12 12 Isaiah35 1-10 Missio Dei

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Text: Isaiah 35: 1-10 Title: Missio Dei Date: 12.12.10 Roger Allen Nelson In the early 1980s I served as the live-in manager of a home for homeless men in Roseland and I preached on occasion at Roseland Christian Reformed Church. One of the first sermons I wrote was on this text. That sermon included this story. So, I quote from a young preacher: One summer night, as a teenager growing up in Iowa, I came home at midnight to an empty house. My parents were visiting family in Michigan. I let the dog outside, got a glass of milk, and went into the living room to watch a little late night television. As I walked into the living room, I set the glass down on a ledge, and turned toward the TV ~ only to see a person curled up in corner behind the television. He was scrunched up in a ball; I could only see half of his face ~ just his eyes, peering over his arms. I shook, shaked, shuddered, and collapsed right there in the middle of the living room. My arms fell to my side, my legs gave out, and I let out a wimpy whimper. On my way to the floor I realized that it was a friend (and I use that term very loosely here) curled up in corner. As I lay there on the floor trying to gather the strength to stand and trying to slow my racing heart, three other “friends” popped up from behind other furniture. They were just there waiting for me to come home…. Cute, harmless, little story, but at some point in that sermon I went on to say this: Strengthen the weak hands and firm up the feeble knees, say to those with fearful hearts, Be strong, fear not. Hands and feet are mentioned because fear takes away strength. Hands fall weakly to our sides and knees wobble and fail; therefore, I collapsed in the living room. Fear takes away strength and for a people whose strength is in the Lord ~ fear signals unbelief. I must have liked that line, because I repeated it. Fear takes away strength and for a people whose strength is in the Lord ~ fear signals unbelief. Now, almost thirty years later, that line seems overstated. To position fear over against belief seems simplistic. To suggest that fear signals some failing of belief seems, well, a bit naïve. We all know some measure of fear. We all have reason for anxiety. If you’re not at least a little afraid ~ you’re not paying attention. I am not sure that belief and fear are polar opposites. In the same way that doubt and faith are all mingled together maybe fear and belief are oddly intimately intertwined.

Consider: Twentieth century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, and twentieth century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, both wrote that the human condition was marked by anxiety. Because we are both free and finite, because we are both spirit and earthbound, and because of the uncertainty of human existence, our lives are characterized by an “anxious dread.” Some of that anxiety is situational: Terrorism, financial instability, toxins and carcinogens in the earth, wind, and water. Some of that fear is cultural: FOX News and MSNBC, each in their own way, fill the air with fear ~ fear of the evil and staggeringly ignorant other. Some of that anxious dread is personal: Fear of failing, fear of falling, fear of being found out, fear of…. Oh, we might cover it over with bravado, or push it back with busyness, or numb it by consumerism and entertainment. But, if you pull back the covers, if you look under the wrapper, if you pop open the hood, underneath the surface we’re anxious. You get the idea. Familiar preaching territory. Heard it all before. Scripture’s sense of things is that we’re afraid. From some of the first words out of Adam’s mouth, “I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked…” to the last pictures in John’s Revelation where the gates to the heavenly city will never be shut because there will be no night, no darkness, and nothing to fear….. from beginning to end…. scripture both names the human condition as one of fear and proclaims, over and over, “Don’t be afraid…” So, for us this morning, how does this text tug at and untangle that knot of fear and faith being all bound up together? What of our lives and this text? Israel is in the desert ~ not just literally or metaphorically, but here historically and geographically. The Babylonians had come, destroyed their cities, laid waste to everything, and carted them off in exile. And, now a vast-dead-desert separated these exiled Jews from their homeland. So, one way to read the 34th chapter of Isaiah is as a picture of that reality. In that chapter (just before our text this morning in the 35th chapter) nations are destroyed, dead bodies send up a stench, the land is a sulfuric burning pitch, the stars have fallen from the sky, the heavens are rolled up like a scroll, and all is wasteland with no one remembered or passing through. It reads like the Joads in Oklahoma or Cormac McCarthy’s Pultizer Prize winning novel about post-apocalyptic America, “The Road.” But, then in Chapter 35 there is a complete reversal. The order of things is turned on its head. Where there once was desert and desolation there is an oasis and a highway of hope. The stink of the dead is transformed into a verdant garden and the harsh wilderness into a place of welcome. The text has a sense of movement. We’re going home on “the Way of Holiness.” We will walk into Zion singing.

