TEXT: Isaiah 40:21-31
Winged Living
Years ago, while
traveling with my high school youth group to a handbell convention in
In
It is the heart’s fatigue imposed on
the rest of the body – life cocooned in a fortress of sheltering warmth – but
only marginally so. Life as satisfying
as watered Cream of Wheat; but at least you don’t feel so hungry. Life, in all
its immensity; volition, in all its disassembled muddle; hope in all its
distant consummation seem too crushingly large to lift, let alone to move or
impact. And so frozen in a sleeping bag
on the periphery of life, we huddle against the chill, brace ourselves for
more, and clutchingly settle for less.
It was the kind of paralysis known
by the Israelites in the years of exile and defeat. Not only were many of the people not where
they wanted to be; not only had their political and cultural world been crushed
like a pecan beneath a wheel. Acute, as
well, was a kind of Vertigo of the spirit in which everything they thought they
knew, everything they thought they understood, everything they heretofore had
trusted was upended, dismembered, and dizzied.
“Where is God?”
“Doesn’t God care?”
“Can’t God do anything
that matters, and if so, why isn’t it happening?”
Enter the prophet
Isaiah. Scholars discern a voice in this
morning’s reading different from the author of the first 39 or so
chapters. If that earlier prophet warned
the people of impending calamity, this “second Isaiah” reflects theologically
on the calamity that has already taken place.
If the “first Isaiah’s” task was hard enough – trying to bend the
national will and direction in a holier direction, his successor had no easier
an assignment: re-lighting the fire of
faith and vision that bitter experience had extinguished and pain-filled tears
had damped. Demoralized, depressed and
embittered, the only thing they now believed was that they didn’t know what to
believe.
The verses we have read
this morning represent Isaiah’s disputation.
It is his intent to argue with the doubts and hesitations that “impede
an exiled people’s embracing the message of God’s imminent entry into their
lives to restore their community to integrity in its homeland.”[1]
“So,” the Israelites
insisted, “how are we supposed to believe that God can accomplish any kind of
meaningful deliverance, given the kind of opposition we have faced? Given the complexity of the cosmos and all its
celestial hosts, can we really believe that one
God controls our destiny?”[2]
They aren’t merely historical or
academic questions. For example, if any
President ever dared to give an honest
assessment of the “State of the
The civil rights
movement has taken gigantic strides on behalf of certain slices of our human
community, but instead of eradicating prejudice as the disease that it is, we
have only reallocated it to the detriment of another. Creative ingenuity and the market economy
have put at our fingertips electronic marvels and the world’s unfolding
intelligence, at the same time that the gap between rich and poor has widened to
a chasm, and privations our minds had confined to the other side of the globe
are manifest in our own neighborhoods and towns.
It is shameful how many
among us can’t financially reach a doctor or bring home a prescription. It’s embarrassing how many children don’t
know how to read – or don’t have attentive enough parents to help them learn. It’s frightening how militantly extreme some
bigotries have become. It’s haunting how
superficial is our knowledge of one another.
We are mighty and
strong, but we are vulnerably weak. We
are intellectually advanced and forever pushing the envelope of what is imaginatively
possible, but all the while we are spiritually lost and socially
infantile. After all this time, after
all we have invented, after everywhere we’ve gone – to the moon and beyond and
safely back home again – we still don’t know how to live together; still don’t
know how to live with ourselves. We’ve
learned well how to ask how we might accomplish something, but have forgotten
how to ask whether or not we should.
All our thrashing has done little
more than dig for ourselves a deeper hole.
And it is tempting, sometimes, when the gravity of it all – the
despondent immensity of it all – settles upon us to simply stay there: in the hole.
Into the numb of this morass, the
prophet raises his voice to shake us from our sleep. A word of disclaimer: if you are on top of your game, dancing on
your successes and making snow-angels in the froth of the heavy cream in which
you are floating – if you have never been mired in the spiritual lethargy of
the soul’s dark night and everything is working in your favor – then you
probably can’t even hear what the prophet is saying. This is not a passage for those who are
rolling merrily down the stream. But for
those who are weary, feeling lost and abandoned, fearful and helpless and cold,
Isaiah offers an invigorating breeze.
“Have
you not known,” he rhetorically asks the Hebrews – knowing
full well that the answer is “yes.” “Have you not heard? Has it not been told you
from the beginning,” the prophet invites his hearers to recall. “The Lord is the one who sits above the
circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers. The Lord is the one who stretches out the
heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in. Look at the stars. Who created them all?
Surely it is God,” asserts Isaiah. “Surely it is God who brings out their host
and numbers them, calling them all by name.
In fact, it is because of God’s strength and might that not one is
missing.
In light of all that, continues
the prophet, “Tell me why it is that you believe God has forgotten you. Tell me why it is you think God now inept or
aloof or perhaps worst of all, impotent.
You’ve concluded in your misery that all creation must be miserable as
well – the earth and the sky and the One whose word caused it all to be.”
“Listen,” says Isaiah,
“and hear the good news. Hear it as the
song of life it has the power to be.
Hear it, and hum it, and let it stir dance to your feet: the Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the
earth. God does not faint or grow weary; God’s understanding is
unsearchable. God gives power to the
faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and
the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord
shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they
shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
Such are the words of
the prophet. As such, so have they come
to us as the very words of the Lord. Can
it not, then, be asked of us, when we are tempted to despair and settle for little
– or less – “Have you not known? Have you
not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood
from the foundations of the earth?” Buoyed
and blown by the gracious and mighty breath of God,
we
can
fly.