Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 4, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The great UCC Hebrew Scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann has taught us to think about Hebrew Scripture in terms of major "trajectories," as he calls them, major images and themes that run across the diverse books of the Hebrew Bible. One of those trajectories or themes, indeed one of the Bible’s major trajectories or themes, is return from exile. Our readings from Isaiah and Psalm 85 this morning are part of that theme. In their historical setting, they are about the return of the Jewish people from exile in Babylon in the late 6th century BCE. That of course is ancient history, but Brueggemann has also taught us to see the great trajectories of Hebrew Scripture not as mere history but as metaphors of timeless spiritual truths. Return from exile is such a timeless spiritual truth.

As humans living in a fallen world, as Americans living in a post-modern, secularized culture that believes that only the material is real and only facts are true, we live in exile from God. We live in a spiritual Babylonian captivity. If you doubt that just look at the world around us. The Psalmist says that God’s will for God’s people is peace. Psalm 85:8a Yet our world, and much of the time our lives, are characterized not by peace but by all of the things that are the opposite of peace. Our world is, for the most part, a place of anxiety, agitation, fear, anger, judgment, hatred, and war. It is only occasionally, for some people, a place of true peace. God’s will for us is peace. God wants us to live in a place of peace, but mostly we live in a place of no peace, even when we aren’t actually at war. That place of no peace is indeed a place of exile from God.

And it’s not where God wants us to be. God wants to lead us out of exile back home to God. God seeks to overcome all obstacles to our return: "Every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain and hill be made low, the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain." Isaiah 40:4 God wants to leads us home and will keep working to overcome the obstacles in our way until we’re there. Isaiah spoke of physical obstacles to a physical return from a physical exile, but his words speak also of a profound spiritual truth. We are not in physical exile, but we live most of the time in spiritual exile. The obstacles to our return from that spiritual exile are spiritual not physical, but God works without tiring to bring us through those obstacles back home to God.

What are those obstacles? I suppose they are different things for every one of us. They are whatever keeps us separate from God. That might be our sense of our own unworthiness. It might be cynicism about the state of the world and God’s, or our, ability to change it. It might be distraction with the things of the world, material wealth and success for example. It might be misplaced values that put nation ahead of God or self ahead of others. It might be addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling, or any of the other things to which we can become addicted so that the thing to which we are addicted becomes our God, becomes that to which we subordinate everything else. I’m sure my list of obstacles to our return home to God is incomplete, so I invite you to make your own list of the things that keep you in exile from God.

And here’s the thing. Whatever your obstacles are, God can overcome them. The only person who can stop God from overcoming them is you! If we’ll let God do it, God will lift up the valley of our unworthiness. God will make the low the mountain of our cynicism and the hill of our materialism. God will smooth out the rough places of our misplaced values and even lead us through the wilderness of our addictions. God will lift up whatever deep valley you have to cross. God will level whatever mountain you have to climb. Praise the Lord!

And it’s all up to us. All we have to do is open our hearts to God. All we have to do is admit our need of God’s grace and ask for God’s help. It’s not a once for all kind of thing of course. It is rather a way of living, living every minute of every day with a prayer on our lips and the love of God in our hearts. It is living with a heart softened by prayer and practice. Last Sunday I told you that Advent is a time of separation from God, and mythically speaking it is. But it is also a perfect time to practice the disciplines that can open our hearts and minds to God’s constant desire to overcome that separation. It is a perfect time to practice prayer, meditation, charity, and compassion for all of God’s creation. It is a perfect time because in this time we await the coming of the one who is our guide out of exile, the one in whom and through whom God ends our exile, Jesus the Christ, our Lord and Savior. If through prayer and practice we are able to open our hearts to Him, our exile from God indeed will end.

And when it does, what a victory that will be! We will at last find that peace that is God’s will for us. We will find that comfort of which Isaiah cries. We will find consolation-another way to translate the word we heard as comfort this morning-consolation for our grief, our pain, our fear. The joy of a life truly lived with and in God is something of which those of us living in exile can only dream. Yet we’ve seen glimpses of it. I know I have. I have felt God’s consolation in my grief. I have felt God’s comfort in my pain and my fear. I’ve felt it, but it’s not where I mostly live. Mostly I live in exile. God wants to end my exile. God wants to end your exile, and God can do it if we just won’t stop God from doing it. May this Advent season be for us a time when we open our hearts to God’s desire to lead us home. May it be a season in which we find that peace that only God can give. Amen.