by Rev. Kevin J. McLemore

Isaiah 52:1-12

Awake, awake,
   put on your strength, O Zion!
Put on your beautiful garments,
   O Jerusalem, the holy city;
for the uncircumcised and the unclean
   shall enter you no more.
Shake yourself from the dust, rise up,
   O captive Jerusalem;
loose the bonds from your neck,
   O captive daughter Zion!

For thus says the Lord: You were sold for nothing, and you shall be redeemed without money. For thus says the Lord God: Long ago, my people went down into Egypt to reside there as aliens; the Assyrian, too, has oppressed them without cause. Now therefore, what am I doing here, says the Lord, seeing that my people are taken away without cause? Their rulers howl, says the Lord, and continually, all day long, my name is despised. Therefore my people shall know my name; therefore on that day they shall know that it is I who speak; here am I.

How beautiful upon the mountains
   are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,
who brings good news,
   who announces salvation,
   who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’
Listen! Your sentinels lift up their voices,
   together they sing for joy;
for in plain sight they see
   the return of the Lord to Zion.
Break forth together into singing,
   you ruins of Jerusalem;
for the Lord has comforted his people,
   he has redeemed Jerusalem.
The Lord has bared his holy arm
   before the eyes of all the nations;
and all the ends of the earth shall see
   the salvation of our God.

Depart, depart, go out from there!
   Touch no unclean thing;
go out from the midst of it, purify yourselves,
   you who carry the vessels of the Lord.
For you shall not go out in haste,
   and you shall not go in flight;
for the Lord will go before you,
   and the God of Israel will be your rearguard.

Not surprisingly, those who put together the recommended texts that form our three-year Lectionary have put this text before us today, the day we Christians celebrate the birth of our Christ.  It is a perfect text in many ways, but we do it a disservice if we forget the context here, if we don’t actually acknowledge what first gave birth to these words thousands of years ago, the background of the text in its full historical context.  As I’ve explained in other sermons, much of these words are written in response to a situation that seemed hopeless—the best and brightest of Israel’s people are being held hostage in Babylon; Jerusalem, holy Jerusalem has been in ruins for decades now, and the few broken people left within its ruins reflect the broken buildings all around them.  The world has become a mess and the lives of God’s people, of Israel, captive in Babylon and also captive within the ruins of Jerusalem, they have lost hope and faith in the future, in the possibility that something better may yet come to them and their children.  And so here the writer of Isaiah writes, he writes with great passion and generous grace and powerful beauty, hoping to give his ancient readers in Babylon the hope that they do not have within themselves at the moment.  There is something about these words that are beautifully and authentically desperate, as if the prophet is fearful that the people will no longer believe in the God who has promised them a homecoming to Jerusalem. 

We all probably know of that kind of desperation—you can sometimes find it in the lives of our friends, and even in our own lives—the dying glimmer of hope in ourselves or in others, and we spend time stoking the embers so that we can go on, because without hope life seems impossible.  I’ve seen people almost demand that others they are trying to help have hope, that they believe what does not seem reasonable to the hopeless one to believe; these good people demand that others continue to hold onto hope even it feels as if hope has walked out of the room for the person they are trying to help.  Sometimes people get desperate with each other—if you don’t have hope, if you don’t believe there is a way home, a better ending than the one we’re looking at, then somehow your lack of hope and faith diminishes me or threatens me, some people mistakenly think.  I often see that with people who are trying to help their love ones struggle out of the deep darkness of personal depression: they think they can somehow talk their loved one into having hope, hope that is not visible to the one who is sitting in their world of shadows.  Sometimes the writer of Isaiah feels that way to me—there is a desperation to his writing, even within its beauty and power—he knows that the people are on the edge of hopelessness, of giving up, and he writes to ask them to have hope yet one more time, to believe yet one more time in the possibility that God will once again bring the people home, as God did in Egypt hundreds of years earlier.  It is a crazy proposition, really, because it didn’t look good—and it didn’t seem likely that they would ever go home again, and certainly it was an ever crazy idea that Jerusalem, now in ruins, now haunted by the jackals of the countryside, would ever return to its former glory. 

But the prophet knows that we cannot be fully alive if we do not have hope, if we do not believe that God can make a way in a world in which we believe that there is no way.  Hope is what keeps us alive—that is why depression is probably the most difficult human struggle, because when hope dies within us, everything else starts to die within us.  Lisel Mueller, the gifted poet whom we heard in the centering words, ends her poem with these words: 

It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another,
it is in this poem, trying to speak.

Exactly—that is what hope does: it offers the possibility of something else, of yet more of life, of the goodness found within the world, even if the darkness seems more overwhelming than the light at this moment.  But hope is a hard thing to come by nowadays: it’s interesting that most of the polls that try to gauge the optimism of my generation find a profound lack of hope for the future—most of us believe that we will not live as well as our parents did, that our futures will not be as bright as the present, and that is something that is a new phenomenon, according to the pollsters who study these sorts of things, at least new in the last 50 years or so in this country.  For some reason, we look into the future, and it does not look better than it does now—in fact, it looks worse—we seem to be a generation without hope.

