Sunday, December 7
Second Sunday in Advent
Focus Theme
Messengers of Hope
Weekly Prayer
God of hope, you call us from the exile of our sin with the good news of restoration; you build a highway through the wilderness; you come to us and bring us home. Comfort us with the expectation of your saving power, made known to us in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
All Readings For This Sunday
Isaiah 40: 1-11 with Psalm 85: 1-2,8-13 and
2 Peter 3:8-15a and
Mark 1:1-8
Focus Reading
Isaiah 40:1-11
See also Psalm 85:1-2,8-13
Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her
that she has served her term,
that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord's hand
double for all her sins.
A voice cries out:
"In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
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.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken."
A voice says, "Cry out!"
And I said, "What shall I cry?"
All people are grass,
their constancy is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the Lord blows upon it;
surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades;
but the word of our God will stand for ever.
Get you up to a high mountain,
O Zion, herald of good tidings;
lift up your voice with strength,
O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,
lift it up, do not fear;
say to the cities of Judah,
"Here is your God!"
See, the Lord God comes with might,
and his arm rules for him;
his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.
He will feed his flock like a shepherd;
he will gather the lambs in his arms,
and carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead the mother sheep.
Reflection and Focus Questions
by Kate Huey
 Focus Questions1. In what ways do you and the people of your church feel far from home, exiled? How do the people in your life need to be comforted?
2. As you look around at our culture, what forces press in on us and on others, personally and communally, to grow comfortable with values that clash with the gospel?
3. How do you respond to Brueggemann's phrase, "a private shalom"? Is it what most of us seek?
4. What sort of road "broad and smooth" needs to be cleared in your heart in preparation for the coming of the One who shepherds us?
5. Is it easier to believe in God when you're in captivity than it is to believe the captivity is really over?
 Text for MeditationA voice says, "Cry out!" / And I said, "What shall I cry?" For ideas on how to meditate with the Bible, read our article on Praying With the Bible
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Imagine an ordination service for a prophet, except that church officials in robes are replaced by God on a throne, and the congregation by a host of angels and heavenly messengers. (The music in this service would be particularly good.) The prophet is charged to deliver a message from God to the people of God. The people of sixth-century B.C. Israel had lost their temple, their city Jerusalem and all that it symbolized, and their land, and their leaders had been carried off into exile in Babylon. However, even before this disaster, their system (like any system) had never really known exactly what to do with a true prophet. So we assume that the ordination service for Second Isaiah was experienced as a call from God to speak a word to the people, and it's that call, and that service, and that message, that are described by our text on this Second Sunday in Advent.
For the first thirty-nine chapters of the book of the Prophet Isaiah, the prophet scholars call "First Isaiah" delivered a word of warning about God's impending judgment, to the people of Jerusalem in the 8th century B.C. Much has happened in two hundred years: First Isaiah spoke of the threat of the mighty empire of Assyria, but in Second Isaiah's time, the Babylonian Empire has destroyed Jerusalem and carried the people off to captivity. The disaster has, like all disasters, provoked theological reflection and much lamentation. In fact, Walter Brueggemann says that the Book of Lamentations "sits" between First and Second Isaiah, a book full of grief over the exile, with "only one moment of hope...: 'The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness ... therefore I will hope in him' (3:21-24)." Only one word of hope amid all that long grief, but then, Second Isaiah comes along to cry comfort to the people, release and forgiveness, the promise of restoration and a great homecoming. Second Isaiah is all about hope, a hope rooted not in the people's strength or wits or goodness, but in the faithfulness of God. It's a surprising, unexpected word of hope, and a challenging one as well.
Many of the Jewish people must have wondered where God had gone. They felt cut off from God, far away from God; perhaps some of them even felt that God was punishing them. But God will not forget God's people or the covenant God has with them. "The Hebrew word for 'beauty' in verse 6 is hesed, which has the connotation of 'covenant faithfulness and love,'" Elizabeth Achtemeier writes. While God is persistent, faithful, and dependable, our response is inconsistent, fleeting, and undependable, no matter what we promise or intend: "we do have our moments of dedication," she observes, "[B]ut our faithfulness is like the flower of the field, beautiful at the moment but rapidly failing when trouble and distraction come upon us." The prophet reassures us of God's "anyway" love for us: we sin, but we can count on God's faithfulness anyway, on the Word of God that "will stand forever (v. 80).
A fuller portrait of God
Some folks describe the God of the Old Testament as a God of fear and threat, while the God of the New Testament is all about love and tenderness. Second Isaiah paints a fuller portrait of God. Yes, "the God who comes" (in grand entrance processionals, like ancient deities, including the gods of their captors, Babylon) is mighty and glorious and powerful. But the God of Israel is also a gentle shepherd, feeding his flock, gathering lambs in his arms and carrying them close to his heart. The people are urged to make way for this good news in their lives, a transformation of their situation initiated by a God who loves and remembers them. The powers that be, Babylon, have been overturned. The mighty have fallen, and the "little" people can dance with joy.
All of this is good news and the stuff of joy, but it's also unbelievable while you're still sunk in despair under the heel of the oppressor. At his "ordination," Second Isaiah is told to "speak tenderly to Jerusalem" (v. 2): "The Hebrew actually reads 'speak to the heart,'" Dianne Bergant writes. "Since the heart was considered the organ of thought, the phrase means 'convince Jerusalem' rather than 'be tender toward her.'" So in this Advent season of reflection in the church (a season that once was a penitential season of preparation), while the world has already started its celebration in decorations, parties, music, and shopping, our heads have some work to do before our hearts are carried away by holiday cheer.
