What Are You Looking Forward To?
At this time of the year, a lot of people are looking forward to something. What are you looking forward to in the coming weeks? Time off from school, visits from loved ones, family members going back where they came from, parties, concerts, snow, worship services, presents, celebrating the birth of Jesus – there are many things we look forward to in December. Tom Petty wrote in a song, “the waiting is the hardest part.” That often feels true whether what we’re waiting for is something we’re looking forward to like a child looks forward to Christmas morning or parents look forward to the birth of a child, or if we’re waiting for something less exciting, like for surgery or physical therapy to be completed.
December 15, 2013
Isaiah 35:1-10, Romans 8:18-30, What Are You Looking Forward To?
Doug Scalise, Brewster Baptist Church
[vimeo 82001355 w=500&h=375]
[powerpress]
While many of us look forward to something we view positively like Christmas, I don’t know anyone who looks forward to suffering. Most of us naturally dread suffering, pain, physical problems, desolation, loneliness or grief. Whether because of disease, accident, violence, persecution or war, suffering is something most people would gladly avoid whenever possible. According to Romans 8:18-30 which we heard earlier, Paul states that the future joy we will share with Christ far outweighs any present suffering we may have to endure. Thank God we can look forward to that time. In a similar way, Isaiah had a vision of God coming to redeem creation. Both Romans 8 and Isaiah 35:1-10 speak to people dealing with a difficult present by encouraging them to look to the future of joy that God will bring about. The first 34 chapters of Isaiah are filled with God’s judgment and the prophet exposing evil, greed, violence and injustice and then, seemingly out of nowhere, like a paragraph that was cut and pasted in the wrong place in a student’s paper, Chapter 35 bursts off the page, pulsing with joy.
“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus 2 it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. 3
Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. 4
Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.” 5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; 6 then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; 7
the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water;
the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes. 8 A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God’s people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray. 9 No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. 10 And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”
The first thing we need to understand is that this text shouldn’t be here. Amid rumors of war and desolation, Isaiah 35 surprises us. A voice speaks without addressing anyone by name, without any context or time. This passage follows one filled with ecological destruction: “The streams of Edom shall be turned into pitch, and her soil into sulfur; her land shall become burning pitch…Thorns shall grow over its strongholds, nettles and thistles in its fortresses.” Then, without a break and without explanation, Isaiah 35 interrupts the devastation and despair.
The focus of Isaiah 35 is joy and gladness. It’s almost like the prophet felt the people needed to have some good news, something to look forward to, some hope in the midst of all the bad news. The time is the future, exactly when we don’t know. The place is named repeatedly: it’s the wilderness. This detail is important. Wilderness (Hebrew – midbar) has many meanings for Israel. It’s a place of flight and of freedom (Genesis 16, 21; Exodus 3, 13). It’s populated by deadly animals (Deuteronomy 8:15). Water is scarce (Exodus 15, 17), and crops don’t grow. It’s dangerous (Exodus 14:3). It’s wide (Deuteronomy 1:19). And it’s easy to get lost (Numbers 32; Psalm 107:4), like the couple and four kids who fortunately survived two days in subzero temperatures in the Nevada mountains earlier this week. The wilderness is where God’s people learn to trust. In the wilderness God carried them (Deuteronomy 1:31), fed them (Exodus 16), and gave them improbable water (Exodus 17). In the wilderness God guarded and cared for the people, and lifted them up (Deuteronomy 32).
The wilderness in Isaiah 35 will rejoice with joy and singing. “ (35:1-2a). The prophet declares the joy of an earth that was bone dry –dry land, desert, and wilderness – and then describes the reason: a profusion of blossoms and shoots of new growth budding toward fruit. Earth’s joyful response swells into an echoing chorus, celebrating the gift of life – it’s like the song, “June is bustin’ out all over.” The God whose glory is seen in the wilderness, declares Isaiah, is our God (35:2b).
The focus of Isaiah’s vision then moves from the earth to people, from dry land to weak and frightened bodies, from green growth to courage and strength. Isaiah describes a pair of hands that have grown weak, soft and slack from disuse. They can’t hold anything and no longer do the work they were made for. Make them strong. The prophet describes a pair of knees that give way to staggering and stumbling. Who can walk like this? Make them firm (35:3). The prophet shows us people whose hearts and minds are racing, gripped by anxiety and worry. Isaiah says to them, “Be strong, do not fear.“ The prophet gives the reason, pointing to our source of strength & salvation. If you open your eyes and look, you will see that right here is your God (35:4a).
What difference can it make if we believe that God is coming to be with us when our hands and knees are growing weak and fear is trying to get a grip on our heart? Isaiah asserts that God will act for the people to deliver them. God “will come and save you” (35:4b). God’s arrival brings something more. When God shows up amazing things happen; things we often don’t think possible. “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert;“ (35:5-6). Isaiah says there will be a time when God’s arrival transforms every inability into ability and every need into miraculous abundance. God’s coming brings the capacity to see and hear to those whose senses are starving for light and sound. Nerves heal and grow and send and receive signals, atrophied muscles grow strong and flexible. What are these capacities for? They’re for worship and celebration. They’re for the open expression of joy in what God can do and what God has done. The man who couldn’t walk will have strength in his legs to walk. But he won’t walk. He’ll jump. He’ll leap and jump for joy to God. The woman who couldn’t or wouldn’t speak will find herself able to talk. But she won’t talk. She’ll shout. She’ll sing. She’ll praise God at the top of her lungs.
