An Absence of Heroes

An Absence of Heroes--December 8, 2017

"For a child has been born for us,

     a son given to us;

 authority rests upon his shoulders;

     and he is named

  Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

     Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

 His authority shall grown continually,

    and there shall be endless peace

    for the throne of David and his kingdom.

 He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness

    from this time on and forevermore.

 The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this. [Isaiah 9:2-7]

Lately I've had a epiphany of sorts that has changed the way I hear these ancient poems and visions of Isaiah, these words that were first ingrained in my memory set to the music of Handel and played by orchestras and choirs at Christmas-time. 

It was an obvious thing I had been missing, but then again, I am rather dense... and sometimes I think we are almost programmed to hear a Bible passage a certain way and then stop asking or inquiring or considering it from any angle.  And especially with the familiar ones--like these words about a "child born for us"--we have an especially hard time breaking out of old ruts.

But just the other day it hit me right between the eyes that Isaiah and I had something in common that I had never considered before: we are both dads.  And to some degree, I suspect both of us see the worlds we inhabit in terms of what kind of life we are handing to our children.  We care about the kind of world they will grow up in, the kind of community in which they will be raised, and the kinds of people they will have to look up to.  And when we each look around, Isaiah and I, at the landscape around us and our children, there is a vacuum at the center of things, an absence that leads us to look beyond the horizon for hope.

Like I say, I had never considered before that Isaiah was a father, or at least I had never thought about how that might have shaped the way he thought and spoke and prayed.  But the fact of his parenthood is there in the text of the book with Isaiah's name attached to it, in early stories in the first dozen chapters (see especially what we call Isaiah ch. 7-8), and in fact, if you read those stories, Isaiah was convinced that God was teaching theology and sending messages through his children.  He was constantly thinking about his children, and the world in which they would live, while he was listening for the voice of God.  In fact, there is reason to believe that Isaiah was a member of a sort of 7th-century BC "clergy couple", since he mentions having a son with a "prophetess" in ch. 8 and that she may have also been the "young woman" whose child gets the name "Emmanuel" back in Isaiah's day (Isaiah 7), before that was applied to Jesus in the New Testament.

Anyhow, the times in which Isaiah lived were... well, disappointing, and fraught with danger.  There were foreign nations rattling their sabers and threatening from a distance, and Isaiah was disheartened when he looked at the leader of his own people.  Ahaz was the king, and he was a far cry from the great and faithful giants of Israel's collective memory.  He was, not to put too fine a point on it, no King David.  David was remembered as Israel's greatest king, as someone who embodied servanthood and strength, who was a shepherd for the people in his best moments, and who could eventually own up to his mistakes and crimes after his worst moments.  And even if some of that reputation was a bit of nostalgia fogging up their view, at the very least, David's legendary character became a standard against which to compare the kings and leaders who came after.  And they never lived up to it.

Isaiah had lived through several different kings, and had seen a string of letdowns, each in different ways.  Sometimes they were arrogant and petty.  Sometimes they were cowardly and fearful against the backdrop of foreign powers.  Sometimes they tried to put their trust in their weapons and wealth.  Sometimes they were all bluster and pomposity with very little wisdom or substance.  But they were all... disappointments.

And when Isaiah looked at his children and thought of the lives they would be handed, the kind of nation they would become adults in, the kind of leaders they would know, well, Isaiah was more than a little discouraged.  So much of the culture, from its politics to its religion to its economics, was straining to even muster up to the bar of mediocrity.  There were official royal pronouncements about how "great" things were, according to the party line, but Isaiah saw through it. He knew better.  He knew he was living through decadent, disappointing times, and I can't help but think that some part of him was rather sad to think he could not give his children something better, someone better, to look up to, since so many of the powerful and big deals of his day were empty suits--well, empty robes, at any rate.

