Text: Isaiah 49:8-26
Being between pastorates one thing I miss is going to retirement homes to conduct worship. I take the guitar along and we sing their favourite hymns. Not wanting to brag, but I noticed that I was the only minister who played the guitar for their worship. I guess most ministers just cave to the notion that the elderly don't like or want anything to do with guitars in worship because it's too informal as if God only listens to organ music. Yet, music makes a big difference for elderly folks slowing down. I've witnessed time and again how a good toe tapping, foot-stomping hymnsing can really make the lame to leap and the deaf to hear. It brings folks back for awhile.
I also like to read passages like this one from Isaiah which deals with the LORD God's faithfulness to his people in exile. This passage was originally proclaimed to the Jewish people while they were in exile in Babylon longing to go home to Jerusalem. People in retirement homes are more or less themselves in the same boat as those exiles. Old age has conquered them and taken away their homes and friends and some of their families and left them physically and emotionally wounded. So many in retirement communities just seem to simply exist having lost much and waiting to die.
Part of the task of ministering to those in exile is helping them to see that there is still life to live, but also it is to speak what they themselves are reluctant to say or in some cases are unable to say. Some of the most forgotten people on earth are the elderly in retirement homes and they really do feel forgotten and forsaken...indeed, God-forsaken. Yet, one of the biggest faith concerns on the hearts of these people isn’t their own sense of being forgotten and forsaken. Rather, it’s that their children have turned away from the faith so that their grandchildren aren’t hearing the old, old story.
This passage from Isaiah really hits a cord with them. There is such a contrast within it between what the prophet is proclaiming to be the great things that God has done and will do for his people and the despair of Zion. Zion in this passage is not a code name for the people in exile, but rather it is the code name for Jerusalem which in these prophecies represents the LORD’s plan to save his creation. Zion is Jerusalem the home of true faith where the truly faithful worship. Yet, Zion lay in ruins because its inhabitants had become idolatrous and God had to kick them off the land into exile. Then (and a big THEN) the LORD abandoned Zion, his home, to go east with the exiles into Babylon. The LORD God did not kick them off the land telling them they couldn't come back until they cleaned up their act. He went with them. But, it had become time for the people to go back home to Zion and the LORD was raising up prophets to tell them to get going. Yet, Zion wasn’t getting the message because the prophets were with the people in Babylon as was the LORD. This is such great news that all of creation was breaking forth in praise. Yet, Zion doesn’t hear the message and is simply in despair. “The LORD has forgotten me, the LORD has forsaken me.”
Now, concerning the Jews in Babylon, there were faithful Jews among them and the exile was no cakewalk for them either. If you were willing to set your faith aside and blend into Babylonian culture, you did well. Most of the Jews in exile did just that to the extent that the largest concentration of Jews in the days of Jesus 500 years later was not in Israel but still in Babylon. For the faithful Jews, those who loved Zion, it wasn’t so easy. They obviously didn’t fit in with Babylonian culture and they found it difficult to be among their own people. Nevertheless, these faithful Jews struggled to remain faithful to a God whom they felt like and had every reason to believe had forgotten and forsaken them even though God was right there with them.
I guess if I had to describe what faith and faithfulness are I would have to throw in there continuing to accept God as God and living accordingly even when your reality is saying, “If your God is real, then your God has certainly forgotten and forsaken you.” The human side of faith which is better described not as belief but as fidelity, being actively loyal, truly doesn’t begin to kick in until you find yourself at a place in life where people are looking at you and you’re looking at yourself asking “Why do you persist in your Christian devotedness, when your LORD has so obviously forgotten you and left you hanging while the hypocritical seem to be enjoying the fullness of his blessing?” The God-given seed of real faith begins to grow when we find ourselves sticking it out with God when it seems pretty obvious that God isn’t sticking it out for us. When reality says "Despair!", faith knows there is reason to hope in the LORD and the LORD alone.
