The Good Days to Come

A Church article with View Comments posted 19 April 2009.
Tags: babylonian exile, epiphany, isaiah, reminiscing, restoration, sermon, year c

Occasion: Epiphany, Year C
Text: Isaiah 60.1-6

This sermon was prepared for an assignment for my Preaching class at Wartburg Theological Seminary and was delivered on 15 April 2009.

The passage we have before us this morning comes from the third part of the book of Isaiah, which was likely written immediately after the end of the Babylonian Exile. A significant chunk of the people of Israel were forcibly relocated to Babylon decades beforehand, and now they get to go home. It’s a time of unalloyed rejoicing for these people.

And what’s not to rejoice about? The people’s very identity was threatened by exile. By being kept in Babylon for all those years, they ran the risk of being subsumed into the Babylonian culture and disappearing utterly as a people. Their customs, traditions, and religion were all interrupted by the exile. A huge amount of ink is spilled in the Hebrew Bible exhorting the children of Israel to remain faithful in the midst of exile. This is when the finishing touches get put on a lot of really important Biblical texts. The great histories of the Deuteronomic historian get put in something close to their final form in the Exile, and the key to it all is faithfulness. Their intended message: remember that God is faithful, even when every indication tells us that we’re in Exile.

Then, after decades of “Bushy Squirrel,”¹ things change. Arise! Shine! Your light has come! What we have here is a scene of restoration that is meant to recall the “good old days.” We’re meant to recall the days of the splendor of King Solomon – in fact, all the talk of the abundance of the sea, multitudes of camels, gold, incense, etc. is deeply connected to the story of the Queen of Sheba paying Solomon a visit (cf 1 Kings 10.1-10). That story represents the height of Solomon’s power and prestige, with people coming from as far as India to bring goods to trade with Israel. The wisdom and prestige and honor and glory of that time – yes, that’s what’s being promised here in Isaiah. This is an economic blessing! God has made good – exile is over, and the good times are coming back! God is on our side again! We are going to be restored – we’re going to be back on top. All that we have lost will be given back to us. If you continue reading in Isaiah, it goes on to talk about all the ways that the foreigners who oppressed the Israelites are now going to serve them. Cool deal – the tables are turned!

Except… it didn’t really work out that way. The good old days – if they weren’t a myth or legend in the first place – didn’t come back. History books tell us that the Israelites were seldom free of foreign control after the Exile. They never had the fabled camels, gold and incense. Prosperity didn’t return. No great king ascended again to the throne of David to right all the wrongs of their oppression. Your light has come? Well, the Exile is over – but things aren’t easy.

And, you don’t even have to look beyond the walls of Wartburg to see a whole lot of exile today, too. People are losing their jobs, their homes, having hours cut, not being able to feed their families. Of the latest economic reports, even the optimistic ones are saying that 2009 is going to be a rough year. Things are looking pretty bleak. It seems like the longer this year goes on, the more in exile we get. It’s enough to get us started pining for the “good old days,” isn’t it? Back when the economy was booming and things couldn’t look any better. Frankly, those good old days are our modern equivalent of a myth or legend – if not for us personally, then certainly for others.

It’s not just about the economy, though. When we start thinking about the “good old days,” we’re longing for those times in our lives when we had an idea of who we were. We are longing for what it felt like when we had some control over where our lives were going. For example, I’ve heard a few of our classmates suggest that seminary is a kind of Babylonian Exile of its own. In ways it can be difficult, even threatening, and I think that many of you would agree that at times it’s not the most life-giving thing we’ve ever done. Those kind of statements recognize that there is, in going to a seminary, a loss of control over one’s own destiny. Just like when someone close to you dies, when you lose control over your life or you lose part of your identity, there is real loss and grief.

I don’t know what it is in your life that looks like this kind of loss, but I believe that everyone has it. Maybe it’s leaving a job you loved to come to seminary. Maybe it’s worrying about the future of the church – or the country – or the world. (Those are good ones for me.) Maybe it’s an economic loss – someone close to you has lost a job in this recession, or you can’t afford the lifestyle you once could. Maybe it’s some part of the deep anguish that comes from knowing that in God’s eyes, we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

Christian hope, however, points not to the “good old days,” but to the good days to come. It might be easy to hear that as a Pollyanna-ish wishful thinking or the Gospel of Health and Wealth or a naïve optimism, but that’s not what I mean. The good days to come are not days that you can point to on a calendar. Our hope is not in acquiring – or re-acquiring – a lost job or future or lifestyle or relationship. Our hope is in Jesus Christ, who promises us that he will be our Light. That light is the light of all humanity. The good days to come, then, point to our ultimate destiny as children of God in Christ: resurrected life.

The returned Exiles listened to the words of Isaiah and heard a promise of restoration. What they had lost – prominence, prestige, wealth, stability, autonomy – they were promised as part of God’s restoring work in their lives. That promise became a symbol of the hope that they had in God. Even though it wasn’t fully realized for them in history, it pointed them – and us – to the reality of God’s restoring and sustaining love for all humanity.

We too hear a promise of restoration. Have you loved and lost? Do you worry for the future of your church, your country, or your world? Have you lost a job – or worse, have you lost the sense of who you are? Look to Jesus, who on this Epiphany day we celebrate as the man through whom heaven and earth kiss. Sharing our humanity, he came to us, as the Creed says, “for us, and for our salvation.”

Have you heard the one about the country music song played backwards? You know, you get your car back, you get your wife back, you get your dog back, you get your job back… Life in Christ doesn’t mean that the sad song of our lives suddenly gets played backwards. But we can know, through God’s Word becoming a human being in Jesus Christ, that God knows the suffering and difficulty that we face in this life, and came that we might have life and light in Jesus’ name.

This promise of restoration in Christ is the most revolutionary message in the history of the world. The infinite God became a finite human being. The limitless became limited. It’s a non-sequitur – it makes no sense. This is like… well, it’s not like anything else because metaphor can’t contain the mystery of God becoming human in Jesus Christ. The All Powerful God of the Universe, Alpha and Omega, Sovereign of All That Is is fully and completely present in a single human being – and a tiny, helpless child at that. When I look at my little daughter – she’s twelve weeks old today – and try to imagine such a thing… well, it’s not possible. But that’s our hope: that God is and will be fully and completely present in and with humanity, even in our darkest hours. And in those good days to come, we hope that the One who was a little child and who grew up and preached in Israel and died on a cross will be our Light, will wipe away every tear, and will throw back the darkness once and for all.

The returning Exiles haven’t yet seen the complete fulfillment of blessings that our text in Isaiah promised. The wise men from the East in our Gospel reading, linked as they are to this story as symbols of God gathering the nations, saw Christ face to face, and yet they probably didn’t fully understand this promise of restoration. The ones who saw Jesus crucified and raised from the dead witnessed the foretaste of God’s final, resounding “yes” to humanity and “no” to the darkness in this world, and yet it took them years to begin to glimpse the promise of God in the resurrection. And even – perhaps especially – we also see, as the Apostle Paul says, through a mirror dimly. But we who are in darkness have seen – and will see – a great light. Arise! Shine! Live in the hope and promise of God, for your Light has come!