Even now before God’s future fully comes, we can experience transformation like this on a smaller scale. Willa Cather writes in her novel Obscure Destinies, “Sometimes in the morning, if her feet ached more than usual, Mrs. Harris felt a little low. (Nobody did anything about fallen arches in those days, and the common endurance test of old age was to keep going after every step cost something.) She would hang up her towel with a sigh and go into the kitchen, feeling that it was hard to make a start. But the moment she heard the children running down the uncarpeted back stairs, she forgot to be low. Indeed, she ceased to be an individual, an old woman with aching feet; she became part of a group, became a relationship. She was drunk up into their freshness when they burst in upon her, telling her about their dreams, explaining their troubles with buttons and shoelaces and underwear shrunk too small. The tired, solitary old woman Grandmother had been at daybreak vanished. Suddenly the morning seemed as important to her as it did to the children, and the mornings ahead stretched out sunshiny, important.” Being in relationship with God and with other people can be transforming when we’re in the wilderness.
In Matthew 11:2-6, we learn that what Isaiah saw happening when God would come is taking place through the ministry of Jesus. “When John (the Baptist) heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”
In Isaiah 35 there is still one more miracle the Lord has in store: the road home. There, in the place that once was wilderness, once a place of wandering, will be a clear road. There will be no more wandering (35:8) and no more danger (35:9). The people God has redeemed and ransomed will walk on it, and they’ll turn, and they’ll come home (35:8-9). As they walk homeward, upon their head, like a canopy, a garland, or a crown, will be abundant joy. Rejoicing and gladness will meet them on the road. Sorrow and sighing will flee (35:10). It’s a beautiful vision of the future.
Isaiah wrote for a people who had been scattered far from home and who needed hope for the future to help them get through the present. While we’re not scattered geographically as were the Israelites, many people today are living fragmented lives in a fractured world. Where are our parched desert places? What do we sigh for, what sorrows have brought us to tears? If we believe that God is able to come into our lives at any moment, how might that change us if we’re in a desert, or wilderness time in our life?
According to Romans 8, the fact that the future is in God’s hands and not our own gives us confidence and hope rather than fear or anxiety. Paul says, all creation groans and yearns for that moment of divine deliverance, like a mother in the pangs of birth yearns for the delivery of her child. Just as a woman endures the short-term pain of child birth and looks forward to being a mother, so Christians are to endure suffering or wilderness times for the sake of the glory we’ll share in God’s future which will last much longer than any temporary wilderness or desert condition we currently face. Paul wrote, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” This doesn’t mean that everything that happens to us or those we love is good. But God can use even things we wish hadn’t happened, to bring something, however small, redeeming or redemptive out of it.
Perhaps one of the things we can work on in our own lives is training ourselves to look for signs of God’s presence and activity everywhere we are even when we feel like when were in the wilderness, not just when we’re in worship or reading the Bible. Often time there is beauty and power right in front of us that we don’t even notice because we’re so preoccupied with the wilderness that we miss the flowers that God is causing to spring up. In January of 2007, The Washington Post videotaped the reactions of commuters at a Washington D.C. Metro subway stop to the music of a violinist. The overwhelming majority of the 1000+ commuters were too busy to stop. A few did, briefly, and some of those threw a couple of bills into the violin case of the street performer. No big deal, just an ordinary day on the Metro. Except it wasn’t an ordinary day. The violinist wasn’t just another street performer; he was Joshua Bell, one of the world’s finest concert violinists, playing his multi-million dollar Stradivarius violin. Three days earlier he had filled Boston’s Symphony Hall with people paying $100/seat to hear him play similar pieces. The question the Post author and many others since have asked is simple: Have we been trained to recognize beauty outside the contexts we expect to encounter beauty? I’d ask, are we training ourselves to recognize signs of God breaking into our life and world with grace and beauty and music and joy? It may be present even when we’re on the way to work if we open our ears and eyes.
When we’re in those wilderness and desert moments in our lives when God seems distant, hope is merely a glimmer, and faith is hanging on by a thread, we can come back to Isaiah 35 to renew our spirit with its the images of glad lands, blooming deserts, all kinds of redemptive reversals, sighing and sorrow fleeing away, and ransomed people coming home singing. That is something worth looking forward to.
Prayer:
“Lord Jesus, Master of both the light and the darkness,
send your Holy Spirit upon our preparations for Christmas.
We who have so much to do seek quiet spaces to hear your voice each day.
We who are anxious over many things look forward to your coming among us.
We who are blessed in so many ways long for the complete joy of your kingdom.
We whose hearts are heavy seek the joy of your presence.
We are your people, walking in darkness, yet seeking the light.
To you we say, ‘Come Lord Jesus!’ Amen. —Henri J.M. Nouwen