Isaiah 40.1-5
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado
 
You and I are not the first people to live in difficult political times. We are not the first people to feel as though our world might be at an end. We are not the first people who need the cycle of lament, comfort, and hope. We are not the first people to turn to God in a vexing, unstable time.

About 540 BC, when this middle section of Isaiah was written, some of the best and brightest in Jerusalem had been taken into captivity in Babylon, an abduction that lasted for nearly 60 years. Can you imagine what kind of fear and hopelessness you would feel if your favorite political and religious leaders were banished from your nation for two generations – so for us that is going back to the Kennedy Administration. What if all of the best and brightest minds in America had been taken away, and their children and grandchildren were only now returning?

You and I are not the first people to live in difficult political times. And the treasure of Isaiah is that we get to hear the fresh words of God’s comfort…words that may be 2,500 years old, but that speak to us in a nation where leaders no longer value truth, where gun violence is accepted as inevitable, where income disparity grows wider, where immigrant children are separated from their parents and detained, where many deny their own racism, and where morality and justice are absent from the national dialogue. This dismal situation is not God’s final word. There is a reason that Martin Luther King, Jr., used this passage in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. Dr. King knew that the evils of segregation and racism were not God’s final word.

Singing is a way that God’s people have worked through tragedy across the millennia. The songs of the Civil Rights struggle are familiar to many of us, and the words of the prophet and captured in this one, short refrain: “Comfort, comfort, O my people! Tell of peace, thus says our God!” Will you sing it with me? “Comfort, comfort, O my people! Tell of peace, thus says our God!”

These words of comfort are driven into our souls when we sing them. They become part of us, part of who we are and what we believe in the marrow of our being. That short refrain can be part of your spiritual toolkit that you bring with you everywhere.

So, when you are watching the evening news and you hear about another school shooting, go ahead and sing: “Comfort, comfort, O my people! Tell of peace, thus says our God!” And when you are listening to NPR in your car and you hear of another strings of untruths that have been released over Twitter, “Comfort, comfort, O my people! Tell of peace, thus says our God!” And when you hear of the devastation of a hurricane, “Comfort, comfort, O my people! Tell of peace, thus says our God!”

Now, that refrain is yours to bring with you wherever you go. Not that it is going to fix everything – it won’t – but it may provide enough of God’s energy – spiritual juice – for you to keep you going when things seem grim.

It is a hard time that we live in, my friends. And if you and I don’t keep our spiritual batteries charged, we are not going to be able to engage the challenge and rise up to be co-creators of the realm of God here and now. It takes spiritual energy to go to the border with Mexico and bear witness. It takes spiritual energy to meet with Cory Gardner’s staff and witness that sane gun controls are essential for our nation. It takes spiritual energy to work toward the end of homelessness in our community. If we don’t lean into our faith, we will lose hope and wither. The good news is that we have a very deep well to draw from: the words of the prophets, the teachings of Jesus, and the presence of God in this very hour.

Hope is a muscle that needs a workout to grow and develop. And like our forebears in the faith, we are being given an opportunity to do some spiritual weightlifting, to build hope, and to flex the muscles of our faith. I know that we are an accomplished, self-reliant bunch of folks, but as I told you a few weeks back, you are not alone, and you don’t have to do this on your own. We need hope and we need to rely on our God. And things will change if we work together. “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill made low.”

It takes courage to have hope in the face of evil. People of faith have been doing it for millennia, and now the hour has come for us to know that God has our backs…that we must have hope and rely on the God who is with us, and on Jesus who proclaimed God’s realm of justice and peace that we pray for every Sunday.

“Comfort, comfort, O my people! Tell of peace, thus says our God!” Amen.
 
© 2019 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.

Isaiah 40.1–11
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC Fort Collins, Colorado
December 3, 2017
 
I’d like to start with a question: What is the primary medium through which you get the news? Perhaps if I asked this question even five years ago, I would get a different answer. How many of you read a newspaper either in paper form or online? How many of you consider a news magazine like Time or The Week as the primary way you get the news? How many of you listen to radio as your primary news source? How about television news? How about from on online-only source like Buzzfeed or a news aggregator like Flipboard? How many of you rely on social media like Facebook for your news?

I’d like to ask another question: How many of you find the news more upsetting, disquieting, overwhelming, anxiety-inducing, and downright scary than you did, say, two years ago?

One of the things I notice in myself as I have shifted from sitting down at breakfast with the morning paper…a physical paper…and reading it online is the pace and flow of my consumption of the news. When you read a newspaper or a news magazine you are entirely in control of the pace of your reading. If you start to feel overwhelmed by the grief or anger of yet another woman who has been subjected to sexual harassment, you can pause, ponder, think about its context, and come back to the story. But if you are getting your news online and have sat down at the computer to read a story in the New York Times, you are less likely to take a pause to think, to consider, and to finish your cup of coffee. Electronic media -– even good journalism, which seems to be in decline -– stream at you and demand your attention in the way that paper sources do not. And that likely results in a sense of being overwhelmed by sensationalism, by inflammatory tweets, and by “entertainment” news that doesn’t really matter. And no matter how we get the news, the content itself seems more daunting every day.