I read these early passages from Isaiah's book, and I feel like I have found a kindred spirit of sorts, removed from my times by twenty-seven centuries or so, but still someone who shared something of an outlook.  Maybe you do, too.  We look around and feel an empty place, like your tongue pushes into the space where a tooth used to be, an absence of substance, in the center of our communal lives.  I get the sense that Isaiah knew what it was like to feel like the only wind was the hot air of official blowhards and court prophets.  I get the sense that Isaiah longed for someone his children could put their hopes on, who would not let them down or disappoint them... someone who would be worthy of his children's admiration. 

And I feel that same disappointment for my own son and daughter.  People we used to look up to turn out to be more tragic than heroic. Figures I would have wished I could teach them to be proud of turn out to be shameless and shallow.  The public faces I would have wished could be examples for them, models of nobility, of grace, of strength, of character, of integrity, they turn out to be hollow and empty, so many of them--if not downright despicable.  Despite our constant bombardment with movies featuring the likes of Iron Man, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the rest, it feels in so many ways that ours is a time suffering from an absence of heroes. Even Atticus Finch let me down... but maybe he was never as good as I had thought he was anyhow. And I wish--sometimes it feels like all I can do is wish--that there were more I could give to my children for examples, for mentors, and for heroes.  

And I think Isaiah knew what that was like, too.

And yet--and this is the thing that pushes me back from the brink of despair--Isaiah didn't give up on hope.  He just looked for a source for hope that was further than the horizon.  He looked both backward and forward, west to where the sun had already set and east to where the new day would begin, to Israel's history and to its future.  And there, God whispered to him... hope.

That's part of why these old words envisioning a future king--an "anointed" one (literally, "messiah") had such power for the likes of Isaiah and his peers.  It was an act of hope in the face of disappointment and mediocrity that God would not simply let their story end with a whimper, but that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would write a new chapter.  Isaiah and the other prophets looked forward, but they also grounded that hope in real history.  They looked back to David, not to make an idol out of a man with obviously clay feet, but if nothing else as a reminder that they had once had good and faithful kings, that there were higher heights than the sad mediocrity they were living through, and that there was more they could hope for.  It wasn't just pie-in-the-sky--it was a hope for something better, but something in line with what they had known before.  And Isaiah, like the other prophets, dared to believe that God could bring about such a hope in their future and their children's future.

On the days when I am kept up at night, worrying about the society and world into which I will be sending my children as they grow, I am learning to find hope where Isaiah does.  I am learning to look beyond the horizon to trust that God is able to give us a better hope.  I am learning to see that for every disappointing Ahaz or heartbreaking fallen figure like Atticus, the living God has given us Jesus and the people whose lives have been marked with his own way.  My children will not lack for examples--there are pillars to whom they can look, and mentors from whom they can learn, even if there are no Davids around on the throne. They will grow up hearing the names and stories of Dr. King and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of Sojourner Truth and Julian of Norwich, of Martin Luther and Katie, of Oscar Romero and Rosa Parks, of Francis and Claire of Assisi, and they will know the faces of saints in pews alongside them, too, people who are trying--often struggling, but trying--to follow Jesus more faithfully in their daily lives.

But most of all, because they will know the story and life and way of Jesus--the one to whom, I am convinced, Isaiah was pointing all along--I believe my children will be able to be honest about the failings and disappointments of all the others around, without thinking they have to ignore those flaws, or defend them, or apologize for them.  But they will find a hope worthy of their futures when the other faces in the public square let them down or do not care.  

Isaiah is teaching me to teach my children to see the failings of authorities and to name them honestly, and, yes, to put the right amount of confidence in the decent heroes they find, but ultimately to teach them to look to Jesus as our hope... because he is the one who will not disappoint us. 

This Advent, Isaiah is teaching me to look to Jesus in a whole new way--as the one worthy of teaching my children to place their hope.

Lord Jesus, when we are let down, pull us from despair and settling for mediocrity by turning us back to you and to your way.