Hilton Head Island, SC – July 7, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 40:1-9; Isaiah 42:1-9
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Behold, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them.” – Isaiah 42:9 (RSV)
The sermon last Sunday was a litany of bad news, a recitation of big problems. Today’s sermon is intentionally much more upbeat. As real and alarming as the issues of the last ten days have been, the theme of today’s sermon is an ode to optimism, a paean of positivity --- despite everything that happened during the past several days. Following are a few examples, out of many, which give us hope.
Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing humanity, but considerable progress is being made, such as the means of producing renewable energy. Thousands of giant wind turbines dot the American landscape, particularly in the Midwest and West. New solar farms are springing up everywhere. Some people object to the sight of these natural electricity generators, but they are becoming a major factor in reducing our national carbon emissions. Thirteen percent of the electricity now produced is from wind or solar, and the percentage goes up every year. As the number of farms increases, their costs goes down. They now cost only 10 or 15% of their original price when they were first manufactured. From the viewpoint of the American economy, it is unfortunate that most of them are manufactured in China, but at least the supply has kept up with our insatiable demand.
Other scientific advancements are being made to lessen the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. We are still a long way from where we need to be, but we’re getting there.
The July National Geographic was devoted to stories about indigenous peoples around the world, and what they are doing on behalf of both conservation and their native cultures. One of the stories was written by Deb Haaland. She is the first Native American to be the Secretary of the Interior. She described how the white settlers who moved west killed millions of bison, wanting to starve the Indians off the land. But the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation in Montana have brought back the buffalo, and are promoting more productive grasslands through ancient conservation practices. Ancestral homelands are being restored, and the renewal of old land management procedures are bringing back the animals and plants that sustained indigenous communities for centuries. Tried and true land management practices from long ago are restoring the land where indigenous peoples live.
In the last paragraph of her article, Deb Haaland wrote, “At the turn of the 20th century, settlers, pioneers, and the federal government failed to recognize what Indigenous peoples have always known: that our understanding of and devotion to the land remains constant…. If we are to save ourselves, we must empower this knowledge with everything we have.” If indigenous people “go native” once again, they may be the leaders in showing the rest of us how to survive in a landscape that is being threatened by over-use and under-care.
Bill Gates has invested over a billion dollars in a new company he started called TerraPower, and he intends to continuing funding the research that makes a new form of energy production possible.. They are developing small nuclear generators for use in out-of-the-way places around the world to generate electricity for rural communities. He is paving the way to help those living far from large centers of population to live more comfortably in future years.
Agronomists and biologists have discovered methods of farming which produce far more food on far less tillable land. Decades ago forecasters were predicting that India would soon have millions of starving people. Quite the opposite has happened. Now India is one of the major exporters of various kinds of grains. Other heretofore poor nations have also been enabled to grow enough food for themselves. The Green Revolution is in full swing, even though many places still need assistance to become completely self-sustainable in food production.
Human ingenuity is remarkably resourceful. The God who created us with extraordinary brains providentially uses that grey matter to improve life in the world He also has created for us and for all other living things.
Experts in the study of the Hebrew Bible have long speculated that whoever wrote the first 39 chapters of the prophecy of Isaiah did not write Chapters 40 through 66. First Isaiah, as they call him, lived in the 8th century BCE. Second Isaiah lived among the Israelite exiles in Babylon during the 6th century BCE. The destruction of Jerusalem and Judah by the Babylonians in 587 BCE was the most devastating disaster among the Jews up to that time since their enslavement in Egypt twelve hundred years earlier.
After the Babylonians defeated the Israelites, they took their leaders with them back to Babylon. There the Jews became badly treated servants in the households of the nobility. Their servitude lasted for fifty-five years. Then, in one of the many upheavals that have characterized the Middle East for millennia, Babylon was defeated by the Medes, a people from Persia to the east. Cyrus, their king, freed the Jews, and allowed them to return to Judah.
The 40th chapter of Isaiah opens with the joyous announcement that the terrible years at last were over. “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned” (vs. 1&2). The bad news was past, and the good news was coming. “A voice cries, ‘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 made low’” (vs. 3&4). Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel powerfully expressed the same concept in a different way: “When you’re weary, feeling small, when tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all. I’m on your side when darkness comes, and pain is all around, like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down.”