In her address accepting a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Award, author Annie Proulx last month offered a stinging and truthful summation of what we together confront:

“We don’t live in the best of all possible worlds. This is a Kafkaesque time. The television sparkles with images of despicable political louts and sexual harassment reports. We cannot look away from the pictures of furious elements, hurricanes and fires, from the repetitive crowd murders by gunmen burning with rage. We are made more anxious by flickering threats of nuclear war. We observe social media’s manipulation of a credulous population, a population dividing into bitter tribal cultures. We are living through a massive shift from representative democracy to something called viral direct democracy, now cascading over us in a garbage-laden tsunami of raw data. Everything is situational, seesawing between gut-response ‘likes’ or vicious confrontations. For some this is a heady time of brilliant technological innovation that is bringing us into an exciting new world. For others it is the opening of a savagely difficult book without a happy ending.

“To me the most distressing circumstance of the new order is the accelerating destruction of the natural world and the dreadful belief that only the human species has the inalienable right to life and God-given permission to take anything it wants from nature, whether mountaintops, wetlands or oil.”1

You may be wondering what this has to do with Advent.

Listen to how one Old Testament scholar describes the setting for today’s scripture: “Events moved at a dizzying speed for the Jewish people between 550 and 515 BCE, the period of thirty-five years that produced” this section of the book of Isaiah. You will remember that this is the period when a significant number of the best and brightest of the Jewish people were taken into captivity and exile in Babylon. “The crises of those years would have tested even the most robust and secure of communities. But the Jewish community of”2 that time was neither robust nor secure. Even though they may have had been economically prosperous during that portion of the exile, their spiritual alienation was profound. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel!”

It doesn’t sound so very far off from where you and I find ourselves as we begin this trek through Advent this year. Some of us are enjoying a record-setting stock market; some of us will benefit from the tax plan the Senate passed yesterday, whether or not we oppose or support it; Colorado has a historically low 2.7% unemployment rate. But we all understand in our gut that something is not right. We are a people in exile. “O come, O come, Emmanuel!”
Many in our nation may be enjoying material prosperity, but it comes as we face an environmental crisis of unparalleled proportions and it comes on the backs of those laboring in sweatshops in China and the developing world and in fields from California to Florida. We have a profound spiritual problem in this nation if we think the situation is acceptable.

So, where do we turn? Where do we find comfort and joy in the face of a tsunami of bad news and injustice? Listen to the prophet: “The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever. Get you up to a high mountain… lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, ‘Here is your God!’

“See, the Lord GOD comes with might…He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”
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I was struck by what I heard in two separate conversations last week with members of our congregation. One woman, who is quite politically active, told me that Plymouth is the one place in her life that is a source of strength right now. One man who is experiencing a rough time with his family said that he comes to worship because it is the one hour a week when he can calm himself and just be at peace. “O Come, O come, Emmanuel!”

And when I see our teens sleeping out on Plymouth’s front lawn for the 13th consecutive year to raise funds and awareness, I am warmed and given hope. Their efforts have an immediate impact, and the sleep-out also helps to inform who these young people are becoming and where their priorities lie. Whether they know it or not, our teens are bringing us and others comfort and joy!

When we are planning worship at Plymouth, we don’t use a whole lot of electronic media, especially in the morning, in part because we want it to be a time when spiritual renewal can take place. So welcome to live, handcrafted, artisanal, free-range, no hormones added worship! I hope that it brings you joy!

I know that part of the DNA of our congregation is doing and acting for justice, and I also hope that each of us can take comfort and deep joy from our faith and from the presence of God within and among us. “O Come, O come, Emmanuel!”

In their dialogic Book of Joy, the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu conclude that our pursuit for outward happiness based on things and accomplishments ultimately results in dissatisfaction and suffering. And that joy is something far more profound than happiness. The archbishop compares joy to a mother coming through the pain of childbirth and how that pain is transformed into the joy of bringing new life into the world. It is a metaphor with deep resonances in this Advent season as we prepare for the arrival of Christ once more.

May you find a few deep breaths of peace even if you are overly busy. May you find comfort and joy in your faith, even if you are overwhelmed by the news. May you find a refuge and a sanctuary here at Plymouth to shelter you, to inspire you, and give you hope.

O Come, O come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel, who mourns in lonely exile here; until the son of God appear. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!

 Amen.
 
1 reprinted at http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/annie-proulx-national-book-award- speech.html
2 Paul D. Hanson, Interpretation: Isaiah 40–66.(Phila.: WJK Press, 1995), p. 1

© 2017 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will happily be granted for non-profit uses.