7 December 2008 ~ 2nd Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 40:1-11

I begin today, surely against the advice of good preachers and the instruction of homiletics professors, with a quote:

We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us. The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has conscience. Only when we have felt the terror of the matter, can we recognize the incomparable kindness. God comes into the very midst of evil and of death, and judges the evil in us and in the world. And by judging us, God cleanses and sanctifies us, comes to us with grace and love. *

The author of that quote knew something about evil and death—he didn’t speak out of the safe confines of an ivory tower though he was an academic. Nor did he pen these words in a hermitage cave atop a lonely mountain, though again, he did spend many, many hours of his life alone and locked away.

This message to us comes across the decades from the years of World War II and was written by the German pastor, theologian, and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, many of you may already know, was arrested by the Nazis for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler in March of 1943 and was imprisoned until his death at the hands of his captors in April 1945. His imprisonment did not stop him completely; he was a prolific writer and out of his imprisonment, in which he most assuredly would have known that he could be executed at any point, came words of hope and faith and comfort.

Ah, comfort, the word which begins the Isaiah reading this morning. Quite different from the opening words of last week’s Isaiah reading in which God was implored to “rip open the heavens.” From that violent image the lectionary moves us to comfort this week.

When we hear the word “comfort” though these days, we often think of ease: a soft sofa perhaps; a fuzzy bathrobe; a heated car seat. We sink into the word “comfort” and just relax, lying there and enjoying life and perhaps an excellent wine.

But the author of these words from Isaiah that we heard today, all those centuries ago, was probably not thinking of sofas or bathrobes and, unless he was extremely prescient, didn’t even envision car seats, heated or otherwise. No, he was had other things on his mind.

Those of you who attended our bible study this past week during which we are looking at the texts used in Handel’s great oratorio Messiah know that these comforting words are the very ones that begin that majestic work. Many of us can still hear it: a high tenor floating out above the strings quietly accompanying him with the refrain of “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.”

You may also remember that what we know as the book of Isaiah was written by at least two different people. The first 39 chapters of Isaiah are from the prophet Isaiah, who lived in the late 8th century b.c.e. The remaining chapters, which begin with the verses from today’s reading to the final 66th chapter, were the work of at least one other prophet; some scholars insist there is even a third one in there. Those who think hard about such things and often get paid to do so, generally refer to them as First and Second Isaiah, though sometimes you’ll hear Second Isaiah referred to as Deutero-Isaiah. (By the way, just a warning in case you go out of here and show off your new found knowledge about all these Isaiahs to our more conservative or biblically-literalist Christian brothers and sisters: this two and three author theory of Isaiah drives them over the wall. They will insist that it was all the same person who wrote Isaiah and that was Isaiah, pure and simple.)

So this prophet, whom we only know as Second Isaiah, begins his prophecy with this word “comfort.” While First Isaiah preached to the people of his time that they were doing wrong, that bad things were going to happen, and that God was peeved with them, to put it mildly, Second Isaiah lived a different circumstance. By his time, the big bad empires had indeed swept through and overrun their tiny countries, taking many citizens captive. Second Isaiah spoke out of the midst of captivity. Second Isaiah didn’t need to tell the people of impending doom anymore because it was now history; it had already happened. Second Isaiah’s message that he was called to preach was likely even harder; out of that pain of captivity, he was called to speak of comfort and of looking forward to people who were in the utmost depths of despair.

In fact, Second Isaiah used that same word ‘comfort’ thirteen times in the 26 chapters that make up the end of the book. The Hebrew word behind the English word ‘comfort’ comes from the verb nacham. Nacham is used all throughout the Hebrew Bible, about 108 times in all. Most of the time, its meaning is as we heard it today, translated as ‘comfort’ or some derivative, like ‘comforter.’ Sometimes though, it means ‘repent’ or even ‘sorrow.’ For instance in 1 Samuel 15 the reign of the first king of Israel, Saul, was coming to a sad and disastrous culmination. In that chapter we read, “Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. And the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel.” God being sorry about making Saul king is that same word, nacham. God is repenting the choice of Saul as king. God is comforting Godself over a wrong move. That sense of nacham casts a different light on the whole ‘comfort’ thing, doesn’t it?

Centuries and centuries after Saul, the prophet cries “comfort, comfort” as the very first words out of his mouth to a people in exile, living as slaves in a foreign land far from home. But even in that situation, comfort comes with an understanding of repentance or turning back, of lamenting one’s state and one’s distance from God.

So here we are, 21st century North Americans, far removed from Bonhoeffer’s prison cell in Nazi Germany and even farther from the dire circumstances of the captives of Second Isaiah’s day. Do we need words of comfort or do we need someone prodding us into action this Advent 2008? As I said earlier, the comfort which comes to our minds is often ease without that sense of finding comfort by returning to God. We are all about sofas and bathrobes and heated car seats. We lack the urgency about which Bonhoeffer wrote; that before God-with-us is good news, it is terrifying and should shake us to our soles. (I wrote that word as soles with an ‘o’ as in the bottom of our feet. But this good news in fact should also shake us to our souls with a ‘u.’)

Being comforted then is not relaxing in the hot tub of life’s bubbling water. It is work, actually. It is making plains where there once were hills and filling valleys so they are level. Because God is sending a messenger, Second Isaiah tells us, a messenger who needs direct and easy access. We’ve got to clear out the brush and pave the desert so that there are no impediments to God getting through to us.

Now even to those exiles thousands of years ago who knew all too well about physical hills and valleys and deserts, these words that seem to us to involve backhoes and payloaders, were not to be taken literally and neither should we take them that way. We’re not going to turn un-ecologically pc all of a sudden. Advent is a time, however, for the clearing and paving that needs to happen within us. Too often we do feel like we are filled with hills and valleys that seem impossible to traverse; we carry inside deserts that appear too foreboding to cross; barriers to God’s messenger getting through.

But it is precisely there in that tough internal work that we find comfort, that we find release. Because God not only cares about what is going on around and outside of us, about what we are doing to make God’s creation a more comfortable place to be, God cares deeply about what is happening within us. And until we make an arrow-straight highway through the desert within and give God’s messenger half a chance at getting through, we are not going to find comfort.

This Advent, in the remaining weeks before we once again tremble to our very depths at the laughable, frightening premise of God-with-us, find comfort. Allow God to get a message through to you by stopping whatever it is that keeps you busy and distracts you. God’s messenger is seeking to get through; your work, your comforting repentance, is to find a way to allow that to happen.

*Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Coming of Jesus in our Midst,” from A Testament to Freedom, The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, edited by Geoffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995), 185; as quoted by Lindsay P. Armstrong, “Preaching the Advent Texts,” in Journal for Preachers, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, Advent 2008, p. 6.