Just as the people of Israel long ago were told to clear a path for God, to make a way where there appeared to be no way, the text tells us to make a way for God to come into our lives, to remove the obstacles and impediments, to clear out old animosities and grievances, to cut back the weeds of doubt and greed, not just to make a nice little bed for the newborn babe but to open up our lives to transforming grace. In Advent, we attune our hearts and minds to the many ways that God enters our lives and the life of the world, the holiness in the everyday reality of our lives and the momentous lives of nations in every age. Indeed, the commentaries on this text speak little of our private holiness and personal sins, and much about the way we've collectively organized our lives, and the longing for the people for hope in the midst of the big events in history.
Hope for a new Jerusalem
A new Jerusalem, a homecoming to the great city restored, is the dream and the promise of this text. As always, Walter Brueggemann writes evocatively of this hope: "It is as though the canon has gathered together all the candidates for the Martin Luther King award. They have learned to say, in distinct, harmonious tone: I have a dream, I have a dream, I have a dream ... the long nightmare of loss is over." Thousands of years later, we have experienced loss, too, in the face of war, poverty, violence (sometimes caused by religion itself), harm to God's beautiful creation, economic crisis, and hatred: "The loss is real," Brueggemann writes; "the city as we know it is defeated and failed. Nobody believes that poverty or homelessness or crime or any of the other maladies can be answered. And indeed, they never will be, given the categories of imagination now operative."
The great preacher Gardner C. Taylor read this text through the lens of a people captive in slavery in the midst of splendor like the hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the ancient wonders of the world: "As they looked around at the splendor of the architecture and masonry of Babylon, these slaves must have felt very small and insignificant," he writes. "The humble, ill-clad slaves looking at this dazzling sight must have felt a terrible despair and an aching longing for home.... What could some slaves mean midst all these achievements when they had only some exotic ways of worship and an invisible God upon whom to call midst the galling yoke and heavy oppression of their captivity?" To Gardner, verses 7-8 declare the impermanence of such glory compared to the glory and steadfast faithfulness of the God of Israel: "The unknown prophet of the exile whom we call Isaiah took one look at all of this heathen splendor and pagan power and saw the fatal void at the heart of it all.... 'Never mind,' he must have mused, 'how green and lush the grass may seem. Never mind how bright and picturesque the blossoming flowers may appear.'" Nothing lasts like the Word of God, he imagines the prophet saying: "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God shall stand for ever."
A message both consoling and jarring
Brueggemann describes God's response to the suffering of the people as poetry that will sustain them. The surprise in his reflection is the possibility that there were those who were perhaps beginning to get comfortable there in Babylon. "It is unmistakable that Babylon was not only a political-military superpower. It was also an advanced, sophisticated, winsome culture with its own theological rationale and its own moral justifications." The empire was a system, like all systems, that worked for some and not for others, but you had a better chance if you knew where to place your allegiance and energy. It must have been tempting to throw in your lot with the seductive culture around you, to find ways not only to survive but to thrive, even if it meant forgetting who and whose you were. Then a prophet comes along, changing everything with the message that, as Brueggemann puts it, "redescribes the world" as "under new management, under the governance of the home-making, home-giving God and away from the deathly power of the empire." Such poetry, he says, is so powerful that it "cannot be unsaid, not by all the power and all the technology of 'delete' and all the intimidators. The word has been uttered and the juices of alternative possibility have begun to flow." Brueggemann calls this message both consoling and jarring, a "comfort-with-disturbance" that leads us out of our familiar comfort zones.
The testimony of Israel, Brueggemann writes, remembers "a past that is saturated with life-giving miracles, not a past filled with self-sufficient achievement," and looks forward to "a future that is marked by circumstance-defying promises ... a future of complete shalom that is free of violence, brutality, competitiveness, and scarcity, a new governance that displaces that of empire." But today matters, too, because this "testimony offers a present tense filled with neighbors to whom we are bound in fidelity, in obligation, and in mutual caring," in justice for all, including "those that the empire finds objectionable and unproductive." So it does matter how we organize our shared life, even in the face of the empires of materialism and militarism that surround us: "It matters if life-giving miracles are scuttled for the sake of can-do achievements ... if circumstance-defying promises are silenced for the sake of winning at all costs ... if bonded neighbors are excommunicated in a passion for private shalom."
This text, then, is about gospel, about preaching the good news of God's love and faithfulness. Knowing what we know about the Jesus for whom we wait, we're not surprised that he described himself as "The Good Shepherd." How does the image of a gentle shepherd speak to a world that tells us to succeed, to own and to acquire, to step on others and outlast them in order to reach our goals, to rely on military might for the nation's security and a gun in our home for our personal safety? How do faithful Christians reconcile the image of the shepherd with such a culture, especially when it claims to be preparing for the birth of the Prince of Peace? In this season of Advent, what are you preparing for? What are the signs that things are about to change?
For Further Reflection
Arundhati Roy (20th century)
Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
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Weekly Seeds is a service of the Congregational Vitality Initiative, Local Church Ministries, United Church of Christ. Bible texts are from the New Revised Standard Version, © 1989 Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The Revised Common Lectionary is © 1992 Consultation on Common Texts. Used by permission. The Ancient Christian Devotional is © 2007 by Thomas C. Oden and ICCS, and is published by InterVarsity Press. Used by permission.