Isaiah
60:1-6
What do you call it when God seems out to get you? When
it seems like the world is spinning towards your demise, towards your own end? I
think for a lot of us, if we’re honest, we’d call it perception. After all, you
can have a bad morning—miss the alarm, car won’t start, spilled coffee on your
shirt, missed an important phone call, lost a client—and believe that God is
out to get you, but really that’s just a string of unfortunate accidents we
might more rightly call bad luck, or horrible coincidence. So, what do you call
it when God really does seem out to get you? When someone with a religious
title tells you that God has indeed set his sights upon you, and your
destruction and downfall are imminent? Honestly,
the only word I can think of for such a position is hopeless. If God has really
made it a point to bring about your end, can it be anything other than hopeless?
I have to imagine that’s how the people of Judah must
have felt hearing the words of the prophets like Isaiah. God’s judgment was
upon them; they had failed in holding up their end of the covenant God had cut
with their ancestors, so now God was going to send a foreign power to destroy
them, to cart them off to a strange land, desecrate their temple, and pillage
their wealth. I’d call that hopeless, wouldn’t you? And I suppose it must have
felt that way, sitting in exile, in Babylon, knowing that it was the hand of
God Almighty that had brought you this far, and it didn’t really seem like
there was any end in sight. I guess you could call that “rock-bottom,”
darkness.
Maybe you haven’t been there, but it can be a terribly dark place, a place where the only true escape seems to be the cold embrace of the grave. When you’re there, there’s always somebody hanging around, trying to talk you up out of the hole, trying to shake a little sugar on the bitter pill you’re left to swallow. They say things like, “when you hit rock-bottom there’s nowhere left to go but up…when you’ve lost everything you’ve got nothing left to lose…it’s always darkest just before the dawn.” I suppose those may have been welcome words to the people of Judah as they sat in exile in Babylon; I suppose if Isaiah had climbed on a stump somewhere, held his hands aloft and declared to those enduring the punishment of God in Babylon, scattered from homes, families, and all they ever knew in the world, “Don’t worry, folks. It’s always darkest just before the dawn,” why some of them may have audibly exhaled as the weight of worry evaporated from their shoulders. I kind of doubt it, though. I mean, when you’re in that place, that place where it seems you can sink no lower, that place where it seems you’ve lost everything, that place where the darkness is pulling you deeper and deeper in—when you’re in that place, bumper-sticker theology isn’t going to do much to pull you out…especially when you wake another morning to find the world still isn’t set right and it still feels as if God is out to get you. That’s when you find that there may actually be a deeper darkness, even after the dawn.
Maybe you haven’t been there, but it can be a terribly dark place, a place where the only true escape seems to be the cold embrace of the grave. When you’re there, there’s always somebody hanging around, trying to talk you up out of the hole, trying to shake a little sugar on the bitter pill you’re left to swallow. They say things like, “when you hit rock-bottom there’s nowhere left to go but up…when you’ve lost everything you’ve got nothing left to lose…it’s always darkest just before the dawn.” I suppose those may have been welcome words to the people of Judah as they sat in exile in Babylon; I suppose if Isaiah had climbed on a stump somewhere, held his hands aloft and declared to those enduring the punishment of God in Babylon, scattered from homes, families, and all they ever knew in the world, “Don’t worry, folks. It’s always darkest just before the dawn,” why some of them may have audibly exhaled as the weight of worry evaporated from their shoulders. I kind of doubt it, though. I mean, when you’re in that place, that place where it seems you can sink no lower, that place where it seems you’ve lost everything, that place where the darkness is pulling you deeper and deeper in—when you’re in that place, bumper-sticker theology isn’t going to do much to pull you out…especially when you wake another morning to find the world still isn’t set right and it still feels as if God is out to get you. That’s when you find that there may actually be a deeper darkness, even after the dawn.
You see, the people of Judah were eventually freed from
their exile in Babylon. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah tell the stories of the
people’s return to Jerusalem, how they were allowed to return by the king of
Persia, to rebuild the wall around the city and rebuild the temple that the
Babylonians had destroyed. The darkest hour was over; dawn had arrived. When
their eyes had adjusted to the light, however, they were filled with tears of
mourning, shame, and despair, for sometimes, the deeper darkness comes after
our failures, after rock-bottom, after the dawn. Sometimes the deeper darkness
is found when our expectations crumble into disappointments. The scribe Ezra
recounts what happened when the people returned and had laid the foundation for
the temple:
When the builders laid the foundation of the
temple of the LORD, the priests in their vestments and with trumpets, and the
Levites (the sons of Asaph) with cymbals, took their places to praise the LORD,
as prescribed by David king of Israel. With praise and thanksgiving they sang
to the LORD: “He is good; his love toward Israel endures forever.” And all the
people gave a great shout of praise to the LORD, because the foundation of the
house of the LORD was laid. But many
of the older priests and Levites and family heads, who had seen the former
temple, wept aloud when they saw the foundation of this temple being laid,
while many others shouted for joy. No one could distinguish the sound of the
shouts of joy from the sound of weeping, because the people made so much noise.
