Monday, December 07, 2020

Comfort - An Advent Sermon (Isaiah 40:1-11)

 

Comfort. Comfortable. Like a pair of shoes or jumper, you’ve owned for years. They’ve seen better days. And yet, the fit is just right. The memories of places and amongst people that they’ve been worn, cluster in your mind. Good times.

 

Comfort is not rose-tinted. As you fall in the playground, comfort is someone cleaning the graze; comfort is telling the grieving widower that in time it will be alright; comfort is the reassuring phone call that they are safe out of the operating theatre and it’s gone well. Comfort is a present knowledge that all shall be well.

 


Comfort is the action of intervention in love. It is active, not passive. It meets us where we are. It is tangible, look-you-in-the-eye-and-doing-something-about-it hope. God calls for Jerusalem - exiled into Babylon, now returning - to come home, and as they do they find the city, their home, the dwelling of God, razed to the ground, houses obliterated, walls shattered, lives and livelihood decimated - and God tells them it will be alright. The awfulness of the time passed is ended. They are home. God promises to give them double in goodness for what they received in suffering and death.

 

The promised comfort isn’t just reassuring words - as tender and beautiful as they might be - like a loving mother holding and gentling rocking her hurting child. God’s comfort to His people will see a safe passage created for them to return to Jerusalem - a safe road, not one surrounded by bandits and wild animals in the shadowy valley, this road will be built for them to travel from Babylon home on. The journey is long and difficult, but to ease it, God will level hills and fill in valleys and the scrubby wilderness will be laid with green grass like a newly fitted carpet. Every other nation will go - wow, look what Israel’s God does for His people! Now that’s love! That’s comfort.

 

A further voice comes to the conversation - hang on. Don’t get people’s hopes up! They will love this sort of comfort, but like the meadow flowers they’ll respond - growing beautiful in their renewed faith and trust, but before you know it God, they’ll die down and go back to living the same old same old and ignoring you. God says - what I have promised I have promised. I am faithful.

 

So Jerusalem, if this is news you needed to hear and you are excited - go and tell others. Get up to a high point where people can see and hear you - tell the surrounding peoples and communities, your neighbours and friends - God is here! He isn’t absent. He didn’t cause this devastation. He didn’t abandon you. He left you, you having told him forcefully like a hormone-filled teenager in your actions and words that you didn’t need him - to walk off, as any loving parent would, to see what you would make of your longed-for independence, not loving you any less, but realising that you just weren’t listening, or accepting loving help and support.


Tell your neighbours - God is coming. God is here. Like a loving father, He will protect his beautiful teenage daughter. Like a shepherd on the hillside - he will eat and sleep and provide for you 24/7 and when you are afraid or hurting, He will carry you.

 

Comfort. Comfortable. Like a pair of shoes or jumper you’ve owned for years. They’ve seen better days. And yet, the fit is just right. The memories of places and amongst people that they’ve been worn cluster in your mind. Good times.

 

Comfort is not rose-tinted. As you fall in the playground, comfort is someone cleaning the graze; comfort is telling the grieving widower that in time it will be alright; comfort is the reassuring phone call that they are safe out of the operating theatre and it’s gone well. Comfort is a present knowledge that all shall be well.

 

Comfort is the action of intervention in love. It is active, not passive. It meets us where we are. It is tangible, look-you-in-the-eye-and-doing-something-about-it hope. God calls coronvairus invaded, recession filled, unemployment rising, public debt increasing, hungry family, longing for a hug filled Britain and the other nations of the world, to look forward, gingerly, to a time when all of this will be ended. God tells us it will be alright. The awfulness of the time passed is drawing to a conclusion. We be home.


 

The promised comfort isn’t just reassuring words - as tender and beautiful as they might be - like a loving mother holding and gentling rocking her hurting child. God’s comfort to us is like seeing a safe road, not one surrounded by bandits and wild animals in the shadowy valley, this road will be built for them to travel home on. The journey is long and difficult, but to ease it, God will level hills and fill in valleys and the scrubby wilderness will be laid with green grass like a newly fitted carpet. Every other nation will go - wow, look what God does for His people! Now that’s love! That’s comfort.

 

This passage isn’t about a coronavirus action plan but it is about comfort, a reversal of awfulness in love by love to love. We all need comfort - an active, physical knowledge that all shall be well. This is the road, the song, the unbridled hope of Advent. This is how God feels about us. This is how God feels about you. Come home.