Sunday's Message: Comfort For God's People
Below is Pastor Rwth's sermon from this past Sunday (12-10-2017) including the slides she used during the 9:00 am Contemporary Service.
You can view the video from the 11:00 am service on our website: http://fumcocala.org/sermons/
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There’s a story that my Mom tells a
lot. She and my Dad had brought me home
from the hospital after my birth. That
first night, I cried and cried and cried—unable to be comforted—despite their
around the clock efforts to soothe me.
Finally, as morning arrived, I fell
peacefully asleep. My parents were
bleary-eyed and hunched over cups of coffee.
My Mom looked at my Dad and said, “Bob, we’ve been had.”
The next night, I cried and cried and
cried. And Mom and Dad didn’t stay up
with me during the night. Though we
would likely disagree with that parenting approach today, apparently I slept
more and more on my own during the night, until a night would pass without my
crying at all.
I confess that while my Mom thinks
it’s a charming story, it makes me a little uneasy. I think the image of a
helpless infant crying all alone in the dark without parental comfort is a good
description of all of us at various times in our lives.
It certainly describes the Israelites
of Isaiah’s time.
It’s around 540 B.C.E. God’s people, Israel, have been in exile for
a long time when this passage from Isaiah comes about. The Babylonians had destroyed much of
Jerusalem, deported many Israelites, and had provoked an economic, cultural,
and spiritual collapse. God’s people
were caught in a catastrophe that didn’t seem to have any end.
After 50 years or so of refugee life,
the Israelites’ hurt is so bad, they’ve stopped crying in the dark for God to
appear and help them. They’ve given up hope and have gone quiet. God isn’t present to them. There’s no sense that anything is going to
change for the better. They’re heavy
with resignation.
So you can imagine their skepticism
when suddenly God breaks in with a promise. Suddenly God is present and speaking
compassionately about comfort and renewal!
This good news erupts in the midst of
the heavenly council, the angelic host surrounding God. The angels—being messengers—are jazzed up
about spreading the word about God’s comfort.
In the darkness of aloneness, alienation, and exile, God promises peace
and restoration!
The angels call upon the prophet to
join them in crying out the good news.
But the prophet, stunned by the turn of events, asks: What
should I cry out?
After all, the prophet has found out
the hard way that nothing under the sun amounts to anything of lasting
value. Everything in this fragile life
can be swept away.
What can the prophet say to the
people who’ve experienced firsthand that everything withers and fades away to
nothingness. All flesh is grass; all its
loyalty is like the flowers of the field. . . .Surely the people are grass. There’s
nothing anyone can ultimately do to make this bad situation better.
A member of God’s heavenly council agrees. Yes, the grass dries up; the flower withers.
. . . BUT there is someone who does endure, who comes through in the
end. . . .our God’s word will exist forever. God will always claim us as his people. He will not leave us comfortless. Weeping may
spend the night, says the writer of Psalm 30, but joy comes in the morning.
The joy that comes in the morning is
that God is here! God comes into the
comfortless darkness with gentle strength and fierce tender care to be with
us.
God will bring all humanity home
together and will live with them forever.
God promises deep, ultimate comfort to all who will hear this good
news. God’s presence will appear, and
all humanity will see it together; the Lord’s mouth has commanded it.
As Christians we recognize God’s
promise of comfort being fulfilled in Jesus.
He’s the good shepherd who gathers all of us into the peace of God’s
eternal belonging. He’s Emmanuel,
God-With-Us—our God is here with us, always.
He’s God’s eternal, always enduring Word, the beginning and the end.
The question is: do we in fact
experience God’s promise of comfort in Jesus?
Maybe we haven’t given enough room
for God’s promise of comfort in our lives.
In last week’s sermon we explored why
we need Christmas. The hard truth is
that we are a people in discomfort.
We’re uncomfortable because God creates us to love him and others with
our whole selves, yet we turn away from this divine calling. We love so many
other things as substitutes for being in right relationship with God and our
neighbor.
Our souls are not at ease. We have a God-shaped emptiness at our very
heart. Whether we acknowledge it or not,
our souls are like infants crying alone in the dark for our divine Father, our
heavenly Mother. We need to feel that
emptiness in the season of Advent, so we can fully embrace Jesus at Christmas.
The problem is that we have so many
other ways of temporarily comforting ourselves.
We make ourselves comfortable by an endless array of distractions, by
consuming things, experiences, and other people, by avoiding challenging
questions about the meaning of our lives, by addictions of every kind, and by
the strange comfort we receive from judging others as more of a mess than we
are.
But all of that is grass: it’s
initially beautiful and lush—it comforts us temporarily—but it all withers
away. And we’re still left comfortless.
On this second week of Advent we’re
inviting you to get comfortable—not by the usual means—but by seeking God’s
promise of comfort in Jesus.
Get in touch with the comfort that
God is actually here—with you—in Jesus.
He’s the comfort in the darkness of our worst moments and our everyday
miseries.
When God is with us, who or what can
really be against us? With God in Jesus
Christ, we have every strength we need, every comfort we need, and every
guidance we need. And God’s comfort in
Jesus is one that doesn’t wither away: it lasts forever.
What opens you to God’s comfort in
Jesus?
At the end of the day, God’s comfort
is a surprise to us, as it was for the Israelites. It’s something that comes upon us when we
least expect it, when we’re at the end of our rope, when we’ve pretty much
given up hope, when we conclude that peace is beyond us.
One evening, when I was a seminary
student, I got off the commuter train and set out to walk the relatively short
distance to my home. It had been a
really long, busy day. I had a bad
cold. And freezing rain was
falling. I had dinner to prepare and
assignments still to do. Underneath all
of this discomfort were deeper discomforts about my marriage and my call to
ministry.
As I walked, I felt like each step
would be my last. I wanted to give up
then and there. Suddenly, I felt as if
there were strong arms about me and supporting me, helping to take one more
step—and then another. I hadn’t prayed
for help, but I knew in the moment that Jesus was there, gathering me to
himself and guiding me—comforting me. I
made it home. I made it through another
night. I made it to the next day. . .and
the next. . .and the next.
Later I came across a verse in a song
that perfectly expressed God’s comfort in Jesus:
I heard the voice of Jesus say,
“Come unto Me and rest;
lay down, oh weary one, lay down
your head upon My breast!”
I came to Jesus as I was,
so weary, worn, and sad;
I found in Him my resting-place,
and He has made me glad.
“Come unto Me and rest;
lay down, oh weary one, lay down
your head upon My breast!”
I came to Jesus as I was,
so weary, worn, and sad;
I found in Him my resting-place,
and He has made me glad.
As we approach Christmas, we pray to
receive the truest and greatest gift of the season: an awareness of God’s
deeper comfort in Jesus Christ, God’s promise of comfort and joy.
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