"Do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.
The wild animals will honor me,
the jackals and the ostriches;
for I give water in the wilderness,
rivers in the desert,
to give drink to my chosen people,
the people whom I formed for myself
so that they might declare my praise." (Isaiah 43:18-21)
Call it the "Back to the Future Gospel." There's this line at the very end of the original 1985 sci-fi comedy where Michael J. Fox's character asks time traveler Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) if they'll need to back up down the road in the time-traveling DeLorean he has built in order to get enough speed for the technology to work. And Doc Brown's immediate deadpan reply is this: "Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads," at which point, the steel gray car morphs into a flying vehicle that takes off like a rocket into the sky, and then disappears with a flash to set up the sequel. But I've always loved that line: where we're going, we don't need roads. It always lands on my ear with a note of hopeful defiance of imposed limits, like he is utterly confident that the physical limitations of the world or the map cannot hold him back. It is, as I say, very much like the word of good news from the prophet we hear in these words from Isaiah 43, as well.
Many of us heard this passage back on Sunday, and maybe again in worship this past Wednesday. And what I want to ask us to hear in them right now is that same Doc-Brown-like sense of boundary-breaking. This is very much a "Where we're going, we don't need roads..." word from God, and it is spoken to people who have just about lost their hope. What the prophet does in Isaiah 43 is to speak a new possibility that God can make when the circumstances seem impossible. He says that dead-end of exile isn't really the end, after all, because God is powerful enough... and free enough... and good enough... to create a way back home even when there are no roads to take them there.
This passage comes from a section of the collection of oracles and poems we call Isaiah that is addressed to the people who had lived through exile in Babylon. The invading Babylonians had destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, leveled the city's walls, fortifications, and important buildings, and then carried away the best and the brightest of Judean society to become displaced subjects of the Empire. The generation that went through the exile had seen a hostile empire kidnap and detain whole groups of people on the whim of its egomaniacal king, without any reason or justification other than that he could. They felt hopeless, because it seemed impossible to get back to their families and lives. That's when the prophet dared to imagine a new way home.
The prophet here in this passage speaks for God and says, "The same God who brought our ancestors out of slavery in Egypt is going to move again in history--God is going to do a new thing!" And that "new thing" is a whole new exodus, except instead of crossing the Sea out of Egypt and heading north and east to get to the Promised Land, God would now make a way through the barren wilderness between Babylon and their homeland. The fact that there weren't highways or railway lines to get there, and the fact that the bully king of Babylon had not given permission to let them go would not stop God. After all, it had not stopped God before when there was a Sea in the way as the people left Egypt, or the fact that Pharaoh had not given permission for the Hebrews to leave their enslavement. God created a way out of no way back then, and here Isaiah 43 is saying that God will do a new thing in just the same creative freedom. You can almost hear Doc Brown's line, can't you? "What you do mean, we don't have enough road to get there? Where we're going, we don't need roads!"
This is the God to whom the Scriptures bear witness: ours is the God who breaks through dead-ends and reaches the end of the line with a smile, because it's right there that the car becomes a flying time machine, or the wilderness becomes a thoroughfare, or the Sea becomes dry land for the freed children of Israel to walk on. That creative freedom, that trail-blazing talent of our God, is what allows us to look at the cross with new eyes, too. Instead of seeing the death of Jesus as the end of the story and the defeat of a noble (but mortal) prophet, we have come to see the cross as the defeat of death itself, the subjugation of sin, and the evisceration of evil. Like our Orthodox sisters and brothers often put it in their worship and prayers, "Jesus trampled down death by death." And what seemed like a dead-end in the garden tomb turns out to be a new way home after all. The same God who brought home the exiles by means of a way in the wilderness that didn't exist before is the same God who takes the grave and makes it, as our funeral liturgy says, "the gateway to eternal life." God isn't stopped by the limits of what we think is physically possible, and God doesn't stay confined within the bounds of what seems reasonable or achievable in our eyes.
And of course, it is worth remembering, too, that this same God still reserves the right to do impossible-seeming things, even when it flies in the face of the next Nebuchadnezzar who wants to make people disappear into interminable exile or push around the peoples he wants to pick on. Ours is a God who keeps blazing new trails, just like God did at the Sea out of Egypt, in the wilderness out of Babylon, and at the cross of Christ.
What will this God do among us in the world today?
Lord God, blaze a new trail today for all those who are cornered in dead-ends and need a new way forward.
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