There is a Latin phrase, first coined by Augustine and later by theologians in the thirties and fifties, that has become sort of the hipster phrase for edgy-happenin’ churches. The phrase is missio dei and it can be translated as “the sending of God” or “mission of God.” Missio dei…. The way that it is helpful is that reframes mission not as something that the church does in response to God, but mission is a very attribute of God. God is a missionary God. Essential to God is mission. We might participate in it, but it is essentially God’s doing, God’s thing, God’s way, God’s being. God sends God toward the world. God sends Jesus. God sends the Holy Spirit. God sends the church. God sends God toward the world. It is a wonderful idea ~ isn’t it? The very nature of God is “sending God.” The motion of God is toward creation, toward us, toward you…. God is a traveling God. God is coming. For, finally the good news ~ the story of all scripture ~ is that God comes. From the first chapters of Genesis, where God comes after Adam in Eve in garden, to the last lines of the last chapter of John’s Revelation where it reads, “Yes, I am coming soon. Amen. Come Lord Jesus.” God comes. That is the sum of it. So, whether you read this morning’s text as history, or as prophecy of a coming messianic kingdom, or as a symbolic picture of a saving change in a human heart….. However you read the text, the heart of it is that God will come. God will come. And then the blind will see, the lame will leap, the desert will blossom, the tongue of the dumb will be loosened to sing, the ears of the deaf will be opened to music, and hearts of fear will be transformed into hearts of joy. Missio dei. The very mission of God. Hallelujah! Thanks be to God! But, you’ve heard all that before and our hearts are still complex knots of faith and fear ~ somehow inextricably linked. Let’s come at this way: John Calvin, in his commentary on the Psalms writes about David’s fear. In Calvin’s words: …when he declares, “My heart shall not fear,” this does not imply that he would be entirely devoid of fear, — for that would have been more worthy of the name of insensibility than of virtue; but lest his heart should faint under the terrors which he had to encounter, he opposed to them the shield of faith.

Fear is sensible ~ but strap on the shield of faith! Given what you may be facing ~ fear is normal, part of being human, but rather than freeze and fall and faint from fear ~ oppose fear with faith! Even for Calvin ~ fear and faith all tied up together in some struggle. I don’t have a clear line here. I know that it is more complex and more human than I did when I was in my twenties. I am still anxious about stuff. Sometimes the shield of faith is not enough, or I am too weak to pick it up, or….. Or! Or, part of the Christian journey is saying again and again, in song, sermon, symbol, and scripture, “Don’t afraid, God comes.” Part of the Christian journey is proclaiming that God comes. God comes into your marriage, God comes into your restless heart, God comes into the cancer ward, God comes next to you on the mourner’s bench, God comes in the battle against addiction….. God comes to Hattie, and desolate mountains of Afghanistan, and the streets of Roseland. God comes wherever you are and into whatever you are afraid of….. It doesn’t mean that it won’t be hard as hell. It doesn’t mean that fear won’t wind its way through and rear its head. It doesn’t mean that sometimes we won’t be stuck in the desert. It doesn’t mean that lifting the shield of faith won’t be unmanageable sometimes. It means that the mission dei is Immanual ~ God with us. So, my prayer is that God has come and is coming into whatever you are going through. And, whatever makes your hands fall and your knees tremble, may God come… in the middle or at the end, in ways mysterious or ways unmistakable, in ways obvious or ways obscure. Our hope is that God will come. That is the sum of it. This morning God promises to come to the table and meet us there. So, come…. Come to the table in hope. (Advent One) Come to the table in repentance. (Advent Two) Come to the table without fear. (Advent Three) Amen.