B Epiphany 7 - Isaiah 43:18-25 "Water in the Wilderness"
Isaiah 43:18-25
18 “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. 19 See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland. 20 The wild animals honour me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the desert and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people, my chosen, 21 the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise. 22 “Yet you have not called upon me, O Jacob, you have not wearied yourselves for me, O Israel. 23 You have not brought me sheep for burnt offerings, nor honoured me with your sacrifices. I have not burdened you with grain offerings nor wearied you with demands for incense. 24 You have not bought any fragrant calamus for me, or lavished on me the fat of your sacrifices. But you have burdened me with your sins and wearied me with your offences. 25 “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.
Sermon
Have you ever had one of those days, when nothing seems to go right? Have you struggled to find meaning or purpose in what is going on around you? Nobody knows the extent of how you feel, and they really don’t seem to care much either! Everyone around you seems so caught up in their own little world, that they fail to see what they are doing to themselves, to you, or to each other. In these days your blue skies seem only to be grey.
Or perhaps bad days come as a result of continually begging God for the blue skies to be grey. It seems as though your property has a curse on it. The rain comes and goes, but it never seems to fall on your land. In fact, the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, while you wonder how you’re going to survive on your infertile arid country. You see your crops and stock getting poorer and poorer; you become lower and lower in self-esteem, and wonder if God is really there to bring you out of this forsaken situation. Or maybe it’s the opposite! You get too much of a good thing. The rain keeps coming, not looking like letting up, while three foot of water runs through your house. If it’s not one thing it’s the other. Perhaps you watch your church getting smaller and smaller, and start to wonder if it is really worth it! You see the budget falling further and further behind, and wonder what it will take to make it right.
Then in any of these situations, there are those who add insult to injury by patronising you with comments like, “It’s ok, it’s not really that bad!” or even worse, they tell you if you had more faith this would not have happened to you.
If you had some energy you might have fought back, but you don’t, rather you just stand, gob smacked that everything you touch seems to dwindle and die. You become dazed by the absence of someone to restore your passion. You stand in the wilderness of hopelessness, in the deathly silence of a desert where it seems that not even a skerrick of life exists.
Paralysed, total hopelessness, wretchedness, frustration, endless troubles, a debilitating desert. These are some of the ways of describing what you might go through in times of trouble; on days, weeks, months, and years when everything seems to be against you. But I sometimes wonder if this is how God feels when he deals with me; if this is how God feels with his people in his church; if this is how God feels with humanity — as he struggles with the wretchedness of your, and my, waywardness.
This is how God felt with his people the Israelites as they continually sought to bury themselves in the affairs of their sinful natures. He says through his prophet Isaiah, “…you have not called upon me, O Jacob, you have not wearied yourselves for me, O
Have we become complacent with the things of God? When we worship God do we allow him to call us to repentance through his Word? Do we really listen to his Word anymore, or do we only listen to the parts that suit us? Is our obedience to his Word governed by the God who dwells in our hearts and opens our ears? Or is our obedience ruled by our emotions, our thoughts, and our moralities; which at best are clouded with the fogginess of our sinful natures? Do we allow Christ to transform us into the individuals we were originally intended to be? Or do we still hang onto the pet sins of the past?
The greatest struggle we have as Christians is to trust God in the midst of all the strife we face in the wilderness of this world. We all too quickly flee from living by faith, and revert back to living by sight. And what we see is not a pretty picture as we look into the frustrations and temptations of our deepest desolate recesses; the place inside of us where we keep the most abhorrent things hidden. And as we take our eyes from ourselves and look at those around us we see the marks of the same things, which we all seek to keep hidden inside.
Trusting God is First Commandment stuff. We are called to live by faith and not by sight; to trust God and not become consumed by our doubts and worries. Now that we are Christians we are called into Christ by the Holy Spirit. We are called to worship in the way he has ordained; we are called into receiving his gifts in the way he has prescribed in his divine service of us. We are not called to worship our ideas of him, the feelings we may or may not get, nor are we called to follow and worship the deeds we might think bring us closer to him. No! We are called to follow God alone, to have no other gods.
When God is allowed to serve us, our thoughts will be moulded and encouraged, our emotions may or may not be affected, and we will be led to do the good works that God has prepared in advance for us to do. But these things always happen as a result of us being conformed to him. God comes to us and calls for a change in us. We never change God; he calls us into community and unity, through repentance and forgiveness of sins. God calls us to be conformed to Christ, so that our sacrifice of praise is a pleasing aroma in the nostrils of God.
Even in the face of our habitual sinning God continues to encourage us. Hear the word of the Lord once again through the prophet Isaiah, “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.” (Isaiah 43:25) And again, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland. The wild animals honour me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the desert and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people, my chosen, the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.” (Isaiah 43:18-21)
In hearing his Word God calls us to trust that our sins are forgiven, and he calls us to hear with the ears and hearts of faith, what he does for us as we dwell in the frustrations of our sinfulness and the terrors of a sinful world. He calls us to trust in him, and be led by the Holy Spirit to feed on the living waters of Christ, whom he places in our hearts when we hear the Word, and when we receive the other gifts he offers in his Church.
How do we know all this? We know because his Word tells us, and because God walks with us through the troubles of this world! We like the Israelites have been freed from slavery. They from the bondage of the Egyptians, and we from the power of sin and death in our baptism.
This is what the Lord says at the beginning of Isaiah 43, “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. 2 When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze. 3 For I am the Lord, your God, the Holy One of
Jesus says, “The time has come, the