I know a man who was in the Junior Marine Corps in high school. He was awarded a full college scholarship by the Corps. The summer before he was to start college, the Korean War broke out. Not long afterward he was called up, and he went through basic training. Within weeks of arriving in Korea, he and his regiment were at the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea, surrounded by a hundred thousand Chinese troops. One night he and two buddies were huddled in a foxhole. Out of the darkness someone shouted, “Grenade!” He felt something hit his foot, and instinctively he put his foot over it. The grenade exploded, almost blowing his foot off, but his instantaneous action saved his two friends and himself. It took months and many surgeries to recover. Now he is 92 years old, having escaped death as a very young man, living with his memories, a taciturn person who constantly smiles at life, enduring whatever must be endured.
I know a woman whose father was injured in a terrible accident when she was just a young child. Part of his face was torn off when a cable on an oil rig snapped, slashing across his face like a ragged knife. He was unable to work for the rest of his life. The family moved in with her grandmother. Later this lady was afflicted by a very painful disease which has plagued her for the rest of her life. She also has had several surgeries. She never complains, and her sense of humor and readiness to laugh simply will not quit. She is a marvel as a survivor of misfortune.
Early on in their lives, both of these people encountered trying circumstances. Nevertheless, they kept slogging on, making the best of it, and they have entered old age, with their heads held high. That is what Isaiah was encouraging his fellow Jews to do as they went back to Jerusalem from Babylon.
God can work wonders within people who need help and who want to be helped. I ponder these two oldsters and many others like them who have suffered greatly, yet who bear it all with remarkably good cheer. “Comfort, comfort says your God.” Where does such indomitable strength come from, if not from God?
In Chapter 42, Isaiah, the bringer of glad tidings, quotes the voice of God as he perceives God to be speaking, “I am the Lord. I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations…. Behold, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them” (vs. 6 & 9).
The past eight years have been a period of worrisome wide swings in national policies and procedures. Two presidencies, four Congresses, and now especially the Supreme Court have put the American people on a long, harrowing roller coaster ride. The last ten days have been particularly momentous. What has been is now what is in extreme measures. What lies ahead is of crucial importance, but it cannot be known. We put our faith in the cryptic words of Isaiah, speaking on behalf of God to the people of Israel 2500 years ago, “Behold, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.” The Jews returned to Zion, and a new kind of life, filled with hope, began for them.
When the apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, he was near the end of his life. He had lived through many hardships and dangers, and at times the world seemed awfully dark to him. Nevertheless, he had come through his challenges, hard as they were, and he wanted to encourage the Christians in Rome to be confident that they too would survive whatever might lie ahead of them. He said to them, “For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:24 & 25).
The Rodgers and Hammersteing musical Carousel is the story of Billy Bigelow, a carnival roustabout, who operates a carousel, and Julie Jordan, who is a worker in a textile mill in Maine.
Julie is an admirable, innocent young woman, and Billy is very rough around the edges. They have a baby girl, and shortly thereafter, Billy is killed in a robbery gone bad, leaving Julie to raise her daughter alone. In the wake of this tragedy, Julie’s best friend sings to her the best-known song from Carousel. In my opinion it is the best Rodgers and Hammerstein musical of the best known musical duo in the history of Broadway, even though it was their first collaboration.
When you walk through a storm,
Hold your head up high,
And don’t be afraid of the dark;
At the end of the storm is a golden sky,
And the sweet silver song of a lark.
Walk on through the wind, walk on through the rain,
Though your dreams be tossed and blown;
Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart,
And you’ll never walk alone –
You’ll never walk alone
Emily Dickenson is my favorite poet. She lived with her parents in Amherst, Massachusetts for her whole life, venturing only a few miles away from home. Nevertheless she had a vision and an imagination that stretched to the end of the world and into infinity. She wrote an outstanding three-verse poem about hope.
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chilliest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
As individuals and as a nation, we go through periods that are placid, and through others that are unusually turbulent. It seems to me that in the past ninety years we have never been in a more unsettled time than we are facing right now. The next two months will be critical for determining our future, and we will not even be able to guess what 2025 will bring until we are in 2025.
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul. Hope that is seen is not hope. If we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. We live every moment of every day by the grace of God. Without God there is no hope. With Him, ultimately, there will be no despair.