Isaiah 40:21-31

“They That Wait Upon the Lord”

February 5, 2006

 

I asked Bryan to read Isaiah’s poem so you might catch a sense of how dramatic and moving it is.  It is a poem that is at the same time overtly political and intensely personal. 

It is political because it is addressed to the whole people of Israel.  It is political because it encourages them to do a world-changing thing—Isaiah encourages them to have hope.

And hope is no easy thing to come by at this point in Israel’s history.  Isaiah speaks this poem to them in exile.  Once proud and mighty, even arrogant, Jerusalem was swatted down by Babylon, the superpower of its day.  Though Israel fought back repeatedly and though they called on God to help, the Babylonians overran the city, looted and destroyed the Temple, and carried their best and brightest into exile back in Babylon.  Where they sat … and sat … and sat. 

It’s not so much that they were mistreated in Babylon (though they certainly weren’t free); it’s more how weak they were and how all-powerful Babylon seemed.  Babylon’s economy and Babylon’s army ruled the world.  At first, perhaps, they thought maybe God was just testing them.  They cried their questions to God:  “How long, O Lord?  Have you forgotten us completely?”  They waited for an answer from God, but the wait was long—decades long.  People were born and died in Babylon.  And finally, gradually, they quit even asking their questions.  They decided that God did not care or did not notice or, worse yet, just wasn’t able to do anything about it.  [1]

It was into that situation that Isaiah spoke his poem.  Have you not known? he asked.  Haven’t you heard?  Haven’t you always known?  To God people are like grasshoppers and the heavens like a tent.  Rulers and presidents are nothing to God; God laughs at powerful armies.  Have you not known?  Haven’t you heard? 

Well, of course, they have known and they have heard.  It’s believing that’s hard.  It sounds nice to say that God loves us, but then why did our houses get knocked down and our families killed?  It sounds nice to say that God is all-powerful, but the emperor’s army’s winning most of the battles lately. 

But hope, Isaiah insists, finally depends on believing that God and God alone is worthy of our trust.  In Isaiah’s thinking, you either trust only God or you don’t God.  You don’t have to trust God, but God will have no rivals, no second chairs.  “Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition,” may sound like common sense, but Isaiah will have none of it.  Praise the Lord, and that’s it.  This is the sort of theology the Confessing Church used in Germany to oppose Hitler—Christ is mein Fuhrer.   It is the reason that national flags are not appropriate in sanctuaries.  In this place, at least, we’ll pledge our allegiance to God and only to God.

Trust in God leads to hope.  And hope may yet lead to courage: so long as God is God, the way things are is not the way they always have to be.  Babylon is powerful now, but not forever.  Apartheid seemed eternal in South Africa, but it was not.  Communism seemed to rule everything in Poland and Russia, but they did not.  Our country’s addiction to fuels that pollute and make us dependent on other countries may seem hopeless, but our President said last week that it is not hopeless, if we will begin to believe and change what we do.  The fact that more than 45 million Americans have no health insurance may feel unfixable, but of course we do have the resources to fix that, if we’ll just begin to believe and stand up.  Of course, what we hope for may not come right away, but it will not come at all unless we dare to hope for it.  They that wait upon the Lord, Isaiah promises, shall renew their strength.

Once again, Isaiah spoke this poem, a political poem, to a people is exile.  And it is hard for a crushed and powerless people to trust in the power of God.  In fact there may be only one situation where it is harder to trust in God’s power—and that is for people who have every other kind of power.  Who needs to wait on God when you’ve got the biggest economy and the baddest army in the world?  We may have been forced to trust in God for a while after 9/11, but we seem to have forgotten. 

Only God, says Isaiah … only God, only God.  It is an overtly political poem.

But it is also an intensely personal poem.  Which is to say that an entire nation doesn’t all at once start having hope.  The nation begins to have hope as individual people in that nation begin to have hope.  And, at least if you believe Isaiah, individuals begin to have hope as they wait on, place their trust in, the Lord and the Lord alone.  Sometimes, faith in God comes down to this:  believing that the way things are is not the way they always have to be, things that seem and feel impossible are not impossible after all for those who wait on the Lord. 

Let me read you a story, a parable written about 90 years ago by a pastor named William Barton.  The language is old-fashioned but clever and beautiful.  The only thing you need to know to make sense of the story is that in his parables Barton calls his wife “Keturah,” he calls his daughter “the daughter of Keturah,” and he calls his granddaughter “the daughter of the daughter of Keturah.”  Don’t ask me why.  The story is moving and profound.

“The Long Walk,” from Parables of a Country Parso by William E. Barton, pages 35-36.

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1Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 40-66, 27.)