August 5, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.

“Jazz at Four” Sermon

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Isaiah 40

I had a college professor named Bill Placher, who gave a commencement address at his college graduation at the height of the Vietnam War. Everyone in the audience that day knew soldiers who had died or were gravely injured or were still in the field at risk of it. Every night, the evening news was full of the tragedy of war. Although my professor didn’t want to talk about the war in his address, it seemed impossible to ignore it.

Far too often it seems as if tragedy is staring us in the face at every turn, impossible to ignore. Even in the few hours since I finished this sermon, we’ve heard news of a tragic shooting in Milwaukee, right on the heels of the recent shootings in Colorado. When will it end? Sometimes it feels like we are not too far away from the life my professor was living when he wrote that commencement address. On television screens, in newspapers, and in our own lives, we see tragedies that threaten to take our hope away and cause us to feel jaded and powerless and to wonder where God has gone. In his commencement address, one of the things that my professor observed was that in the midst of life’s tragic times, there are many people who think that the least one can do is have the common decency to be miserable—to do our best to empathize with people who suffer by being morose ourselves. He remarked that such a response is quite sad, because what the world lacks most and needs most in the face of tragedy is signs of hope. That is one of the reasons why the church should be here—to be a hopeful people even in the face of tragedy. But how do you get there?

How do you express hope in a way that is authentic and real, that is respectful and not dismissive of the suffering in life, and that at the same time gives us a reason to live, to get up in the morning and press on? That’s what I’d like to talk about tonight in reference to a passage from Isaiah 40, a chapter written by a faithful prophet long ago who I believe was struggling with this same set of questions—an ancient man who may have more in common with us than we think.

It’s often much easier to connect with the Bible when we remember that it is not just a random collection of stories and sayings but that the context is important. And sometimes the context isn’t so different from our own. There were real people who read and heard these stories in the ancient world, people who were, in important ways, very much like us.

We often default to thinking that people who lived in a different place and time, halfway around the world more than 2,000 years ago, have very little in common with us, but there is a lot we share with them just by virtue of the fact that we are all human. The people who heard Isaiah 40 the first time had families and homes to worry about, just like we do. They worried about making ends meet. They rejoiced in the same things we do as well. They nurtured friendships and fell in love. Ancient people, just like us, knew what it was like to experience great joy in life, to succeed beyond expectation, and they knew great pain and understood what it was like to fail miserably. Their nation fought wars; their loved ones sometimes became sick and died. They were human, just like us.

Another similarity we have with these people is that they faced times of disaster and despair, and in those times, they needed faith and hope to get them through it. The God they worshiped was one of the resources they would have looked to when hope seemed lost. In our modern world, we also live through times of disaster. We witness tsunamis and hurricanes, ongoing wars abroad and staggering violence at home, devastating accidents and tragic losses. When we see these things happen, it is reasonable to ask where God has gone in the midst of it. If God is present, how can these things happen, and when these things happen, how do we continue to live lives of hope? This is a context and a question that we share with the ancient Israelites. The people of ancient Israel lived through times of disaster as we do, and they asked the same questions we do, and Isaiah 40 was written at one of those times. Let me tell you a little about what was happening back then.

The nation we know as ancient Israel came into being sometime around 1,000 B.C. At first, Israel was a collection of tribes; there was no single king over Israel. There were twelve separate tribes, and eventually they became a united kingdom with one king. The famous King David becomes one of those people; he builds a palace in Jerusalem, and his son, Solomon, is responsible for constructing the temple that was understood to be God’s dwelling place on earth and the foundational place for the religious life of the Israelites. Unfortunately life in the kingdom was not stable for very long. If you think about a modern country created from a variety of tribes and peoples—Iraq is a particularly obvious example these days—it’s easy to understand that the united kingdom of Israel had its problems and eventually split into two smaller kingdoms. Israel wasn’t the only kingdom in the area—they were often caught in conflicts with their neighbors—and the division in the kingdom only made them weaker against their enemies. Eventually the kingdom was conquered by the Babylonian Empire. The Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. They took all of the money and property from the Israelites who had any wealth to speak of and sent them away to exile. This is, without a doubt, the darkest time in Israel’s history, and it is the setting for the book of Isaiah.

Jump forward and think about dark times in our own history—disasters, wars, conflict—often the first thing humans tend to do in times such as these is look for someone or something to blame for the misfortune. Whether you consider the prolonged war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon explosion, or the financial meltdown of recent years, everyone wants to know who is at fault and whom we can blame. Sometimes it’s important to hold people responsible for their actions in these situations, but often there is a lot of ego and self-righteousness present in the “blame game,” and I’m a little embarrassed to say that religious people are often the most guilty of that kind of behavior. There is always some quack out there in the wake of a disaster talking about God’s retribution because of sins people have committed, usually directed against homosexuals or people from another religion, people who obviously have nothing to do with the tornado or international conflict or random act of violence that is negatively impacting innocent lives.

