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These words were spoken to the people of Israel towards the end of the Babylonian captivity. They are a message of hope expressing confidence in God’s ability to do what he says he’ll do. Just as sure as the rain will make the crops grow, so the word God spoke to his people in captivity will accomplish their purpose. In the previous chapters, the Prophet Isaiah boldly proclaimed to these captives in Babylon that God would soon be returning them to the Promised Land where they would rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple and people from all over would flock to their Land after seeing what God had done for them.
Of course, this word sounded great to these captives…or so we would think. How could these captives resist this irresistible invitation from God to return home? Well, they did. In the end, apparently only a handful of people, just a few thousand returned. Believe it or not, until the Middle Ages the largest population of Jews in the world was not in the Holy Lands (even in the days of Jesus) but in Babylon, near modern day Baghdad in Iraq. It turns out that captivity wasn’t so bad. In Babylon, the people of Israel thrived. They built homes, farms, and businesses and became quite comfortable…so comfortable that most chose to stay in the land of their captivity rather than return to the Land that God had promised them.
Now, about those few who returned. They were a very small remnant who despised their captivity in Babylon because it kept them from being the people God had meant them to be. God did not bring their ancestors out of slavery in Egypt for them to become comfortable captives in Babylon. Rather, God had freed them from slavery in Egypt and established them in the Land to be his own people so that through them God could show the world that He is the one true God and there is no other. But time and again the Israelites refused to be God’s people and time and again they chose to live like the nations around them. They were supposed to be a nation that looked after their poor and practiced justice in a way that would emanate peace to the nations around them. But instead, they in time began to abuse the poor for profit. Their justice system became corrupt and favoured the rich. They even began sacrificing their own children to pagan gods in the belief that doing so would give them power and success. Those were the reasons reasons that in 586 BC God raised up the Babylonians against them to destroy them as a nation, destroy the Temple, and take them off the Land into captivity in Babylon.
While in captivity, there was a small remnant who realized why God had kicked them off the land. They decided they wanted to preserve their heritage of faithfulness. So, they began to put together most of the Old Testament as we know it today. They did this because they wanted their children to hear the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, the Judges, David, and Solomon. Instead of sacrificing their children to the false gods of the false securities of wealth and power, they wanted their children to know who they were as a people, that they were God’s people, and so that they could be the people God had set them free from slavery in Egypt to be.
It was to this faithful remnant that God spoke through Isaiah the word that we hear in the weeks before Christmas, “Comfort, O Comfort my people…Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” Make a highway in the desert so that the Lord could come and get his people to take them home. That word, the word that they were going home, going back to the Land to rebuild, that word is the one that was as sure to be fulfilled as the rain and snow watering the ground causes seeds to sprout to give food. For an unimaginable and incomprehensible reason God had forgiven his people of their betrayal, idolatry, greed, and of their abuse of their own people and was coming to take them home. God’s thoughts and ways are not like ours. What God had to offer was his presence with them and a blessing of joy and peace free of charge like buying wine and milk without money and without price.
This word was good news to the remnant among the captives who hungered and thirsted for the Lord and to be his people but for those other captives, the comfortable captives, that word might as well of never been spoken. They didn’t care. Babylon wasn’t so bad. They likely felt blessed to be there like we do when we look at how good we’ve got it and call ourselves blessed. To these captives of comfort God had a question, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” God was offering to them his blessing, his sure love, contentment and joyful peace and most importantly his presence with them. Why were they spending their lives to simply be comfortable captives in Babylon?
Isaiah’s invitation to these comfortable captives was, “Seek the Lord while he may be found. Call upon him while he is near.” Another way of saying that would be, “Come, now while the time is right. Turn from your self-serving comfort and come home. God will be with you.” But as I said earlier, the largest concentration of Jews in the world up through the Middle Ages was in Babylon. God’s word for the most part fell on deaf ears. The majority of God’s people there in captivity were so comfortable that they no longer realized they were in captivity and just spending their lives on things that cannot feed the deep-down hungers and thirsts of life. They probably even considered themselves blessed.
When I was in seminary, I took a class on the prophets and we read a book by one of today’s brightest interpreters of the Prophets, Walter Brueggemann. It was titled The Hopeful Imagination. Brueggemann’s point was that preaching to the church today is not much different than preaching to those captives in Babylon because we are indeed captives to comfort who have compromised our freedom to be God’s people for the sake of living as the gods of our culture say we ought to live. We are quite content with our wealth and privilege to the extent that we would consider ourselves blessed because we have it. If this were Canada Day, I might pontificate a bit more on that, on how we are indeed captives to the comfort our freedoms afford.
Brueggemann wrote that book in 1986, at the beginning of the period which I would call the last heyday of the church in North America. If you are in your seventies and eighties now you were in your thirties and forties then and just getting established with career and a young family. The economy would soon begin to turn sharply up and the temptation was to become very comfortable in Babylon with a Christian faith that was very geared towards health, wealth and individual success.
Well, that was 30-40 years ago. I was ordained in 1997. The church has changed dramatically in the 26 years since. The church is majoratively no longer the church geared to serving young families with education and outreach programs. Most congregations today have a lot more in common with that small faithful remnant that persisted during the Babylonian Captivity than with the comfortable captives of Babylon because for the most part the comfortable captives today have left the church. They say "we're done with it" or "spiritual but not religious".
We, the remnant, would love to hear God speak the word that he is taking us home, back to the Promised Land of churches filled with families that have thriving ministries geared towards raising children in the faith and serving the community around us. We would love to hear that word, but frankly I don’t believe that is word that God is speaking today. I think it’s our wanting to hear that particular word that is keeping us from hearing the word of hope that God actually is speaking today, the word, the effectual word, that will accomplish what God spoke and won’t return to him empty.
To clear this spiritual build up in our ears so that we can hear God’s word for today we must take Isaiah’s invitation to the Comfortable Captives seriously. We, the Remnant, need to seek the Lord while he may be found, turn from our comfortableness in trying to continue to do church the way we’ve always done it, and turn to a more personal, prayerful relationship with God in which we grow more and more aware of God’s felt presence with us. Our personal, devotional lives matter. Gathering together to pray and study the Scriptures matter especially when we also take the time to eat together. I suppose that if Jesus did do all that walking around, he would like have been quite heavy for all the meals, indeed feasts, he shared with people or should I say that people shared with him.
We must also work to build a faithful community founded on God’s love, hope, healing and forgiveness as shown to us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and experienced in us by the indwelling of God’s Spirit. Building that community requires that we, ourselves, the Remnant, also turn from the security and the comfort that hold us captive - our prejudices, our judgementalism, our fear of people who are different.
More than that, we must above consider ourselves dead to life as we want to live it even now in our later years of retirement after we’ve worked all our lives to have life the way we want it. Each one of us individually has got to want more than anything else to be recreated anew into the image of Jesus. Paul said, "I was crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me." We are dead, but Jesus is living in us and through us. We have got to want more than anything else that God reflect his love through our lives. We have got to be the faithful remnant who want nothing more than to be God’s people. Amen.
