Comfort. Hope. Peace.

Advent 2B

This week, I was visiting our senior warden, Louise, and her daughter Olivia who is going with other high school students to our President-elect’s inauguration! – we were sitting in the living room talking about what dress Olivia might wear to the inauguration events - and Louise suddenly said – it’s hard being Episcopalian these days! And brought out the New York Times. There we are, headlined on the front page – above the fold! “Episcopal split as conservatives form new group. And in smaller letters “Threat to Frail Union”.

The San Francisco Chronicle headline was a bit more tame: “Conservatives form rival group to Episcopal Church:” “Theological conservatives upset by liberal views of U.S. Episcopalians and Canadian Anglicans have formed a rival North American province

"The Lord is displacing the Episcopal Church," Duncan said in a news conference in Wheaton, Ill., where the proposed constitution for the new province was drafted.
Our dear Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, responded in her unflappable calm and comforting voice that "there is room within The Episcopal Church for people with different views and we regret that some have felt the need to depart from the diversity of our common life in Christ." Isn’t she great!

But despite it’s headlining status, this news of trouble in the Episcopal church is not really the main news of the week. On the same front page, above the fold, were articles on the rapid warming of the planet, the trouble that the automakers are in, and this headline – “When a Job Disappears, So Does the Health Care.” “As jobless numbers reach levels not seen in 25 years, another crisis is unfolding for millions of people who lost their health insurance along with their jobs, joining the ranks of the uninsured.” Starla, 27, 8 months pregnant with her second child, rushes to the hospital to have early labor induced and then is delivered by Caesarean section. She did this before her plant closed, leaving her with no health insurance. These are the stories of our neighbors – and I know actually, of some of you. Cuts - leaving you without insurance, and with little explanation of where to go next.

And then, of course, there are the non-headlines, the everyday aches and bruises of life – surgeries that don’t fix the pain, chemo that destroys the appetite, spouses that leave, children that grow up, stress that gets in the way of sleep, debt that piles up.

Second Isaiah was called by God to speak words of comfort – to be a voice of comfort in a time when the Israelites were in exile – their homes destroyed, their way of life gone, and them carried off to a foreign place. “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people.” Handel’s Messiah begins with this magnificent chapter of Isaiah. Calvin and Luther, those old time theologians, insisted that this chapter pre-figured and even contained – the whole of the gospel of the good news of Jesus Christ. You might think of the God of the Old Testament as a God who wreaks vengeance and destruction on people, and the God of the New Testament as Loving – but that’s not so. Here, God comes to his people, in the words of his prophet, with the tenderness of a mother whose child is in pain, with the tenderness of a shepherd, whose lambs have been scattered and who are in need of direction and protection.

“Speak tenderly … cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received double for all her sins.” I have been in Ecuador and in the Holy Land this year – and in both of those places I have been with people who are at the bottom of the heap, the children of indigenous people in Ecuador, and the children of Bedouins in the Holy Land – I have seen hunger, and the distressing way that hunger stunts growth and dims the light in a child’s face. My friend Khalil Zhakaria, a Gaza resident, asks for prayers for his mother, who has cancer, and who is utterly reliant on the prayers of other Christians, because Gaza has been sealed off from any form of outside medical or food aid for weeks now. Of course, we are all paying the penalty of the sins of greed and lust for quick profit and power and revenge – but there are those who pay double and triple for those sins – they are the ones whom Christ called the “meek” – the ones who will enter the kingdom first. These children of hunger and war are the lambs whom God carries closest to his bosom.

So, Isaiah is called and anointed to preach comfort and hope – in a comfortless and hopeless time. But Isaiah asks – as you and I might very well ask – “what shall I cry?” All people are grass, their constancy, their fidelity – is like the flower of the field. It fades so quickly.”

Have you, especially you long time believers – ever felt like – what’s the point? In all these years – have we really made any dent in the world’s bent towards self-destruction? Has the sweet and compelling voice of Jesus, spoken through the church, stopped any wars, thwarted any famines, reconciled any families, healed any emotional distress? The short answer actually is yes – it usually doesn’t make headlines, but I KNOW healing happens, because people appear almost every week in my office telling me about healing of one kind or another – and I myself have experienced God’s healing. So – even though our constancy and fidelity to God can’t be counted on – God’s faithfulness can be. So God tells Isaiah: “Lace up your sneakers, climb the highest mountain, and shout it out – Here is your God. He comes with might and power. He feeds his flock, he gathers his lambs, he gently leads the people home.”

The truth is, our hope is NOT in our own faithfulness and reliability – our hope is not in any President-Elect, no matter who it is – our hope is not in labor unions and bail outs – our hope is in God - whose word is powerful. Whose word is constant. Whose word is reliable.

But where is God? The people that Peter wrote to were wondering – and I don’t know about you – but I wonder that too. Where is God? Just this week – someone exploring the Christian faith asked me – why doesn’t God intervene in times of trouble? Why does God allow such pain and suffering? Peter’s response is one of the many responses that the church gives to this delay in God’s putting things to right –God does not want any to be lost and therefore God is patient. God’s time is not our time – but even so - before the “end of time and the healing of all creation” – God does come into our world and our lives, with signs and wonders, with power and with tenderness.

Sometimes, God comes in big ways with miracles of healing. My Gazan friend, Khalil, is convinced that his mother, through the power of prayer, is being healed of her cancer – and I do not doubt his word.

Sometimes, God comes in big ways with miracles of peace. One of the people I met in Nazareth, was the Catholic Christian Mairead Maguire, the Nobel Peace winner from Northern Ireland. When her friend’s daughter was killed in the fighting between the IRA and Britain, Mrs. Maguire went from house wife to activist and was instrumental in bringing peace to Ireland.

Sometimes God comes in big ways with miracles of liberation. In Jerusalem, I met Bernard Lafayette, who worked closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the American civil rights movement, not just forty years ago – and now we have an African American President – elect.

And sometimes, God comes in small ways, in ways virtually unnoticed and unremarkable – as in a baby born of a peasant woman in a barn in Bethlehem, almost 2000 years ago. But that baby was the beginning of the good news of God’s miracles of healing and peace and liberation for all people, not just a few, not just the chosen, not just the elite and well born – but for all.

The beginning – but not the end.

The Gospel of Markleaves off with the women running from the tomb, so astounded that they do not say anything! It is an odd ending – until you go back to the start of this gospel – The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God – and realize that this Good News is still unfolding … we are a part of it. We are now the ones to continue the unfolding and the telling of that Gospel – We are the Isaiah’s - the ones baptized and called to lace up our sneakers, climb the mountains, contribute our pledges, and lift our voices with strength to cry out the good news of Comfort. The good news of Hope. The good news of Peace. The good news of Jesus.