FINDING COMFORT AND JOY IN THE WILDERNESS

FINDING COMFORT AND JOY IN THE WILDERNESS

(Preached on Sunday, December 4, 2005)

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.

-Isaiah 40:1

Charley. Frances. Ivan. Jeanne.

The Haitian floods.

The Asian tsunami.

Dennis. Katrina. Rita. Wilma.

The earthquake in Pakistan/India.

Are you feeling it?

It is exhausting to think back over the past year.

And now we have passed Thanksgiving and entered Advent headed for Christmas and New Years.

I am already flat out tired. I feel like good old Charlie Brown when he said to Linus, “Life is just too much for me. I’ve been confused from the day I was born. I think the whole trouble is that we’re thrown into life too fast. We’re not really prepared.” And Linus asks, “What did you want ... a chance to warm up first?”

The Advent season is supposed to be our chance to warm up. It’s that time to prepare our hearts and homes for the birth of the Christ child. It’s that time when we put all the decorations in their place, the presents are bought and wrapped, the cards sent out and recevied, and we get ready for Christmas Day. But if we aren’t careful the time of preparation will be over and the big day will be here and it will be just another day.

Even more important, if we are really dealing with disaster fatigue, then we are probably dealing with compassion fatigue — where we are dangerously close to losing our ability to care about others, even those we are close to. And if that is the case, then we are in danger of becoming depressed, angry, emotionally overwhelmed or emotionally shut down. Then our relationships begin to suffer, our ability to work begins to suffer, our ability to relax and create begin to suffer. We begin to miss deadlines, miss appointments, pay less attention to our health. Our tempers grow shorter, our patience and understanding grow shorter, and again, our relationships begin to suffer.

I know I’m tired.

How about you?

So what are we to do?

I tried to suggest to my wife we skip Christmas, but that didn’t fly with her and I doubt any of you will likely take me up on that idea.

So another idea is to take a look at one of the central figures of Advent and Christmas who might offer some guidance: Mary.

Mary is a problematic character for Protestants, so we have tended to shy away from her.

Two of the dominant views of Mary we do not really find helpful: the idea that she is the feminine face of God (which tends to deify her too much and we have never been comfortable with that) and the idea that she is the ideal woman (which again we are not comfortable with, for it not only stereotypes Mary but also women in general.)

But the view we Protestants have tended to hold of Mary actually holds more power for our world today than we have usually acknowledged.

That view is the remembrance that Miryam of Nazareth was a poor woman of faith who partnered with God throughout her life, especially in the redemptive work of mothering Jesus, the Messiah.

In remembering that she was a Jewish village woman of faith we can discover some real power in her memory. As a member of the people of Israel, Mary inherited the faith in one living God stemming from Abraham and Sarah onward, a God who hears the cries of the poor and frees the enslaved into covenanted relationship.

She was also a village woman — one of the untold millions of faceless, nameless marginalized women who live unchronicled lives in oppressive situations.

She was a poor woman living in a poor village in a time of military occupation by a foreign nation. Her life was hard and difficult and held little promise of ever improving, even with marriage.

As a woman of faith, she had a faith history to draw strength and wisdom from for daily living — especially for coping with such a despair filled world. Perhaps her prayers may have sounded like this, taken from the poetry of Ann Johnson:

“My God

To what mountain have you fled?

Within what cavern have you hid?

I am your people.

I am Israel and

I call to you.

Daily I listen for evidence of your vitality.

I hear only shallow resonances of what once was.

Daily I hear stories of our past with you.

Exodus and prophecy seem old and far away.

Daily I witness a beaten people begging alms and hanging on a Roman tree.

Your nation rots, twisted and suppressed in Roman hands.

My God

Have you forgotten who we are?

Are we forsaken by a love grown cold and faithless?

I am named Miryam.

I am Hebrew and

I claim my hour with you.

I remind you of the covenant forever binding on us both.

I call on you to honor it.

I sound forth Isaiah’s promise ... Prince of Peace, Redeemer, King.

I do not come in knowledge, but ii hope.

I implore you in this hour to fulfill our destiny.

I stand with Deborah and with Ruth willing to risk everything.”

She would have turned to God in prayer.

She would have remembered different ones of her ancestors in the faith: Deborah and Ruth, even Isaiah.

Perhaps she might even have remembered these words we read together this morning. “Comfort, O Comfort my people, says your God.”

These words were spoken to a people in a far more desperate situation than we find ourselves in today.

They were proclaimed to the Israelites who were languishing in Babylonian exile in the sixth century B.C., to a people who thought that God had forgotten all about them. They had been captives of the great Babylonian Empire for over sixty years.

In exile, when most Jews felt despair, and passaged hopelessness around like a bitter cup, Isaiah offered them a golden chalice of hope.

This hope was grounded in the faithfulness of God.

In the dialogue the prophet imagines with the angelic messengers of God, when he fumbles for a message to share, because, he points out, human beings are as fickle and insubstantial as the grass of the field and the beautiful flowers which bloom one day and the next are gone.

Never the less, the angel acknowledges that truth, but points out the message of comfort, hope and joy does not depend on human creatures, but on the unshakable faithfulness of God. Not only is God faithful, but also merciful and gentle, leading and nurturing and caring for them even as a shepherd cares for the lambs in his flock.

Undoubtedly by recalling such stories from her faith tradition, Miryam found the strength she needed to face her own despairing time.

In fact, like the Israelites in exile, Miryam discovered that it is often in the most barren and desert-like times that one encounters God in the most real way.

Advent suggests that the wildernesses of our lives are precisely when God comes to meet us. Advent is itself a kind of wilderness — a desert place between two locations.

No deep valley or ravine in our journey is so dark that the guiding star of God cannot penetrate.

No event can be so calamitous, that God cannot use it for a larger purpose. No evil can be so entrenched that redemption is impossible. No suffering or sorrow is too heavy for the Divine Comforter to ease the weight from our shoulders. No threat so deadly that God cannot offer the promise of new birth.

Whenever we start feeling sorry for ourselves, we need a dose of Isaiah’s courage and vision.

And we need to link arms with brothers and sisters in the faith, especially those down through the ages who have faced far more despairing times and persevered. And we can do all this by spending time alone with God in prayer, even as Miryam did.

Finally, there is one other little thing we can do as illustrated by this little story. It’s about a little girl who told her mother that her brother and his friends had set a trap to catch birds.