Technorati Tags: Isaiah 40:21-31, sermons
5 Epiphany 2009
February 8, 2009
Isaiah 40: 21-31
Grasshoppers & Eagles
Pastor Chris Enstad
Brothers and sisters, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in…
With these words the author of second Isaiah begins a call to Israel to come home from exile, where they had gone and built a relatively comfortable life, to leave what they had known and set off to an unknown future completely relying on God to provide them with strength and power.
We are a nation and a people that have grown used to leading pretty comfortable lives. This congregation has had a long period of relative stability that has allowed us to reach out further than we ever have to go out in mission and ministry knowing that our mission base was unchanging and fairly predictable. Comfortable
We as a nation, as a people, as a congregation, as individuals have been used to life the way it used to be.
A week ago Thursday our presiding bishop Mark Hanson visited the Twin Cities to give the combined Minneapolis and St. Paul Synods an update on the state of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the denomination of which we are a part. But rather than give a statistical update, which anyone can find online, Bishop Hanson was more concerned with the state of preaching in the church. “How are you going to preach at this critical intersection of fear and hope,” he wanted to know? People are scared right now. Things have changed and are most likely never going to go back to the way they used to be.
And then I opened the Bible to Isaiah 40 last weekend to begin writing this final sermon here and Isaiah’s words shook me and comforted me. I believe that there are things that we have taken for granted in our lives at home and in this community. And today, God has gives us word for that, and that word is “exile”. We have been living a comfortable life, but it has not been a life that has been lived waiting on the Lord. It has been a life lived waiting on me first, then our kids, then our families, then our jobs, then all the other priorities we have set for ourselves in order to keep our relatively comfortable lives comfortable.
How’s that for a final sermon at Normandale Lutheran Church?
But you know I can get away with saying that not because I’m a short timer but because you know I love this church, you have been a second family to me and Carrie and our daughters Liv and Berit. For those two kids this is the only church community they have ever known.
So let’s jump into this Word together one final time, ok?
What a blessing it has been to serve in the community where I was born and raised. I went to elementary school right across the highway at Concord. I remember a day in fourth or fifth grade when the hill next to the playground was invaded by grasshoppers. I don’t think I had ever seen so many! We spent all of recess chasing them and I finally worked up the guts to catch one and there it was sitting there in my closed fist… it was mine! You know what happened next? Well, no one had told me that grasshoppers produce this really gross brown juice and kind of spit it out and that’s what my grasshopper did to me… and I let it go in disgust… gross!
So it was particularly interesting to me to hear the writer of Isaiah talk about God sitting above the circle of the earth and looking down at us like we are grasshoppers. But perhaps it’s a fitting metaphor for the One who seeks to hold us in the palm of His hand and we do our best to spit on that hand and hop off in our own directions, no?
Have you not known, have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? It is God who sits above the earth, and looks at us like grasshoppers… it is God who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent for us to live in.
God brings the powers that be, presidents and princes and queens and pastors and ceo’s and bankers and all of the people who think they are in charge to naught, he makes them nothing. So, brothers and sisters, what or who have you been putting your faith in?
Human beings have this funny way of planting and building and forming and working on stuff and when it takes root or shape or takes off in any way we like to think we are in charge of it. Or we build a fence around it, literally and figuratively, and call it ours. But Isaiah says no, even those things that are planted, scarcely sown when God blows on them they wither, the wind carries them off like stubble. Have you felt like that before? Have you ever experienced a time when all you have worked for is carried off just like that?
Isaiah continues:
Who could we ever possibly compare God to? Who is God’s equal? The answer is no one, no thing. Look up at the stars some night and know this, God created all of them and numbered them and calls each of those stars by name.
Isaiah does an amazing thing in this text. He addresses Israel by name. The God who made the heavens who stretches them out like a tent that we get to live in and who knows the name of each of those stars in the sky knows your name Jacob, he knows your name, Israel. God knows your names Elliot and Eva (Avery and Haley).
We were reminded just this morning that in the waters of baptism God called each of us by name and then in the water and the Word we were joined to Christ’s death and resurrection and were made children of God with a claim to our full inheritance everlasting life.
There are two ways to get to heaven you know. The chariot and the grave. Now we spend much of our lives attempting to earn our way to a bodily assumption directly to heaven that we have found ourselves in exile, away from God but things are pretty good for the most part when we do all the work, when we can look around and compare ourselves to the poor or the outcast or the hungry or the homeless and say to ourselves, well we’re doing pretty good.
Today God is calling these little ones who will be coming to this font to a life that can not be guaranteed to be comfortable or safe or painless but he is calling them to a life lived in worship and service to God. God calls us to come and die first to ourselves and to all of the power and principalities that have a claim on us, and then to come out of that grave with a new identity as God’s children.
God has called each of us out of any kind of so-called life that is lived to the glory or ourselves, our comfort, our safety, our assurance, a life of exile, to a life lived fully in the world, with our death already taken care of, and our life caught up fully in his hand.
Finally, Isaiah reminds Israel, as he reminds each of us gathered here today, that God gets it. God knows what a life lived dependent on God rather than our own efforts looks like and God knows what the intersection of fear and hope looks like.
Even the young will faint and be weary. Even the young will fall exhausted.
But those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up on wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.
Have you ever seen an eagle playing in the ups and downs of the air? They make it look so effortless. Would that we might live our lives, in all of the ups and downs, the exact same way. What does it look like to preach at the intersection of fear and hope? It looks like the cross. It looks like the cross.
And so my prayer for this community as I take my leave is that you would find yourselves in this place every Sunday hearing this living Word, learning about the God who sits above the circle of the earth, who has called each of you by name, and then find yourselves out there, where in the words of that great American poet… John Denver, God will find you dancing with the west wind, touching on the mountain tops, sailing over the canyons, being what God has called you all to be.
Thanks be to God.
You brought the Word...nice finish, Chris! Godspeed.
Posted by: Jon Rhodes | March 06, 2009 at 12:18 PM