one is missing. 27 Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, "My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God"? 28 Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. 29 He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. 30 Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; 31 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.
The longer I live, the more I notice just how out of sorts life can get in the wake of pain, grief, sorrow—really just any general negativity. It seems as if the world around us completely stops spinning, as if we’ll never be able to get on with our lives, like there’s never going to be any sense of normalcy or happiness ever again. To some degree, this is normal: to be young and experience the sting of a first heartbreak, believing you’ll never find true love again and that all the joy in the world has been drowned in an ocean of your tears (or some sappy notion like that). It’s normal, to grieve the passing of a loved one—especially a tragic passing—for a time. For most of us, this feeling of being stuck, these feelings of futility and hopelessness, pass with time and the healing presence of others in our lives. There are those of us, however, for whom the days never seem to grow brighter, the world never seems to be set right, those of us for whom every day is just another periodic reminder of the darkness from which we cannot escape.
Like the daughter—in her sixties now—who cannot let go of the grief that came with her mother’s death over fifteen years ago. The shadow of her despair lingers in the corners of her home, in the numerous shrines to her long-departed mother; it creeps its way into every conversation and every drag of a cigarette and every swig of water taken to wash down the pills. For her, the earth was thrown off its axis the day her mother died, and from that time on she’s wallowed in the dark shadows of that pain, never allowing the realities of life, death, and time to heal her heart.
Then there’s the ex-husband, the one who didn’t see it coming. After twenty years and two kids, he came home to find a letter stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet. Twenty years, and all he got was a letter, followed by a visit to the lawyer’s office. Twenty years, and all he got was an occasional drop in from the kids from whom he’d weasel the latest gossip. It’s been twenty years now, and he still keeps his ring in his pocket, her picture in his wallet, and he winces whenever the kids mention her new last name. For him, that day was the beginning of the end, the first day he began looking forward to his last.
There are those people for whom there seems to be no escaping the tragedies of life and the repercussions that follow. Like those people, the ones who had believed they were God’s special people, a chosen nation, blessed and untouchable, they believed that theirs was a nation that would continue on in perpetuity, but then the Babylonians came. The king Nebuchadnezzar led his forces into the capital, exiled the elites, the leaders, the upper-crust, raided the riches of the temple, and left the rest to be divided among his own people who would intermarry with the remaining “chosen people.” In exile, these people of God began to despair, to believe that the world as they knew it—as they wanted it—was over. They were surrounded by the idols of a foreign people, surrounded by the visible signs that they had lost (and by extension, that their God had lost). They were reminded with each new day that they were not home, that they may never return home, and that in the grand scheme of geo-political power, they were little more than a pawn on the chessboard. For so many of them, all that was left was to accept their fate, to slump into the belief that God was gone and with him went hope and the joy of the future they once envisioned.
Into this supposed hopelessness, the prophet speaks these words: “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.” While you’ve all been in exile, giving in to what you perceive as the inevitability of defeat and assimilation, have you forgotten what you’ve been told since you were little? Have you forgotten all those songs you sang in Sunday School? Have you forgotten about the very nature of your God? You’re worried about the power of princes, presidents, dictators, and emperors, yet God is so far above that! You don’t worship a God whose fate is determined by the outcome of wars fought by men, of laws passed by governments. Yours is a God who hangs the sky like it was a set of curtains in the guest room, spreads them out like a pup tent over the weekend. Yours is a God who by mere presence shows the reality of the way things are—that the people of the earth are like grasshoppers, their rulers come and go and are easily forgotten as their memories fade with the pages of history books. The prophet arrives to remind these exiled people that their God is beyond their present pain, that there is hope to be found in the very transcendent nature of God.
I think the truth of that reality, of God’s transcendence, is one which we seem to lose over time, but not when things are going wrong. No, we seem to lose sight of God’s true transcendent nature when things are going well, when we’re getting everything we want, when our ducks are in a row, and everything is going according to plan. It’s in those times that we lose sight of the reality of God, because it’s in those times that we begin to take God for granted, that God is blessing all that we do, that God is pleased with everything we are. We buy into the inverted narrative of exile: if nothing is wrong, then everything must be right (and alright with God).
Think with me for a moment about the exiles to whom the prophet is speaking in our text this morning. Now, were they exiled unfairly? Was the arrival of the Babylonians an accident of history, the inevitability of a world superpower consuming land, resources, and people on its way towards global dominance? Were they being picked on? No! The Babylonian captivity was (according to the prophets) a direct result of the people of Judah’s actions: their actions towards the poor, the strangers, the vulnerable among them, and their overall greed. As far as the people were concerned, before the Babylonians showed up, everything was fine, because the rich were getting richer and the poor were keeping their mouths shut. As far as they were concerned, they were fat and happy, so God must also be happy.
We lose sight of God’s nature, of God’s calling on our lives when we don’t have to wait on God to set everything right. When life glides on effortlessly, when things are without complication or confusion, that’s when we begin to misunderstand God’s true nature, because it is in those seasons of our lives when we can so easily fall into believing that everything has God’s blessing on it. That’s really why we begin to doubt and question and fear when troubles come, because we’ve taken it for granted that everything else was blessed by God. It’s why the prophet says, Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, "My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God"? Why do you think your way is hidden from the Lord? Why do you think you have been disregarded by God? Because you’ve had to wait a little while in exile? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. It’s as if the prophet is saying, “Why are you suddenly concerned about being hidden from God? Why do you suddenly think God has disregarded you? Don’t you get it? God is above all this; God made all of this. Can you really understand God?”
Then, there are these great poetic lines: He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted. Power to the faint? Strength to the powerless? Youths will faint and young will fall exhausted (I’m assuming “young” means something besides three years old here…)? That doesn’t make sense. Why would God grant power to those on the brink of passing out? Why would God grant strength to those without power? Why? Because those are the ones who need it, and they know it. You see, of course the youth with faint and be weary—they’ll eventually grow old, tired, exhausted. Of course those who are carrying on in their lives as if God has blessed every step they take and every decision they make will eventually run out of breath—we all do! But when the days come when youth has disappeared, when strength has gone, when power has faded, all that we’ll have left to do is wait, 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.
It turns out, that we really don’t get the nature of who God is until we have to wait for God, until we have to understand that everything we think is our own, everything we think we’ve earned, everything to which we believe we are entitled, is nothing more than junk on its way to dust. It turns out that we can really only find our strength when we realize we don’t have any in the first place, that we can only soar to the heights of this life when we realize such heights are on an entirely different plane from the one we use to measure success, that we can only walk and not faint when we realize we’re really too weak to stand on our own.
When things are going great, we can give our religious obligation to God (show up to church, put a few dollars in the plate, say the blessing at the dinner table) and believe that everything we have and everything we do is blessed and approved by the Almighty. When things take a turn for the worse, we can wallow in self-pity, linger for too long in the dark shadows of our own needs for reassurance and security. We can go through this life believing that it’s in our hands or believing that every choice we make is somehow predestined in some intricate plan set before the foundations of the world and we’re just living it out in real-time. Or we can choose to believe that we worship a God who transcends our ways of thinking, a God who could quite possibly hang the sky like a curtain and pitch a tent with the stars, a God who does not come and go with the fleeting notions of religion, politics, or culture, a God who does not grow weary with the passing of time, a God who does grants strength to the powerless and help to the helpless, a God who does not run on our clock, by our rules, according to our expectations, a God worth waiting for. Amen.
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