Isaiah 40:1-11
2nd Sunday in Advent
Rev. Douglas L. Stewart
“Comfort, O comfort my
people, says your God…”
Speak tenderly to Ferguson and Staten Island…
Speak softly to West Africa…
Speak gently to Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza…
Speak
lovingly to those in our city encircled by poverty and violence…
Speak
soothingly to our youth who wonder if this will be the week that gun violence
hits their schools as it has in 91 other schools since Newtown…
Whose bearings are confused…
And whose vision is blurred by broken hearts and
shattered dreams.
“Comfort, O comfort my
people says your God…” Words so
familiar, and yet at times so far out of reach.
Words nonetheless offering the balm of healing to the festering wounds
of exile.
A place of confusion,
despair, and darkness, away from everything and everyone familiar to them...
A place from which they anxiously
return home only to find their beloved city in ruins; only to find their
precious land destroyed by drought; only to find their cherished homes laid
waste…
The city once teeming with
the joyful laughter of children playing in its streets is now eerily silent. The
Temple, the holiest place on earth, through which the living God nourished his
people of old with his presence has been reduced to a pile of dead stones.
Glorious buildings,
family, and friends… All gone.
Erased. As if they
never existed.
And yet, it is precisely here in the season of Advent where
two worlds collide: where the world of brokenness and the world of hope walk hand in
hand.
While shedding our own
exilic tears,
Of relationships broken, of
healthy bodies lost, of death’s sting too real…
An empty cross stands
right here before us, reminding us that not even death can separate us from
God; empowering us to dare proclaim God’s hope of restoration and healing.
While lamenting the
valleys of unspeakable poverty…
We dare to proclaim hope
in a God who transforms food deserts and levels the hills of economic
disparity… perhaps even using us to advocate systemic justice while feeding and
clothing a hungry and hurting city.
we dare to hope in a God
who makes the rough places a plain by the boundary-shattering work of his son –
especially in the Rochesters, the Staten Islands, the Fergusons and the Gazas
of this world.
We dare to imagine and
follow a God of hope who not only gives us our thirst-quenched voice, but who
leads us out into the world – into the wilderness places using our voice to
comfort and prophetically stir the world.
“Comfort, O comfort my
people, says your God…”
Not a warrior to impose
our jaded agendas on the world, but one who came as a newborn so vulnerable, so
easily approachable that no one needs to be afraid.
One whose death upon a
cross, touching heaven to earth, has forever transformed our cries of despair into
songs of hope.
One who will gather the broken
lambs into his arms, feeding and healing us that we may feed and heal the
world.
No comments:
Post a Comment