“Do You Not Know? Have You Not Heard?”
Isaiah 40:21-31
For the past year and a half or so, how many times have you heard the phrase: “When will we get back to normal”?
It seems that this pandemic just goes on and on and on.
Lately I’ve been hearing this phrase “When will we get back to normal?” morph into: “Will we ever get back to normal?”
I’d imagine the Israelites also talked about and wondered if they would ever return to Jerusalem, and, if and when they did, would things ever be like they were before?
In our Old Testament Lesson for this morning Isaiah is speaking to the Hebrew people during a particularly bleak and desperate time.
It’s the 6th Century BC and they have been invaded, their Temple in Jerusalem has been destroyed, they have been forcefully removed from their homes and exiled as captives to Babylon.
Following all this, they were left with questions like, “Is God not powerful?”
“Is God not faithful?”
“How do we find hope while we are in exile?”
“How do we move beyond exile?”
“Is there life after exile?”
And now the Prophet Isaiah is trying to convince them to return to Jerusalem and build the Temple and the city again.
“The time of exile is over; come back home.”
But their faith in the power of God had been fading and they had become convinced that God wasn’t the One in control.
So, Isaiah has to remind them.
“Do you not know? Have you not heard?” Isaiah asks them.
Like a good prophet he is drawing them back to the faith that defines their identity.
And they know the story.
They know about God’s call to Abram—the covenant that God established with him.
They know about the birth of Israel in Egypt.
They know about Moses—how God used Moses to set His people free.
They know that they sinned in the wilderness and were forced to endure forty years of wandering in that land.
And they know how God, in His grace and love, fed them with manna and quail…
…and led them by a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night.
They know, but they need to be reminded.
They know how God enabled them to enter the Promised Land and establish a nation there.
And they know how they rejected God’s kingship by demanding a human king.
And they know how their human kings led them and how they failed them.
They know how they rejected the advice of God’s prophets and how they decided to rely on alliances with pagan nations rather than relying on God.
They know how this led to the destruction of Jerusalem and to their enslavement.
(pause)
They know this.
They just need to be reminded.
They need to be reminded that Israel has suffered before and that suffering was not the end—that God freed them—redeemed them—brought them back.
They need to be reminded of all these things, because God is about to do it again.
Their lives may seem hopeless, but that is not the truth.
If these exiles were dependent on their own power, they would be slaves forever.
But they are dependent, not on their own power, but on God’s power.
God “gives strength to the weary,” Isaiah reminds them, “and increases the power of the weak.”
“Even youths will grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”
I want to ask you this morning: Are you feeling discouraged, beaten down, and worn out with life?
Are the problems you are facing so overwhelming that it seems like there will be no end to your struggle?
Do the obstacles in your life keep you from being able to imagine what might be possible tomorrow?
Are you on the verge of giving up any hope for true healing to take place in your life?
Are the wrong choices of your past more than you can deal with?
Are you feeling alone and powerless?
Experiences of crisis and trauma can make it easy to forget things.
I’m not sure about you, but there have been times during this pandemic that I have struggled to remember what life was like before.
What was it like to be able to come to church and go to the store and school and work without having to wear a mask?
What was it like not to hear stories of deaths and full hospitals on the news…
…and not to worry that children who are too young to be vaccinated will become sick?
What was it like before we had to shut down and we had not lost so many people to death, nursing homes or fear of gathering together?
What was it like?
There are some who have compared this time in Church history to the exile of the Israelite people.
There were already less people affiliated with a church than in the past 75 years of record-keeping before the Pandemic hit…
…now look at things!!!
And it’s not just us—it is across all denominations and churches of all sizes.
A month or so ago, the children’s director of Jones Memorial United Methodist Church—the church where my wife is Pastor—was having a conversation in Panera Bread about the drop she has seen in people being actively involved in church, and how hard it has become to find volunteers.
During the conversation another person came over to the table and said, “I want you to know you are not alone.
I work at Silverdale Baptist.
Before Covid we would have 200 children in our nursery on Sunday mornings and more volunteers to run it than we could handle.
Now we have 10 children on an average Sunday and we can’t get enough people to run it.”
She also said that their attendance is half of what it used to be just a little over a year and a half ago.
And so, these are difficult times for so many people in so many different ways.
But I think God uses times like this to cut the fat.
To help us to stop and re-evaluate how we have been doing things and perhaps encourage us to do some new things, reach out in new ways.
The Church of Jesus Christ has been around for 2,000 years.
It has survived and overcome all kinds of obstacles from intense persecution to horrible corruption to plagues, false teachings—you name it.
And every time, like the Reformation or the Great Awakening, God brings new and exciting life out of death or difficulties.
Because of the trauma that they had experienced as a result of the exile, it’s understandable that the Israelites suffered from an identity crisis.
Isaiah, however, is reminding them who and Whose they are, and despite what they believe about worldly kingdoms, God is the One with control over the powers of the earth.
This idea in an all-powerful God Who controls the powers of this world is what we call the sovereignty of God.
And although the Israelites may have believed in the sovereignty of God to a point, their belief in God’s sovereignty only went so far, because they had gone so many years living their lives at the mercy of worldly kingdoms.
I wonder if the sovereignty of God has once again come into question.
Like the Israelites, have we forgotten that we are not the ones in control?
As Isaiah reminds us that God and God alone stands above the world, creating a place for those who are like grasshoppers to live.
Yet this same God is intimately involved in the history of human life bringing “princes to naught and [reducing] the rulers of this world to nothing.”
So God is fully in control.
But, this is not to say that God caused this pandemic.
It does mean, however, that God is with us even in the midst of this crisis seeking to do a new thing.
A few chapters later in Isaiah 43 God tells the people of Israel: “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you perceive it?”
It seems that everyone has an opinion on this coronavirus and what should or should not be done in response to it.
Some have reacted with fear, some with frustration, and still others out of a desire to get back to the way things were before.
But like the Israelites, I don’t believe we will go back to the way things were before because God IS doing a new thing, which means that our call now is to embrace and faithfully live into the new thing God is doing and will do.
And this is where hope comes into focus.
This is where things become exciting.
The Israelites went back and rebuilt the Temple, but that isn’t all that happened.
God continued to do a new thing when God came to earth in human form.
And right from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, we are made aware that Resurrection is the new thing God is doing.
No longer is there need for sacrifice because Jesus became our sacrifice once and for all.
No longer is there a need for a Temple because, through faith in Christ, we “like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices to God…
…we are the CHURCH—God’s “holy nation, God’s special possession, that [we] may declare the praises of him who called [us] out of darkness into his wonderful light.”
We live in a messed up world…
…a world which is moving further and further away from God, and the pandemic has put this moving away into warp speed.
At the same time, God is in control and God loves us and claims us.
He died for us and He died for those who are yet to believe.
This is not the end, only a new and exciting beginning.
Like the Israelites that found themselves in exile, many of us have come to believe that we are strong enough to withstand any negative forces on our own and that we are fully in control.
But, only when we feel weak and helpless, whether young or old, are we vulnerable enough to experience the power and grace of a God who “raises us up on eagle’s wings.”
And only when we are willing to admit that we are not the ones in control, that we are not the ones with all the answers, that “yes” we have grown tired and weary, will we be able to find hope in the new thing God is doing in our world.
May this hope be your hope, my hope—the hope of this church, the hope of this community and of this world.
Praise God.
Amen.