There are two messages of hope in this passage. To those in exile Isaiah's word is “You’re going home to Zion, to the city of true faith where the faithful worship. Get up and go.” In reality this was apparently a very a hard message for the exiles to hear for only a very small remnant of them actually went back. The risk and the cost of returning to the worshipful heart of God’s saving plan for his creation was just too costly. It was safer to remain in Babylon. This is struggle we each often face, the struggle with getting on with being who we are in Christ when it seems so safe just to continue in the ways of Babylon which surrounds us. Paul tells us that our lives are hidden in God with Christ. Therefore, we won't find our lives in Babylon even though it seems safe. Our lives are found along the way of the cross, in dying to ourselves, not in the ways of our mammon-based culture.
Secondly, Isaiah's word was to Zion, the home of the true faithfulness and worship through which our LORD God will save his creation. To Zion God says, “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are ever before me. Your sons hasten back, and those who laid you waste depart from you. Lift up your eyes and look around; all your sons gather and come to you. As surely as I live," declares the LORD, "you will wear them all as ornaments; you will put them on, like a bride. "Though you were ruined and made desolate and your land laid waste, now you will be too small for your people, and those who devoured you will be far away. The children born during your bereavement will yet say in your hearing, 'This place is too small for us; give us more space to live in.' Then you will say in your heart, 'Who bore me these? I was bereaved and barren; I was exiled and rejected. Who brought these up? I was left all alone, but these-- where have they come from?'" This is what the Sovereign LORD says: "See, I will beckon to the Gentiles, I will lift up my banner to the peoples; they will bring your sons in their arms and carry your daughters on their shoulders. Kings will be your foster fathers, and their queens your nursing mothers. They will bow down before you with their faces to the ground; they will lick the dust at your feet. Then you will know that I am the LORD; those who hope in me will not be disappointed."
Since the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus this has been literally true with the nail marks in his hands and with the Gentiles being grafted into God's people but I won’t speak so much to that. The point to Isaiah's word isn’t that God has a rubber band around his wrist or inked a reminder onto the palm of his hand to remind him to do something at a particular time. Rather, he’s been to the engraver and had his love for his creation and his people painfully and permanently inscribed so that we are always on his mind. To the deep despair of Zion the LORD says, “Those who hope in me will not be disappointed.” Those who hope in the LORD will not be disappointed. It takes hope not just faith in the LORD to cross through the desert to Zion leaving behind the comfort and security of Babylon. It takes hope to take the risk and pay the cost of true faith and faithful worship. Faith is not faith unless it is a real and certain hope.
This passage has something to say to small churches to churches that are dwindling off in the midst of our cultural reality of the passing of Christendom. Zion is here in our midst waiting for us to gather around the table of our LORD, but are we as a people willing to leave the comfort of Babylon and walk in hope, in the real hope of what God is really doing in our midst in bringing us to love one another, in bringing us to forgive and work for reconciliation and justice. Zion is found in our fellowship as we gather here around the Lord ’s Table. The living testimony of the love we share around this table is what proclaims to the captives “Come out.” And to those who are in darkness, it says “Be free.” “Come and join us on the way for the One who has true compassion is with us and guiding us.” We are those who are called to call out to the world inviting it to join us on the journey to Zion where the love of God flows forth like a river, flooding out to heal the nations. We have a choice. We can play at being church, a church in the comfort of Babylon that looks faithful in doing the things that we think churches are supposed to do all the while having traded our identity in Christ for worrying about money and resources all the while ignoring God’s unflinching promise that those who hope in him will not be disappointed. Babylon today is an archaeological ruin while the Jews persist. That should tell us something. We can be the church of Babylon or we can be the church that’s walking the desert to Zion embracing the possibility of dying while risking all our resources on the pearl of unconditional love that glimmers when we gather around the Lord's table in worship. It will cost us everything; our excessive wealth, our grudges. It will transform who we are as persons. Are you willing to put aside whatever it is you call church and come to this table where our LORD is and simply love one another as he has loved you each? It is hard to believe but faith and hope know that here at this table you can see and meet Jesus Christ in Zion and his healing love for you. He has indeed engraved you on the palms of his hands. Amen.