And yet, and yet, Christmas arrives, and a child is born, born to parents with no means, born to a country with no prospects of a future, strangled as it is by the power of Rome, born to us, again and again, year after year, reminding us that there is hope, there is life, there is a future, that there is serum that can rid of us the disease of hopelessness.  Sure, it may come back again, this disease, but that is why the story of Jesus being born is celebrated year after year, to remind us that the cure exists, that we can become pregnant with hope yet again, despite the odds of it happening yet one more time.  People like Isaiah are the people who remind us that God yet reigns in this world, that hope and life are the end of the story, of every story that God writes, which is all the stories ever told on this side of eternity or the other side of eternity.

And that’s all fine and good, I suppose, but most of us who’ve experienced times of hopelessness—and I suspect that is most of us in this room—most of us don’t have someone like Isaiah in our lives to breathe that kind of hope into our hopeless lives.  And yet, of course, maybe we do.  All of us can be an Isaiah for each other, and maybe our work with each other is all about reminding each other that whatever Babylon we find ourselves captive in, there will be a time, there will be a moment when God tells us to arise out of the ground, to shake the dust off our feet, and to make our way towards home.  Maybe that is what you need to tell me when I am in Babylon and I feel homeless, and maybe that what I need to share with you when you are in Babylon and you feel homeless.  Maybe we need to keep reminding each other that a child is born, there is a hope, no matter how deep the night, or hopeless the cause.  And maybe that is one of the reasons we gather with each other each and every week—to draw upon each other’s hope when our hope is seemingly spent and gone. 

William Hoffman, in his wonderful short story called THE QUESTION OF RAIN tells of a story of a well-meaning minister who is beset by his congregation to hold a worship service specifically calling for rain for the drought stricken farming land of his congregants.  But Wayland, the minister, is reluctant, in good Calvinistic fashion, he’s simply reluctant to specifically ask God for rain, since rain may not be in God’s will for the people of that county, at least not at the moment—but more than anything he is especially reluctant to conduct a specific service for rain, where everyone comes together with the singular purpose of asking God for nothing else but rain.  

When first asked to lead the prayer service by some members of his congregation, the minister promises to pray personally but declines their suggestion of a prayer service—“I’m not a medicine man,” he thinks, “and I’m not going to do a rain-dance, as if I could manipulate or prompt God into action by doing something, as if God was just waiting for us to pray to open up the floodgates above.”  But again and again he is asked by yet more members a worship service for rain, and eventually even people outside the church begin to ask him about it, and it soon becomes a crisis of faith for him—“are we afraid to put our faith to the test?—one of his church member’s asks him, a member he respects for his faithfulness and wisdom.  The pastor in Hoffman’s story is right, in a way, or his instincts are right, at least—he’s skeptical about trying to convince God to send rain—after all, he just assumes that God wants the best for them, which we would all assume would be rain for the farmers in this county.  But what he forgot in the midst of his desire to not set up God for failure is that the congregation was never really asking for rain as much as they were asking for a chance to gather together and be transformed by the act of asking for a miracle, by the act of hoping together, of believing together.  And even more importantly, unlike the pastor in the story, they did not fear an answer that might include a “no”—they just needed to ask God for help, and to hope together that God would answer their prayers.  They didn’t fear a negative answer from God as much as they feared not asking God in the first place, of not hoping together that rain might fall, and of not hoping together that deliverance from their own captivity might just happen as well, just as it did for Israel thousands of years ago.  And so, in the end, the pastor says yes to their requests for a prayer service for rain, and I conclude the sermon with the end of Hoffman’s story, right after the prayer service:

[Wayland, the pastor,] would not anticipate.  Rain wasn’t necessary.  He and his congregation had acknowledged God’s fathership, which was the main thing.  He turned his back to the window, so he wouldn’t be tempted to judge the quality of the afternoon sunlight edging the drawn shade.

Yet he felt a stillness, the absolute hush of the day.   Even the locusts were silent.  A distant rumble had to be a truck. He stood, went downstairs, and walked out onto the screened porch where [his wife] Mims sat. She wore her lavender church dress in case of visitors, but had pushed off her white pumps so that her heels were free. 

The expression on her clean face was strange as she gazed upward.  He looked at the sky and, tingling, saw the dazzling cloud growing, building rapidly into a thunderhead, the underside purplish, the crown of radiant whiteness seething as it mounted into a cathedral of a cloud.  People came from their houses to stare.  Then Wayland felt a coolness, a nudge of air, and knew rain must be close.

In wonder Mims watched the sky. Wayland’s amazement gave way to rapture as the majestic thunderhead conquered the heavens.  He realized his mouth had opened as if to catch the rain on his lips.  The pressure of gratitude brought him near to weeping. 

During the slashing, luminous rain, he put on his shorts to walk in the yard.  With his face uplifted, he gave thanks.  Children, despite lightning, ran in the streets, and across glossy lawns.  Adults too splashed through puddles.  The artificial pond in his rock garden overflowed.  The telephone rang so often that Mims, now wearing her pink bathing suit, took it off the hook. 

That is what we are to do, I think, to hear those words of hope together and then to hope with each other, and then to finally to dance with each other, when the rain finally falls, dance when the Christ child is born, and dance when we get to go back home, out of Babylon, and back towards home, back home towards to whatever place we call home, to our own version of Jerusalem, back to the hope that keeps us alive and makes life worth living.  Friends, the child is born Christ is born, and hope is alive, and hope will overcome all.  Amen.