Great and Good
A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany in the Year of Our Lord 2021
Throughout this season after Epiphany, we’ve been considering God’s dramatic, intrusive appearances in our lives, all the ways that God shows up when we’re least expecting God. Sometimes God’s words are hard to pick out, requiring others to help us to recognize them. Sometimes, like Jonah, we’d rather God had simply minded the divine business instead of recruiting us to preach sermons we weren’t ready to preach, much less for the congregation to respond!
In today’s passage from Isaiah, folks were about ready for an epiphany. The sins of their many-times-over-great-grandparents had landed them in a foreign land, far from Jerusalem God’s holy city, far from the land God promised to Abraham when he was living not too far from where the exiles were stuck. All that time (in the promised land), they were walking a very thin line: walking or–just as often–not walking in the ways that the Lord had called them to walk as God’s people. So now they’re still in exile, and they’re not seeing any signs. How can they read the Lord’s mind? Does the Lord still have a word for Israel?
The Isaiah prophet is clearly dealing with these kinds of doubts and questions. You don’t have to ask, as Isaiah does, “Why do you say, Jacob, and declare, Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord, my God ignores my predicament’?” unless folks are openly questioning whether or not the Lord is still God, whether the Lord still cares for the people whom the Lord made for the Lord’s own delight and good pleasure.
So, what does the Lord do? The Lord doesn’t shine out of the clouds as a dove descends, like at Jesus’ baptism. But the dialogical Lord, the Lord who simply cannot bear to be out of conversation with the Lord’s people, sends a word to Israel in exile. It might not have been the kind of word that Israel was hoping for but when is the Lord ever confined to fulfilling our expectations for how the Lord should behave?
The Lord instead is determined that these exiles, surrounded by the worship of foreign gods, should remember that there is none other like the Lord their God. The Lord is incommensurable — shares a measuring stick with no other being, no so-called god. The Lord doesn’t send Isaiah with a new word, a novel, clever word, a trendy word ready to adorn the lips of the intelligentsia. That’s not what’s needed. Israel is called back instead to the kind of theology that Adam and Eve could have done in the garden, called back to square one. The Israelite exiles are sitting for remedial confirmation classes, relearning how to tell the most fundamental truths about God.
Isaiah’s refrain — “Don’t you know? Haven’t you heard” — rings out today like it did to the Israelites because like them we do know (or at least we should) and we have heard (or at least we were supposed to) that, as the Psalmist puts it, “the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hands are the caverns of the earth and the heights of the hills are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands have molded the dry land” (Ps. 95:3–5).
Isaiah retells these truths in gorgeous verse to get our attention: The Lord is “enthroned on the rim of earth, and its dwellers are like grasshoppers. He spreads out the heavens like gauze and stretches them like a tent to dwell in” (Is. 40:22, Alter). The earth cannot even begin to contain the Lord, yet the Lord makes of the heavens a resting place.
The leaders, the bigwigs, the powerbrokers of the world? The Lord “turns princes into nothing, earth’s rulers He makes as naught” (v. 23, Alter). They’re not invincible nor self-sustaining but mere saplings with slight tendrils to root them in the earth, susceptible to a puff of the Lord’s breath, born away by a storm.
It’s not like Isaiah is instructing the Israelites in the finer points of rocket surgery here. These are the basic affirmations. It’s first line-of-the-creed level of basic: We believe in one God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. For these to be God’s words through Isaiah to a struggling and confused bunch of exiles means that sometimes we don’t need a fancy sign, don’t need a grand gesture, don’t need a miracle. What these words mean for them and for us is that what we need to hear is what was announced to us from the beginning, what we’ve understood since the earth was founded. No matter who’s in office, no matter who’s got the launch codes, no matter who’s running the economy, the Lord is still God and the Lord is so great that by contrast the ones who imagine themselves important are as unimportant as chaff in the wind.
But these verses only make sense as comforting words when we read them alongside the final verses of the chapter. We can say more than “God is great.” We can also say, “God is good!” God is great; God is good. The powerful, untiring, unfathomable Lord has determined to be for those whom the Lord has chosen. The Lord is near to those whom the Lord loves, giving them power when tired, reviving them when exhausted.
You might feel this morning like you’ve lost a step, like you don’t have the bounce you remember having not so long ago. But the reason you can’t keep up with the Lord now is because you couldn’t even when you were at your peak! Even the young tire, stumble, fade, but the Lord is unchanging: “In him there is no shadow of turning.”
No matter what you’re going through, the Lord has the strength and sustenance you need to make it through. Not only make it through, you can run without growing weary (unlike the tired-out youngsters — now’s your chance for an “I-Told-You-So”). But you needn’t expect to be limited to such mundane methods of transport: the Isaiah prophet says that those who hope in the Lord will sprout wings (and be able to fly).
What the Isaiah prophet is preaching, what he believes has been known since time immemorial, the reason he’s so dumbfounded by the unbelief he finds around him, is that the Lord is for us. This is the great truth that sustains Israel in exile, as it waits for the Lord to bring it home to the Promised Land: to clear a way in the desert, to make straight in the desert a highway (v. 3).
Nowhere is it clearer that the Lord is for us than in Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected. We would be satisfied to know that the Lord gives power to the weak, but the Lord went one step further and became weak. Our comfort is that we can run the race marked out for us because the Lord has already run it and defeated our foe for us. No obstacle remains in our course that can stand in our way. We can trust that even when we run out of strength in this life, that by being joined to Christ’s death and resurrection we will still be renewed, given new bodies, new strength which will never run out.
It might be that this is the first time that you’ve heard this news, and if it is, let me tell you that you’ve just heard the best news there is. Everything hangs on this news, on this truth, that God is for us in Jesus Christ. But for most of you this morning, it’s not new. It’s a story you’ve heard many times before. The epiphany this morning, the manifestation of the Lord’s presence, before you is a simple reminder of the great and good news that the Lord God is great and powerful and over all the kingdoms, all the cosmos, and that the Lord is for us, cares about us, and will give us strength to follow.
Will you pray with me?
O Lord, at your word out of the formless and null void the heavens and earth sprung into being. You are the everlasting God, holding all our time within your eternity. No height nor width nor depth can contain your infinity. You are Being-beyond-being, the Absolute. What are we that you are mindful of us? And yet you are. You are for us: loving us, listening to us, and attuned to our needs. When we are weak, you make us strong; when we are powerless, you give us power. Help us to remember what we’ve always known: that you are great, that you are good. Amen.
