Beyond Our Comfort Zones--December 11, 2023

Beyond Our Comfort Zones--December 11, 2023

"Comfort, O comfort my people, 

    says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

    and cry to her

 that she has served her term,

    that her penalty is paid,

 that she has received from the LORD's hand

    double for all her sins." [Isaiah 40:1-2]

The old line says that the job of the prophet is to comfort the afflicted... and to afflict the comfortable.  Everybody loves the first half; nobody wants the second.

But it is important for us to be clear about just what is going on in these words many of us heard this past Sunday, as God speaks comfort through the prophetic poem that we call the fortieth chapter of Isaiah.  These are words of comfort, to be sure--and that means they are spoken to people who are uncomfortable, not to folks who are already insulated from suffering, numb to pain, and wrapped up in their own apathy.  And before we start borrowing these words to lull ourselves to sleep, it's important to remember how they were first spoken... and to whom.

This word of hope was first spoken for folks who had lived through the worst of what dominating empires could do, and who had seen their homes, temple, and way of life all destroyed by invading armies.  Some of them had been carried away into exile back in Babylon; others of them had to piece together a life left among the rubble of what the Babylonians left behind in their wake.  It would eventually be decades--nearly three quarters of a century!--before the exiled people (or more likely, their children and grandchildren) would be released and allowed to go home.  And so the people hearing the words, "Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God," are people whose hearts are still raw with grief, and whose hopes have been crushed.  They have been told by the powerful (the empire of the day) that their suffering is unimportant (collateral damage that comes from standing in the way of the empire's power) or that they deserve it.  And many of their own people have concluded that their God has either been defeated by the Babylonians (and their gods) or has turned away from them and abandoned them forever for generations of disobedience and idolatry.  The people to whom Isaiah 40 was first spoken had been told that their pain was incurable and their future didn't matter to anybody.

These were people who needed to know that God still cared about them, and that there was relief for them.  These were people shrugged off by the conquering Babylonians, and God raised up a prophet to tell them that they were not forgotten, not negligible, and not left to suffer forever.  God spoke comfort because they needed comfort, and because there was no one else willing or able to speak a word of hope to them.  And to be honest, these words from Isaiah 40 probably took those first hearers by total surprise when they heard them, because they didn't dare to imagine that there could be a new chapter to their story or a hope of coming home.

The temptation for us, removed from those people in exile by twenty-five hundred years and thousands of miles, is to hear them against the backdrop of our material abundance, our relative prosperity, our secure, undestroyed homes, and our habits of apathy.  It's easy to take these words, yanked right out of their original context and intended audience, and to hear this as God encouraging us just to stay comfortable where we already are, never troubled at the suffering of others, never provoked to care about neighbors in need, and never stretched beyond our own self-interest.  We are tempted to say, "Well, we're God's people, and here is God saying, 'Comfort my people,' so I guess what I need is more luxury, more pampering, more stuff, and more self-indulgence!"  It's easy at least to take these words as license not to care about those who suffer, those who are displaced, and those who have lost everything.  It's easy for us as pretty comfortable people living in a pretty comfortable time and place to take these words as permission to stick our heads in the sand, or turn the volume up on our smart-phone streaming personal playlists so that we don't have to hear the cries of neighbors in need or think about the people whose homes are being destroyed in a war or are missing family members held hostage.  But, to be clear, the prophet does not intend for us to use his words as approval of our apathy.  The prophet comforts the afflicted... and afflicts the comfortable, by God's design.

I'm not saying that God, or the prophetic voice of Isaiah 40, wants us to be miserable.  Not at all.  But I do think the prophet would point out that it is the height of privilege not to care about someone else's suffering just because you don't aren't also going through it. If we dare to hear these words of comfort for exiles honestly, we will have to come face to face with those who need comfort yet today--and we will have to ask what we are called to do to offer relief from our abundance. 

That's because the One for whom we wait--the One of whom the prophets dreamed--cares for all who suffer.  And the One in whom we hope has always called out the folks who keep the suffering of others at arm's length.  This One we know as Jesus spoke blessing on the poor... and called out the indifferent and indolent rich who let their neighbors go hungry.  This One whose birth at a borrowed manger we celebrate this season is the same one who told stories where the forgotten and marginalized are welcomed into God's embrace and those insulated by their wealth are doomed.  The One carried in Mary's womb is the same One who grew up hearing her lullaby about God filling the hungry with good things and sending the overstuffed country-club set away empty.  So let's be clear about who is it we are hoping for to come in this Advent season: we are waiting and watching for the same Jesus who identifies with the hungry, the naked, the imprisoned, the sick, and the vulnerable foreigner at the door, but who calls out all of us who have turned those faces away because we didn't want to be disturbed from our comfortable routines.

I'm reminded these days of how very much of the prophets' work and words were meant to hit us like Charles' Dickens, A Christmas Carol--as something that offers comfort at the end only after waking us up and shaking us out of our apathy toward the needs of others.  Marley and the Christmas Ghosts are there to bring forth a change for old Ebenezer Scrooge, but it will come at a cost--he will no longer be able to turn away from the pain of others or the needs of his neighbors in the pursuit of making a bigger profit or piling up more wealth.  Like old Marley's ghost says it to his former business partner, “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"  Poor Marley only learned after it was too late, as Dickens tells it, that he was meant to care about the needs and suffering of his neighbors all along, not to stay sequestered away from their troubles inside his counting house.  The only hope for Scrooge is that he can be made uncomfortable enough with his own path along the same trajectory that he can be made to change his life and care about the ones around him who need comfort.  It's a powerful part of the story that, because we have seen it and heard it told and retold in so many different versions, we may miss because of its familiarity to us.  But in a way, it's exactly what the prophet wants us to know if we hear his words in Isaiah 40.  The hope of comfort is meant for the ears of the uncomfortable, the forgotten, and the disinherited.  If we are looking for permission to use these words as reason to stay, like Scrooge, insulated from those people and their needs, Isaiah won't give it.  Instead, we are dared to take our place with those who suffer, so that these words of comfort may both move us to offer comfort ourselves, and to receive it as well.

On this day, where you and I are hurting or feel forgotten, there is good news:  God will not leave us there in that place of suffering.  And at the same time, where you and I are indifferent or numb to the needs of others, there is another word of good news: God will not leave us there in that place of apathy, either. May we be ready either way.

Lord God, where we are afflicted bring your comfort... and where we are too comfortable with a world full of others' suffering, afflict us enough to be moved with Jesus' own love.