Faint and Weary (Isaiah 40:21 - 31)

     If any of y’all have missed Al’s Sunday School class, you’ve missed a really good time. All the wonderful Old Testament stories showing how God hasn’t always been the model of modern jurisprudence have been delightful, with good lessons thrown in to boot. Most of them so far have been from Genesis, in which the Lord was a God you could encounter walking down a country road with some of his buds, looking for a place to eat, which is exactly where Abraham—who was still Abram at the time—met him one hot Palestinian afternoon. Well, there was a little ambiguity about just who those three guys were . . . At first, they were just men, then it seemed that they might have been angels, and finally it was revealed, right at the end, that at least one of them was the Lord, when he yelled at Sarah right through the walls of her tent.

     But the point is that the God of the book of Genesis, from whence most of Al’s stories so far have come, was a very personal God, you could talk to that God face to face, maybe drink a glass of wine or eat a bagel with that God, and share a joke or two. Not so the God in our passage from Isaiah . . . that God is remote, terrifying, even. The Lord is so far beyond us it’s not funny, who “sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants”—that’s us—“are like grasshoppers,” we’re like bugs, we’re so insignificant, and holy guacamole, I’d be scared to death to meet this God on the road, even if he’d stoop so low as to walk down one, which I highly doubt.

     But wait . . . there’s more! We’re not just insignificant, like ants or horny toads, we’re destructive, too . . . few things can strip a field faster than a swarm of grasshoppers, or to use their other name, locusts. So from the perspective of the God of Isaiah 40, we’re both negligible and harmful, irrelevant and devastating. Sheesh . . . you’d think God would make up God’s own mind.

     But you might well ask: wait a minute, Pastor! You talk as if there more than one God, you keep saying the God of this and the God of that . . . I thought there was only one God . . . And if there’s only one God, I thought that God was everlasting, unchanging, forever and ever, amen. What gives? Are you trying to pull a theological fast one?

     Well, no . . . I don’t think so . . . And I also think there’s only one God, too, but how can I be sure? Angels look pretty God-like from the standpoint of us grasshoppers. And our Hindu sisters and brothers have a passel of gods, and Buddhists don’t have any, so the world-wide jury’s still out on that one, but we Christians are monotheists—meaning one-godded—so let’s stick with that, which still leaves the question of if God is never-changing, etc., and while that may be true, what we’re dealing with for certain is that our conception of God is changing. Genesis was written a thousand years, more or less, before Christ, just as the Kingdom of David began to roll, and it describes a time—perhaps wistfully—before the nation of Israel began, when the people were nomadic, tribal wanders. When they worked for themselves, not for some king.

     Cut forward in time 500 years, give or take, when this part of Isaiah was written, and Israel had had a king for almost that entire time, and their conception of God had become like the monarchs they knew: remote and all-powerful. In fact, Biblical scholars tell us that over all the books of the Old Testament, as they get newer, their picture of God gets more and more far out. My favorite example is in Ezekiel, written 200, 250 years after Isaiah, where God appears as some sort of multi-headed, whirling beast, spitting fire out of the holes where its legs go. Oy.

     And another thing—this part of Isaiah was written during the Babylonian Exile, when all the elites had been carted off to captivity. And this part of Isaiah—which scholars call Second Isaiah—is a song of comfort, where their God is a king, strong and powerful, and not only are we like insects to him, insignificant and destructive, but Isaiah says God “brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.” Quite a lot of comfort for folks caught up and exiled from their beloved Jerusalem. Their God is a powerful God, who’ll take care of the princes and rulers holding them soon enough, you’ll see.

     So in the Old Testament, at least, the people’s idea of God seems to be based on a combination of (a) increasing trandscendence with time and (b) what God needs to be at any given time. What about in the New Testament? Well, that volume is all about the implications of the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. We call it the incarnation, of course, and according to orthodox ideas, God was one and the same as the human being Jesus. He was both fully human and fully divine, like us in every way save that he was without sin. Which kinda obviates the fully human part, doesn’t it, because isn’t that one of our defining characteristics, like “to err is human, to forgive divine,” or something like that.

But never mind. In the New Testament, God becomes one of us, as the song goes, or as Jesus himself says in the Gospel of John: “if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father” (Father being the name he gave God). Jesus made the divine attributes crystal clear: compassion, forgiveness, grace and love.

     So. God is revealed in the New Testament not to be away up there somewhere else, looking down on us like we’re ants, ready to chop our enemies up into little tiny bits, nor to be a weird, multi-headed, flying turtle right out of a bad acid trip like in Ezekiel, but having the best attributes of humanity itself. Does God look like the man Jesus, who ran around Palestine for 33 years? Of course not . . . but Jesus was God where it counted: he displayed the attriubtes of the divine, he taught us what God is like: compassionate, gracious, forgiving and full of love.

     And furthermore, God is with us even, as Jesus said, unto the ends of the Earth. He said that in Matthew, and in John we get an idea of how that works: “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” As Paul puts it, “In Christ all things hold together.” God and God’s Word—another term for Christ—permeate everything, they hold everything together. They are the glue of the universe, they keep everything from flying apart.

     Wow. We went from the personal God to the cosmic God, from just another guy walking down a road, to the universal, all within the same Bible. And scientists today are revealing that the poetic way biblical authors put things might not be so far off. Quantum physics, which begot the New Physics, is showing that everything is connected, in some way or by some thing, showing, for instance, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Barbara Brown Taylor has called it a “luminous web” connecting everything, and everybody, in the universe.

     So. What does that mean for us, held as we are in these days of turmoil and strife, where things are so divided? We increasingly live in our own little ideological bubbles, increasingly locked there by what news we watch and which social media feed we read. What news you see—what video you watch, what stories are covered—depends on which network you watch. They are completely different on each. And social media is just as bad—on Facebook, if you look at an item pro-alien abduction, for example, you get fed increasingly large numbers of pro-alien-abduction articles, and none of the ones that call it hogwash. Of these biased sources—what “news”we watch and articles we read—of these biased sources are bubbles made.

     Wouldn’t our lives together be better, wouldn’t we be less divided, more unified, if there were only something we all had in common, something that we could see in one another that was the same, so we could say we aren’t so different after all? Hmmm . . . What could that be?

     What if we saw the divine spark in everyone, from that politician we despise to the news-commentator we loathe?  What if we—like the Benedictines do—actively practiced seeing the Christ in everyone?  If Christ is in you and Christ is in me, how can we hate one another, how can we be truly divided, how can we hate?  Maybe if we do, maybe if we quit thinking of a God “out there,” on our side, and admitted God is in here, all around, and in everybody else, we could truly say, as Isaiah did so long ago, that we shall renew our strength and mount up with wings like eagles.  We shall run and not be weary, shall walk and not be faint.  Amen.