WADING RIVER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

SERMONS IN PRINT

Peter Vibert 11/27/05

Isaiah 49:8-21 “I Will Not Forget You”

To get lost a second time, after you had found your way back onto the right road; to see someone fall back into addiction after once making the steps to recovery; to have grabbed the rope and then let it go because you did not have the strength to hold on - these are among the most brutal, the most demoralizing events in life. Nothing can quite prepare you for the sense of failure the second time around.

What happens to individuals and families can happen to communities, to peoples, to nations. The paradigm for us as believers is the experience of Israel. God had chosen Abraham’s line to be his people; they had gone into slavery in Egypt and in the great Exodus he had delivered them with a mighty hand under Moses’ leadership. He had established them in the land of Canaan; they had built a nation out of a group of nomadic tribes; under David and Solomon they had become rich and famous; but then everything had started to go down hill. Despite God’s promises that the Temple would be his home, that one of David’s dynasty would always rule from Jerusalem, the kingdom had fragmented and declined; until in the 6th century BC Israel and Judah were overrun - the people dispersed, the Temple and the city of Jerusalem destroyed, thousands of their leaders deported to Babylon. Israel had gone into exile; for a second time the people of God were slaves in a foreign land.

The prophets had warned of it, but nobody believed them. Surely God would never allow the city or the Temple to be destroyed! But he had! What now of Israel’s future? What of her faith? Where was their God now? What do you do when you have lost your sense of being called, chosen, protected, guided? How does faith survive when you have gone into exile? How do you believe when the things you relied on to give your life meaning, all the old landmarks, have disappeared?

1) God Has a Time

God sent the prophet Isaiah to the people in exile to announce his plan. The exiles hardly heard it; clearly they did not understand it, or believe it. Much of Isaiah’s message went right over their heads, and at times he seems to be wondering if anyone is listening. Later Jesus will take up Isaiah’s lament over those who are “ever hearing, but never understanding.”

Isaiah says God is going to restore Israel. It will not be like before; it will never be the same Israel again. Ten of the northern tribes will never return to the land; the great worldwide Dispersion of the Jews has begun. But the important thing for the exiles to know is that God has a time, and a plan. There will be a moment when he is ready. The exiles will spend 70 years in Babylon; two generations will come and go before any restoration of people to the land occurs. God’s people will be punished for their national sins, and as a people they will be purged. Only a handful of the original population, a remnant, will return to Jerusalem. But the time will come! God has a plan, “In the time of my favor I will answer you.”

Maybe the hardest thing for any of us to do is to wait, and hope, and trust that there is a better future somewhere ahead. The point of Isaiah’s prophecy, and why we often read it in Advent, is that he speaks in the middle of the darkest night Israel has known in 800 years, and promises that God has in store a time of restoration. When Jesus comes, he says it is “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” “Now is the time of God’s favor,” writes the Apostle Paul, quoting Isaiah. Advent is about the certainty that God has a time in store when he will change everything. He has not finished with us; his day is still coming. But it will come.

2) Restoration and Redemption

What will happen when that day comes? Isaiah sees it as God’s people making the long journey back across the deserts and mountains, from modern Iraq to Israel. God will lead his people out like a warrior king. He will make the paths smooth; he will protect them as they journey, he will provide for their needs at every step. Yet he will also be to them a tender shepherd, and the enigmatic figure of his Servant. As they return, it will be with joy and celebration.

There will be plenty to celebrate. The captives will now be free; and although the Babylonian exile was more like a national house-arrest than an imprisonment, they would at last be free! If you have dragged the chains of some memory or habit around for years, you can sense what it might mean to finally be free of it. Maybe the time is finally coming, for you. You don’t have to be in exile forever.

The people in darkness will come into the light. It is not that the sun did not shine in Babylon; the darkness is spiritual. God’s coming is always portrayed as light that penetrates the gloom and frees those who have been crouching in the darkness in fear or in ignorance. It is no coincidence that John in his Gospel describes Jesus as “the true light, who gives light to every man... the light of men... which the darkness could not overcome.” If you are trapped in a gloomy place, and very little light penetrates into your life, then you need to know the promise of Isaiah, and of Advent, that “the light is coming.”

