Sermon:  “HOPE That Catches Fire”

Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds here together be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

That’s some call to ministry the prophet Isaiah got, huh?  A 6-winged seraph waves around a burning hot coal, touches Isaiah’s lips with it!  How could anyone doubt the existence of God after a vision like that?  But the passage Pete acted out for us was from Isaiah 6.  What we just heard is from chapter 64, the part we have come to call Third Isaiah, written by an unknown author some 200 years later.   He lived in an even more awful time in Jewish history – when the enslaved remnant of Judean leadership was returning from 70 years in exile in Babylon (present-day Iraq) to a homeland where Solomon’s mighty Temple had been destroyed and the mostly peasant people who had been left behind had been living in bondage to their conquerors.  Nothing was as it should have been, and visions of flames and angels were long past – no one in recent memory could tell a story of faith anywhere near as spectacular as Isaiah’s.  How could a modern preacher (even one named after the late, great Isaiah) get his people to trust in God again, when God was so conspicuously absent from the modern world they were living in – a world of war, famine and disease, not to mention paganism, atheism, and hopelessness? 

Now I hate to be a whiner, but you have to admit the prophet’s job – then as now – is a hard one.  It’s not easy to be a peddler of hope these days, when human history is in such a dark place – when our nation, our way of life, seems to be circling the drain.  It’s not easy to be a prophet for our times.  Trying to give hope to the hopeless can be kind of like trying to build a fire with rain-soaked wood.  And yet we want people to have hope; we want them to feel better.  We need hope ourselves, we know.  It’s good advice.  “Don’t lose hope.”  We know we should have hope, we just don’t necessarily know how.

We know “shoulds” can get very oppressive at church, where we hear hope preached so often, we know we need it.  And so we learn to fake hope at church, to put on a brave face, right?  Well, that’s OK.  We can wear a hope mask for a while.  But for how long?  How long, O Lord?  Wouldn’t it be a relief to just feel just one moment of real hope again – hope that still burns somewhere down deep in our soul?  What if hope could catch fire again and just burst out – free and unashamed?  But where do we find that spark of hope in the middle of our pain and struggle?  This Third Isaiah didn’t know exactly, but he went back to the ancient texts of his faith to find out.  It’s clear he knows his First Isaiah – he knows his ancient prophets – and yet he pretty much blames God for his people’s loss of faith – he says, “because you hid yourself we transgressed.”

I don’t know whether it’s encouraging or discouraging to know that – even in very ancient times – people had a hard time believing in this invisible, abstract, almost theoretical God of the Jews and later, of our Jewish messiah, Jesus.  When God is hidden from us – when God is not working in obvious ways in human history, when the Red Sea tides ebb and flow as usual instead of sweeping Pharoah and his chariots away – on those ordinary days of real life, how are we supposed to remember the God of our ancestors and cling to our hope?  I mean, what we miss when we read the Bible – especially those Bibles for children that go from one color picture of a spectacular God-encounter to the next – is how long God’s people often have had to live in a kind of spiritual wasteland of hopelessness. Desert times of aimless wandering that come in between miracles usually last much longer than our mountain-top experiences – those are few and far between.

I think for those of us who’ve gone through anything truly difficult in our lives – the loss of a job or a marriage, a death, a terrible illness, an addiction, any kind of life struggle really – many of us have gotten to the point where we have felt that we might have to physically assault the next person who comes up and says something like, “You should just have hope,” “Just hold on to your faith in God,” “You should just be thankful for what you have – count your blessings.”  So maybe we can understand what possesses this preacher we know as Third Isaiah when he succumbs to the temptation to call down fire from heaven, when he begins this rant we just heard: "O God, that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence— ²as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil— to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!” 

With all the challenges of the times we live in, we don’t need any more damp reassurances.  Just like the exiles returning from Babylon, we need hope that catches fire. 

I think the author of Third Isaiah had the right idea, don’t you?  Even though he was quoting to his people a prophet as ancient to them as Thomas Jefferson is to us today, he could tell first Isaiah still had that old prophetic spark.  Jesus, you remember, had the same exact idea when he spoke his “inaugural address” at the beginning of his ministry – quoting from Isaiah:  “I’ve come to set the captives free!”  And 2,000 years after Jesus, Isaiah still has his chops, doesn’t he?  “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence— ²as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil— to make your name known!”  What was it “Rev. Day” said last week? “Tell it, Isaiah!”  When you think of a few of the great villains of recent history – Sadaam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Bernie Madoff – as great as it’s been to see them brought to justice through the usual military and police channels, how cool would it have been to see them struck down by Almighty God?  You know, a well-placed lightning bolt is not such a bad idea from time to time, right?

It’s so appealing, these images of God’s justice – perhaps especially to us who have been brought up with “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” and not the God of ancient wrath that our Pilgrim ancestors were taught to fear!  But, I wonder, how did Third Isaiah’s congregation feel, as they heard his sermon – his calling down of fire from heaven to spark his nation’s hope again?  How did they really feel, listening to poor Third Isaiah, as they looked out at their ruined land, enslaved people, and the corrupt, wealthy officials in their conqueror’s puppet government?  Were they ready and willing to consider that God might act again to save the world, or did they roll their eyes at Third Isaiah’s imitation of First Isaiah’s old-fashioned religious language of hope and justice? 

We don’t know.  But what we do know is that what was true for Isaiah was true for John the Baptist and Jesus – the prophetic word of God’s love and justice had the power to kindle hope in the hopeless.  What was true for Thomas Jefferson and his brother in the pulpit, our own Rev. Thomas Brooks of 1757 is still true for us today – the prophetic word of God’s love and justice has the power to kindle hope in the hopeless. 

Are we ready for hope that kindles fire again?  More and more, I believe we are open to the possibility that “God is still speaking,” even in ordinary “prophets for our time” like us.  We are finding our words to speak about our faith.  We are exercising our voices in a robust and muscular religion that we take out on the road on mission trips to South Dakota, to Florida, to Maine, to Rhode Island.  We are finding ways to transform the lives of many of our neighbors right here in Brookfield – with Church School and children’s choirs, fellowship groups, study groups, and prayer groups, with our Yankee Fair and our Giving Tree, and yes, even with ordinary Sunday worship.  We still open up our raggedy old Bibles and read from the prophet Isaiah – and we do our best to make his words fresh and new, so that they speak again a word of hope to us and to our children.  It may look kind of quaint and old-fashioned, but this is vital, important work for today – because the world is suffering from a desperate shortage of hope about now. 

More than ever, people of God, we need to peddle some real hope to the world – hope that kindles fire.  Let us pray, this Advent season, that God is ready to bring it once again – even if it’s as small as a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and laid in a manger. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

---

 

Isaiah 6:1-8

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. ²Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. ³And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” ⁴The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke.

⁵And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” ⁶Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. ⁷The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” ⁸Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”

Isaiah 64:1-9

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence— ²as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil— to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence! ³When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence. ⁴From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him. ⁵You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.

⁶We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. ⁷There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity. ⁸Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. ⁹Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people.