Ancient Israel had an element of this kind of blaming, though I think it tended to be more thoughtful than what we often see today. There are many different writers in the Bible—people we call the prophets—who observed the destruction of the temple and began to play the blame game. The prophet Ezekiel complains that the people are suffering because they have slipped into false religion: they go through the motions at the temple, but they are mostly doing it to look good to each other and not to please God. The prophet Jeremiah declares that the people are suffering because they have forgotten the social purposes of religion. They may go to the temple and perform rituals, but they have forgotten to care for the poor and the hungry, so their religion has become empty and soulless.

Then there’s Isaiah. Isaiah isn’t playing the blame game. He’s doing something different. In the midst of this disastrous time in the history of Israel, Isaiah is inspired to share a message of hope. It’s important to realize how rare and difficult this is. We’ve all been through times of suffering. If the disasters and wars I’ve been referencing seem distant to you, think about the death of a loved one, betrayal by a friend, the loss of a job or a relationship. Consider today’s tragedy in Milwaukee: it seems flippant maybe or insensitive to suggest anything positive in the face of such a disaster. How could you say anything hopeful at a time like that?

Almost to a person, I find that people who look back on times of tragedy are able to speak well about how they learned something from it—the experience was hard, but they lived through it and are better and stronger for having had that experience. But in the middle of the experience, when we are living through the suffering, believing in hope and speaking in hope is an incredibly difficult thing to do. Many of life’s panaceas—substance abuse, mistreating our family or friends, feeding addictions, overeating or engaging in some “retail therapy”—we do all of these things to keep ourselves from having to feel the suffering. We do these things because, in the midst of the suffering, it is so incredibly hard to be hopeful.

This is why the hope that Isaiah carries makes his message so distinctive. The fact that he can express hope right in the midst of suffering is highly unusual and begs the question of how he managed to be so hopeful. Here’s my hunch: the foundation of Isaiah’s message is that he finds hope not in his own capacity to change things but in God’s strength and fidelity, which surpasses the sufferings of any place or time or any individual life. Isaiah’s message is not “I will get through this!” Isaiah suggests that “this suffering may last a while, but as long as it lasts, God will get us through.” There is no naïve expectation that we can solve all our problems, and importantly, there is also not a naïve expectation that God will fix our problems for us. What there is is an unwavering affirmation that whatever happens, God will still be God. The sufferings of this life may last for a while, but God’s Word endures forever.

Arriving at that conclusion, it occurs to me, is a great act of faith, so much so that it is hard to wrap your mind around it. It seems almost like a non-answer in the face of tragedy to say, “Everything else will pass away, but God’s promises endure forever.” How can you be sure? Could I really say that to someone who is suffering? Could you say it to the victims of today’s shootings? I’m not sure I could, but it seems that, on some level, this is what we must say. Perhaps the only way to have hope in the face of real tragedy is to keep declaring to one another that God has in store for us something more stable, more enduring, more steadfast than any of the passing sufferings of the world. That fact needs to get a hearing, because if we don’t believe it, I’m not sure why we’re here. I believe that God has a plan for you and for me and that the patterns of suffering in this world will one day pass away and give way to the greater vision of our God, the one Isaiah calls attention to. It is that faith that allows Isaiah to speak reassuring words to a people who are suffering deeply. And perhaps his words should just stand on their own: “Comfort, Comfort ye my people. . . . Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill made low; the uneven ground shall become level and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.”

The world needs people to say these things, to be people of hope, to carry the torch for Isaiah and for the Lord, and to speak into the suffering places that these disasters and calamities will not go on forever. The world needs people to stand for that.

The Christian preacher Tom Long illustrates this idea by talking about a student who spent a summer on a construction crew with a foreman who was the essence of kindness and grace. If a worker was sick, he understood and made arrangements. If a worker had trouble at home, he would find a way to help or be supportive and would get the work covered. The only thing he would not tolerate is sitting down on the job. In the church we can tolerate many things: we know that you bring with you your sins and shortcomings; we know that you are often tired and weary of the world and that you have made mistakes and carry regrets. We can extend all kinds of grace for where you have been and what you have done. We can grieve together when we face tragedy, and at our best, we can speak honestly about the horrible things that do happen in the world. We can stand all of that sadness and regret. But Isaiah insists that in the midst of all of that we must never desert God’s message of hope: that God’s Word, God’s strength and God’s vitality, will outlast the struggles of this world.

And Isaiah’s good news to us is that you need not have all the strength within yourself to speak with that kind of hope, for God is the true source of hope. People will stumble and doubt, even the strong will sometimes lose faith, but, as Isaiah says,

God gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted.

But Isaiah’s promise is this:

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
God does not faint or grow weary.

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.

Thanks be to God. Amen.