And the sound was heard far away.[1]
The people who could
remember what it had once been, those who were expecting the former glory of
Solomon’s temple, wept so loudly at the pitiful site of the new temple, that
their weeping could not be distinguished from the shouts of joy from others. In
times like that, disappointment can be a deeper darkness.
It’s not unlike the father, with more mouths to feed
and fewer hours at work, who goes into the convenience store, spends his last
five dollars on a Powerball ticket, and waits in front of the television to
hear the numbers called. He has prayed. He has crossed his fingers. He is out
of ideas and out of time. For a moment, it all seems possible—to hold the
winning ticket, to go from desperate to unbelievably rich in a matter of
seconds, from scrimping and saving for spam and eggs, to steak and shrimp every
meal—it’s right there in his hands. The drafty apartment would be a distant
memory, along with the stack of pink envelopes and cut-off notices on the
counter. But his heart falls through the floor when he doesn’t even have one
number right. In times like that, disappointment can be a deeper darkness. In
times like that, hope evaporates, the light blinds you, and you begin to doubt
whether you should have ever left that which came before. Sure, it was hard.
Sure, it was dark. Sure, it was painful, but at least there you had hope.
The people of Judah wept in the midst of their
disappointment when they saw that they could not go backwards, when they
realized that the dawn only brought with it the uncovering of their
shortcomings. They wept, for when they were freed from the darkness of exile,
they found the deeper darkness of disappointment, and what may be the deepest
darkness of all—the realization that they couldn’t come out of it alone.
In the verses prior to our text, we read the prophet’s
words in verses 8 and 9: “The way of
peace they do not know, and there is no justice in their paths. Their roads
they have made crooked; no one who walks in them knows peace. Therefore justice
is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us; we wait for light, and
lo! there is darkness; and for brightness, but we walk in gloom.” In
other words, there is a confession, a realization, that the darkness is a
result of their own ignorance towards peace and justice. The people of Judah
are in darkness because they have not upheld their end of God’s covenant to be
a blessing to the nations, to live for peace and justice. The darkness is of
their own making, but they cannot undo it on their own. This is perhaps the
deepest darkness, the realization that we are the cause, yet we are incapable
of being the cure—at least we are incapable on our own.
That, perhaps more than anything, seems to be the ironic
hurdle so many of us who call ourselves people of faith cannot seem to clear. We
may confess that we are saved by grace through faith alone, but too many of us
are still hanging on to the notion that it is something we do, something we can control, something for which we are
inevitably responsible. It’s why we tend to gravitate towards religious ideas
with easy-to-follow guides, step-by-step instructions. It’s why we like
absolutist religion, with no room for unanswered questions, doubt,
contradiction, or mystery. If our faith has clear lines, steps to follow,
boundaries that separate those who are right from those who still need to come
around, then maybe, just maybe, it’s something we can do ourselves, and then
faith becomes a matter of confession, a matter of agreement, a matter of
aligning oneself with the correct ideas, people, and actions. Those are things we can do for ourselves.
But friends, do I even need to
tell you? Maybe you’ve discovered it already for yourself? Maybe you’ve yet to
break free from it? The truth is, though, no matter how hard we may strive to
do it, no matter how much we pray, read, study, act, or confess, you and I are
incapable of pulling ourselves out of the darkness we create. Because, when we
try, we only find ourselves disappointed, weeping in the shadow of what we had
hoped would be. When we try, we discover that there’s always a little more we
could do, a little farther we could go, and still not quite get there, because
so long as we are trying to do it ourselves, there is that nagging,
ever-present, sin at the root of all sins—selfishness.
The people of Judah came to that
realization in the shadow of their own disappointment in Jerusalem, so the
prophet spoke of God’s own intervention, of God’s own arrival into the world,
to bring the people out of their self-made darkness, to shine the true light so
that all of God’s people—Jew and Gentile alike, all people—may come to it, to be delivered from all of our
self-imposed darkness. “Arise, shine; for your light has come,”
the prophet proclaims to a people who seemed to be totally lost in the dark—their
own dark. The light that has come is the very presence of God, and God’s
presence—Christ’s presence, the Spirit’s presence—means you and I are not
alone, that we don’t have to pull ourselves out form our self-made darkness,
that the light of God has come to set us free, to liberate us from the darkness
of hopelessness, to drag us out of the deeper darkness of disappointment, to
bring us into the light of God’s eternal, loving presence. Amen.
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