I want to tell you a story. Mostly I want to hear that poem from the prophet Isaiah again. When I was on my gap year in the middle of college, touring with a family-oriented Christian youth band, we had a camp song recapping the last half of this morning’s reading. It was easy to play on guitar and had a few harmonies that were easy to pick up on. Whenever I read or hear this morning’s portion of Isaiah I get the song stuck in my head, so I thought I’d share. <teach song> “Why do you say, O Jacob, and proclaim, O Israel, ‘my way is hidden from the Lord’? Do you not know, have you not heard, the Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth, He will not grow tired or weary. And His understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary, and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary. Young men stumble and fall. But those who hope in the Lord shall renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles. They will run and not, not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. Halleluia.”
It’s that first part, about saying our ways are hidden from God, that catches me every time. Isaiah was written in a time when people worshiped gods who were attached to their land. It would be like worshiping the god of New York here in Chatham and crossing the border to the east to worship the god of Massachusetts. Granted, after the build-up to the Super Bowl it seemed for a weekend we were doing something like that, and discovered which football gods reigned supreme this year, but it was life and death in the early 530s BC, Isaiah’s days, when neighboring empires overran their borders and scattered the people of God like so much dust on the wind. It’s no wonder they began to doubt God’s supremacy when they had been ripped from their homes and suffered so much by the hands of their Babylonian captors.
The prophet speaks to that suffering and exile in the chapters leading up to today’s reading. But this morning we hear words of the prophet from the days of the people’s return to their old home. It has been a very long time since they had seen Jerusalem in all its glory, and there is not much glory left to it since the conquering armies had their way with it. Not many among them remember firsthand the greatness of that city Jerusalem, they have been away for too long. They have gotten old and their weak knees and cloudy eyes could not rest on the safety of those great buildings and beautiful living spaces they had known as children. But the Lord has promised to renew their strength, that the old may run as well as the young to rebuild and, more importantly, to BE rebuilt.
This is a story we know well. How often have we cried out that God surely must neither see nor care about what we are doing or what is being done to us? “My way is hidden from the Lord.” How many times have we seen other gods vying for power, other pressures on our lives to be other than God made us to be, other powers fighting to have the last word about what we are worth.
This is why I like Isaiah the prophet so much. He shows us God’s interactions with and promises to God’s own people through their ups and downs, their injustices and their healings. They may have lives three thousand years ago, but the history of God’s people is not unlike our own. History tends to repeat itself over and over, the oppressed becoming the oppressor, cycles of violence and destruction, pain and healing, when we think life is great and then something awful happens, or when the awful has been awful for so long that there’s nothing to look forward to, this is a history we are part of, a story we are not the first to tell. But over and over again in it, there is the presence of God among us, the promise of faithfulness, the prophet’s words that, yes, God sees and knows and cares.
Our hope is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. Our peace is in the broken Savior, Jesus, who could have very well stayed safe and secure in heaven but chose freely to come among us and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Our healing is in that blessed community where Jesus comes to us all, where we are, and restores us one to another. Just as he went to the home of Simon and Andrew with James and John, took Simon’s mother-in-law by the hand and lifted her up, Jesus comes with us into our homes, into our daily lives, not to remove us from them but to bring us to more fully live in them.
Why do you say your way is hidden from the Lord? God sees. God knows. You are not overlooked. You are never forgotten.
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