It was a decision whether to preach on the Gospel[1] this morning, and though it is a compelling text, the Old Testament[2] has been in my heart. I invite you to walk – or perhaps wander – with me through some reflections on the words of Isaiah.
The God of Isaiah echoes the God of Genesis[3]. This morning’s Old Testament reading holds together in just seven verses the God who is close to us and the God who made everything. The God who walks in the garden and the God who breathed over the waters of creation. The God who listens to us shout and weep and yell our frustrations and confusion and grief and the God who molded the dry land[4]. The God who listens to children make wishes on the first star I see tonight and who set those stars in their galaxies countless millennia ago.
As we move through the autumn of the year, time seems to be picking up speed, and we are moving more and more quickly toward the thin space of All Saints and of Advent, the God of Isaiah, very close, and also transcendent – God here, with us, in our lives, and God beyond, beyond us and beyond our understanding and our senses – feels a very true and powerful and relatable God. A God who forms light and creates darkness, as we hear in Isaiah this morning, who makes weal and creates woe, or, in translations including the English Standard Version, the God who makes well-being and creates calamity.
In these seven verses of Isaiah, God is a God who is involved with the doings of human beings – the politics and oppression of nations, the wealth of kingdoms – and God is a God who calls us by name, even if we do not know God’s voice.
I am the Lord, and there is no other, he says;
besides me there is no god.
I arm you, though you do not know me…
God is speaking in this passage to Cyrus, a Persian king, one might have called an upstart in his day – in 539 B.C., he was building an empire and in the process of that he conquered Babylon. His empire was not as oppressive as the Roman empire of Jesus’ lifetime, for instance – Cyrus did not believe in the Hebrew God, but he did not force his own gods on the people he conquered. He was after power and land and riches, like most conquerors are, but unlike most conquerers of his day, Cyrus was relatively merciful. He allowed conquered people and even their kings to remain free (as long as they didn’t threaten his power or rebel); he was merciful to conquered rulers; and in the case of the Jewish people, he liberated them from the Babylonians that had captured them a half a century before, and many of them were able to go home again, and began to rebuild what they had lost.
Cyrus gave the credit for his success to one of his own gods, Marduk, but the prophet Isaiah tells the Jewish people that it was the Hebrew God, the God we know through the Scriptures, YHWH, who worked through Cyrus for good. A God who knew Cyrus, even though Cyrus did not know God; who is also a God who knows us, and knows the universe – a God who can level mountains and a God who takes us by the hand.
But that last verse of today’s reading is a difficult one to read through. God says:
I form light and create darkness,
I make weal and create woe;
I the Lord do all these things.
…I make well-being and I create calamity.
How do we make sense of a God, how do we walk with a God, who creates calamity? What does it mean that our God makes the darkness as well as the light? How should we feel about a God who has made the world and the cosmos, the loud rushing planets that we just sang about[5], in all of its beauty and all of its heartbreaks – who made sunsets and mountains but also hurricanes and cancer? Who is that God?
Dale Coulter, a professor at Pentecostal Theological Seminary in Tennessee, describes this complexity of God as God’s wildness, as an uncultivated God[6] – which reminds me of the wildness of the mustard seed, or the dandelion, or the kudzu that we talked about this summer. The seed that is planted may grow into a kingdom unlike anything we could possibly expect. That’s the kingdom of God. That’s how God is.
We think of God as a creator and source of light, not of darkness, of creativity, not calamity. But when we as individuals, or as a nation, are faced with grief, fear, uncertainty, conflict – did God cause those things to come into being? Did God say, “let there be war,” and there is war?
The Reverend Callie Plunket-Brewton, an Episcopal priest and writer in Florence, Alabama, reminds us that God, in these words, through Isaiah, is speaking to a people in exile, a people who are grieving and homeless, so this language of God destroying mountains and bringing grief is not meant to be a description of a God who is vengeful and punishing or who rains down calamity, but a God who walks with us in the midst of calamity. Isaiah is describing a God who builds the mountains, and who knows us by name. I find that comforting, and believe that we all can, in our own lives, and in our common, shared lives.
God made a world that is complex enough, and imperfect enough, and human enough and beautiful enough, that it holds heartbreak, a world whose imperfect people keep hurting each other – we keep taking, we keep wanting more, we keep building empires, and we also all want to go home again. In whatever hurricane or illness or empire or grief or estrangement, we are struggling to survive, we are not struggling alone.
Our God is a God who makes the stars, and who takes us by the hand, in peace and in calamity. Our God is a God who speaks even to those who do not know or listen or believe, a God who works through the unexpected. Our God is the God of Cyrus, and of Isaiah, the God who made humans to live in cities and go to war and then to find a way to make peace. Knowing this, and knowing that we are known, tells us that God didn’t give our loved ones cancer or set us on a path of political and racial conflict – God doesn’t direct the outcome of the World Cup or the midterm elections – and it tells us that God does not leave us to fend for ourselves in that complex world that shapes us and that we shape. And that we will find ourselves coming home again, and rebuilding our beloved places, and that God will give us the strength and the love to meet each other there.
Amen.
[1] Matthew 22:15-22
[2] Isaiah 45:1-7
[3] prompted by Joel Kemp; https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-29/commentary-on-isaiah-451-7-7
[4] Psalm 95:5
[5] https://hymnary.org/text/earth_and_all_stars
[6] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-29/commentary-on-isaiah-451-7-6