There are others who are out of prison, out of darkness, but who need protection and provision along the way. The journey home is long, and at times exhausting, and we sometimes wonder if we will ever make it through. Sometimes we are so tired we can hardly put one foot in front of another, physically or spiritually. We need the promise: “He tends his flock like a shepherd; He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young.”

The restoration of God’s exiled people is more than just gathering in the remnants of a once proud nation. It is the beginning of a new gathering of God’s people, because now God’s Servant - Israel as she is meant to be - will be a “light to the Gentiles” and will bring God’s salvation “to the ends of the earth.” If that seems extravagant to you, how much more to Isaiah and the exiles of 587 BC, who could not imagine that we would be sitting here 2500 years later as heirs to that promise.

God is not as limited as we often suppose, and what he may yet do - if not in our day then in the future; if not in our generation, then in our children’s and our children’s children’s - what God may yet do is literally beyond our imagination. So it is not for us to give up, but to remain faithful in our day. I have often told ministerial colleagues that one of the great blessings of pastoring an old, historic, church is the daily, tangible, reminder that we are part of something very much bigger than ourselves. God’s people have been worshipping and serving him on this corner in Wading River for over 300 years, and we are called to follow him, and them, and be faithful; not to be obsessed with the details of our own day-to-day achievements, but to be concerned to pass on the faith to our children and their children, and to all the other children and adults whom God brings into our circle of influence and responsibility.

3) Fear and Forgetting

But there was one fear that held back the people of God while they were in Babylon, or even as they straggled back to Jerusalem. Had God abandoned them? It was a haunting fear, because all they had relied on had crumbled, and the word of God seemed no more to be trusted than anything else. His people felt alone, cut off, forsaken; indeed this was what the prophets had foretold: that they would be “cut off” as God’s chosen people.

That remains a great hindrance to flourishing today in the lives of many people - physically, psychologically, spiritually. We feel alone; if we are not deliberately abandoned by others, then we are simply isolated, living in places that nobody else knows about or understands. People outside have no idea of what goes on in your family; we look fine on the outside, but we all wrestle with sickness, or anger, or addictions, or Alzheimer’s, or some other private family demons. Nobody else knows, or would want to know - or so we think. And so we feel alone. Our jobs take us away from our loved ones for most of our waking hours, into worlds they cannot begin to understand, where what is required of us, the effort we put in, the decisions we deal with, the new ideas and plans we must produce, are all unimaginable to anyone who hasn’t done what we do. Even our immediate working colleagues don’t always get it.

So we feel alone; isolated from anyone who could really understand. This is worst of all for some older people, who feel cut off in so many ways. And with loneliness goes fear; that we will be left alone when we most need help, and there will be no-one who understands or cares. No wonder so many people fear dying alone and unnoticed.

A deep sense of loneliness, which you can experience in the midst of crowds of people, can leave you feeling that even God has forgotten you. It is to that lonely place that Isaiah speaks: “Zion says, the Lord has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me.” But the Lord’s answer is firm: though even human love can fail - a mother can forget or neglect her infant child - I will not forget you!” Indeed, he says, I cannot forget you, for your name, your face, your image, is “engraved on the palms of my hands.”

It is hard to find a more graphic image of God’s remembering. This is no writing that can be erased; we are forever written on his hands. When we feel lost or alone or confused; when like Thomas the Apostle, we say, “Lord, how can we know the way?” – we can meet the Lord who shows us the scars in his hands, and says “believe”. This is the message of Advent - that when things seem bleak, and we are alone, when nobody understands us or cares for us, God comes to us in the person of Jesus our Savior and Lord, and says “You are engraved on my hands; trust me, commit yourself to me, follow me. Believe what I say, do as I tell you, and you will come out of this into a bright and shining and new place.”

God give us grace to hear his voice this Advent, and to welcome the coming of Jesus, and to be ready to trust and follow him, and to remember his promise: “I will not forget you.”

Let us pray...