What Are We Waiting For?

What Are We Waiting For?

Isaiah 35:1-10

September 9, 2018

“They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God.” When that great day of liberation comes, light will shine in the darkness and every eye shall see it. When that great day of justice comes it will roll on like the river Jordan after the rains fall. When that great day of salvation comes, all God’s children shall seek shalom and pursue it.

These are the promises of the prophets and apostles, of the righteous kings and of the messiah, of the holy texts of this and every age. When that great day comes, it will be well with my soul and all manner of things will be well.

And I want to know, what are we waiting for?

I began this homily several times last week and kept tossing it aside. I think I was waiting for true inspiration – for a vision burnt across the sky, a lightning bolt, or, maybe, angelic visitations – heck, an anonymous op-ed sermon dropped over the transom would have been OK. But the end of the week came, and the words just didn’t.

I did some a-level procrastination around here: I walked through the building making a list of needed repairs. I even changed out a switch plate that’s been sitting in my in-box for months. I looked through cupboards at ancient sheet music that no choir at CPC has sung in decades, and I actually did find a beautiful kyrie that I’ve looked for several times over the past half-dozen years and finally found it in a stack of unsorted music. It’ll be coming ‘round in Lent! As I said, some a-level procrastination!

I did catch the irony of all of this given that I’d jotted down “what are we waiting for” as a provisional title at the beginning of the week.

When Isaiah wrote these words -- the wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing – he was writing to a community in exile. They probably felt like they had been waiting forever for a sign that God still cared about them. They probably felt that their cries for justice and restoration would never be heard. They may well have ceased to believe that they were waiting for anything because they may well have lost all hope that anything better was going to come along.

They may have stopped asking “what are we waiting for?” and simply resigned themselves to living as strangers in a strange and foreign land.

The cupboards need to be cleaned out and a bunch of old papers purged. The garden needs some serious weeding, and the grass needs to be mowed. There’s a stack of thank-you notes waiting to be addressed and mailed. We’re not hoping for the promised land – the day of liberation, of justice, of healing, wholeness, and peace – and we’re not waiting for something better, we’re just making the to-do list and checking things off.

In this strange and foreign land, some folks have risen to positions of relative prominence. They have responsibilities beyond the domestic sphere, so they’ve got important meetings to arrange, staff to manage, programs to run.

But into the middle of this – this world where the captives have become residents and maybe even joined the middle class – into the midst of this Isaiah offers an alternative vision:

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert […] A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; […] it shall be for God’s people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray. No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

For Isaiah – as for all the great prophetic voices of Israel – the vision of shalom is indivisible from a vision of justice. These things – water in desert, songs instead of sighs – these things are signs that accompany the day of jubilee, that day when the oppressed go free, the blind have new sight, the poor hear good news. These signs of shalom mark the coming of another world, the inbreaking of what Jesus would call the kingdom of God come as close as the air we breathe.

Isaiah cast this vision of a future otherwise, and Jesus wants to know, “what are you waiting for?” It’s here, in your midst, if you would but trust the vision, live into it without fear, and follow where I am leading.

I think I understand how the exiles felt. They were resident aliens in a culture that did not fully share their values, and they no doubt sometimes felt the foundation of their own values shifting beneath their feet as they went along to get along with the culture around them. They must have felt powerless to change the systems that controlled their lives and they must have also sometimes felt that those systems were changing them and their children.

So Isaiah reminds them who they are. In the piece I just quoted I left out a line that sometimes troubles me. When Isaiah describes the highway in the desert, the Holy Way, he also says “the unclean shall not travel on it.”

You can imagine why that bothers me as purity codes are often used to exclude marginalized persons. But this time through, I was reminded that the practices that marked the faithful as the children of God were, first and foremost, reminders to the people of who they were and to whom they belonged.

Isaiah is reminding them: it’s never too late to put into practice the things you say you believe, the things that mark you as God’s own. You can sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land. You can practice the golden rule even in a society in which the rules are twisted and the leaders dominate by monopolizing the gold. There is never a wrong time to do the right thing, even when the culture around you does not value those things.

That’s why we workshopped what we workshopped this morning. Feeding hungry people is always the right thing to do. You don’t have to go to the mountaintop to find beauty; you can see and celebrate beauty and feel God’s presence right here in the city. You can sing a new song unto the Lord this and every day.

What are you waiting for? What are we waiting for?

We may well be tempted to wait. But, friends, heaven shall not wait. Amen.