Hope Under Construction--December 13, 2022

Hope Under Construction--December 13, 2022

"The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing....For waters shall break forth in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes. A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God's people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray." [Isaiah 35:1-2a, 6b-8]

When you feel stuck at a dead-end, the hope of a new way home feels like nothing short of resurrection.

Twenty-five centuries ago, give or take, God performed just that kind of resurrection--a resurrection, not of dead bodies, but of direction for hopeless people. And it is worth retelling the tale, and how the prophets like Isaiah understood it. It is worth knowing this story because, in all honesty, some day you and I will find ourselves in a dead end and wondering where hope is to be found in the middle of nowhere--and whether it is worth the wait for the new road to open while construction is underway.

So, like I say, just over two and a half millennia ago, a minority community living in Babylon were on the verge of giving up hope. They had been carried away--or their parents had been carried away--from their homeland in Judah, and brought as spoils of war when the arrogant blowhard ruler of the Babylonian Empire, Nebuchadnezzar, had conquered their homeland, destroyed their capital and its Temple, and ransacked the most valuable treasures. The exiles were living in a foreign land, defeated and despairing. And as far as they could see, their hope was dead. They weren't sure if their God YHWH (the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) had been defeated by the Babylonian gods, or whether YHWH had just abandoned them for sinning so much, but the exiles were sure that things were done between them and their God. The covenant was broken. The Temple was in ruins. And they had no way of getting home, so long as Babylon held them in captivity and there was a vast desert between Babylon and their old homeland. Hope itself was dead.

And in the midst of that utter dead-end of a situation, God whispered in the ear of a prophet we know as Isaiah. And Isaiah dared to dream up nothing short of resurrection for deceased hope. Isaiah brought the message that God was going to make a way where no way existed, and that God was going to perform a resurrection of the destroyed nation. God was going to bring the exiles home, and along the way, everything that God touched would burst into life.  God would even pave the way for their homecoming: a new road was under construction.

Now, you can imagine that if you were convinced that your nation was functionally dead, it would sound like foolishness if someone said there could be a homecoming and a new beginning. And if there were a thousand miles of barren wilderness that separated you from your old homeland, you would say the idea of a pathway back home seemed preposterous. After all, even if for some impossible reason the Babylonians gave you permission to leave and go back home (and they wouldn't), you would have no idea how to get back (no GPS), and even if you knew how to make the trek, there was a literal desert of hundreds of miles between you and home, whose inhabitants were wild predators, and which offered no water, no food, and no respite along the way. Even if you ventured outside the gates of Babylon to try making the journey, you would surely die under those conditions... right?

So this is where the prophet speaks God's word of hope that takes the impossible and creates a new possibility, a word which takes the dead-end of the wilderness and dares to imagine life bursting out along the road God would build. At God's direction, Isaiah envisions a highway being laid out ahead of the people, going right from Babylon to Jerusalem. And everywhere God touches the ground to carve out that road, life breaks out--crocuses bursting up out of the cracked and parched ground... springs of water where there was nothing before... cattails and marsh reeds where there was only brown crabgrass. In other words, it is God answering every angle of the hopelessness with new hope. How will the exiles get home? God will make a road? How will they avoid getting lost on the way? God will make it so foolproof that even the most directionally-challenged guy who couldn't find his way out of a paper bag cannot get lost on it. How will the people survive along the way? God will provide water... which will provide plants... which will provide sustenance all along the journey. The ground itself will be transformed from death to life, and along with it, hope will be resurrected.

This is how God deals with dead-ends--in particular, how God deals with dead ends for people who are on the verge of hopelessness and who cannot see a way forward. This is how God looks out for the people on the margins, the people who, like the exiles in Babylon, are a small minority looking to keep their way of life going. This is how God creates new possibilities where all we see is the impossible. God resurrects hope by taking our dead-ends and making roads in the wilderness where the Empire-approved-GPS cannot chart a course to follow.

And in your life and mine, the same God is at work. The same God who promised homecoming for exiles, and the arrival of a Messiah to people waiting for generations for his coming, is the same God who resurrects our hopelessness into hope when we are desperate and can't find a way forward. This is who our God is, forever creating a way where there was no way, and forever creating hope for the folks who have been told by the powerful that their lives don't matter.

Now, where will this same God resurrect hope from hopelessness around you today?

Lord God, where we long for an end to exile, bring us home. Where we ache for a way out of the dead-end, lead us forward.