Dreams to Live By

Scripture: Isaiah 35

Sermon: Dreams to Live By

Topics: advent, hope, dystopia,

Preached: December 8, 2013

Rev. Mike Abma

Preamble:

The power of this chapter is not really conveyed unless you begin to imagine who it was first written for.

Babylon has just utterly destroyed Jerusalem and Judah.

It is empty rubble and ruins.

The citizens of Jerusalem have been forcibly marched to Babylon

where they are the slaves and servants of the people there.

Their city has been destroyed.

Their culture looks dead.

And their people have been scattered.

Isaiah 34 expresses the pain of their past.

When they were attacked and occupied, their neighbors, the Edomites,

did nothing.

Worse than that, they cheered and applauded their ruin.

And so, the voice of Isaiah 34 calls for justice,

a reckoning on Edom.

Then there is a dramatic turn in Isaiah 35.

These broken, wounded, enslaved, exiled Jews

are given a vision,

a breath-taking dream of a future

that is almost too good to be true.

Listen:

35The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,

the desert shall rejoice and blossom;

like the crocus ²it shall blossom abundantly,

and rejoice with joy and singing.

The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it,

the majesty of Carmel and Sharon.

They shall see the glory of the Lord,

the majesty of our God.

³ Strengthen the weak hands,

and make firm the feeble knees.

⁴ Say to those who are of a fearful heart,

‘Be strong, do not fear!

Here is your God.

He will come with vengeance,

with terrible recompense.

He will come and save you.’

⁵ Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,

and the ears of the deaf unstopped;

⁶ then the lame shall leap like a deer,

and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,

and streams in the desert;

⁷ 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.

⁸ 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 traveller, not even fools, shall go astray.

⁹ No lion shall be there,

nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;

they shall not be found there,

but the redeemed shall walk there.

¹⁰ And the ransomed of the Lord shall return,

and come to Zion with singing;

everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;

they shall obtain joy and gladness,

and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

INTRODUCTION — ENDANGERED HOPE

I wonder if hope has fallen on hard times lately.

Our decades-long war on terror

seems to have hardly made a dint of difference.

Our efforts to do anything about global-warming have been feeble at best –

as if we are already resigned to failure.

Our trust in the market-economy to be the tide that lifts all boats

has proven to be an odd tide indeed,

because a few boats are way up there,

and most boats or way down here.

The result is that we have become a nation of cynics.

Can we solve problems,

can we address global issues,

can we heal our wounded planet…?

Yeah right. Who are you kidding?

We can’t even do that for our own country, let alone the world.

Perhaps that is why almost all the literature,

and all the movies

that are set in some distant future

are dystopian.

By dystopian, I mean

that they all show a planet that is a mess.

Whether it is the movie

Book of Eli,

or Children of Men

or Elysium

or the popular Hunger Games movies,

in all of them, and more besides,

the planet is a wasteland,

people are barely surviving,

and faith, hope, and love seem to have disappeared from the landscape.

Is this where the world is heading?

Is this our vision of the future?

NEED FOR HOPE

In one of his sermons, Tim Keller,

the pastor of Redeemer Church in New York,

noted that he found it striking that

no one had ever asked him to preach on hope.

Striking because they had asked him

to preach on all kinds of other things.

Also striking because hope

is so essential to our Christian lives.

How we live now is determined by the hopes that live in our hearts.

How we live now is shaped by our believed-in future.

So what is that believed-in future?

Christian hope is not grounded in human capabilities.

Christian hope is not rooted in human resilience or perseverance.

Christian hope is anchored in God.

Christian hope is anchored in

his faithfulness,

his promises

his future.

It is his faithfulness,

his promises,

and his future

that God wants his people to see in chapter 35 of Isaiah.

They can only see a wasteland,

but God wants them to see a garden.

They can only see wounded people,

who have been made blind, deaf, and mute,

but God wants them to see people

who can see again, hear again, and sing again.

They can only see themselves in exile

far away from their home,

but God wants them to see themselves

on the road back home

to a fully restored, fully redeemed, fully new home

of everlasting joy and peace.

Look at this chapter.

The dream God gives his people is in the future tense.

All the things that shall happen:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,

The desert shall rejoice and blossom….

It is all shall, shall, shall happen.

But there is one part of this chapter that is in the present tense.

Verses 3-4.

Strengthen feeble hands.

Steady shaky knees.

Steel fearful hearts.

Be strong. Do not be afraid.

Here is your God.

He will come and save you.”

Why was Isaiah asked to deliver this dream to God’s people?

Because our believed-in future shapes our present lives.

The hopes that live in our hearts for tomorrow ,

determine how we view and live our lives today.

We know this is true.

Suppose we did an experiment.

Suppose we gave two women the exact same boring job.

It is a job with long hours, and tedious and menial tasks.

These two women would need to arrive early each day and leave late each day.

They would arrive in the dark, and leave in the dark.

They would have to do this job for a full year – no vacation.

Now suppose

you told one woman that at the end of the year she would be paid $15,000.

And suppose you told the other woman that at the end of the year she would be paid 15 million dollars.

Do you think there would be a difference in how they worked?

Can’t you just hear the one woman whistling while she works?

That is what hope does.

It allows us to welcome the future in spite of our present.

But how do we know this future is true?

The Holy Spirit is the deposit, the down-payment,

the guarantee,

of that glorious future waiting for us.

With that hope living in our hearts,

we begin to see the shoots, the sprouts, the tiny seedlings of eternity,

of the new heavens and the new earth

in whatever desert or wilderness or wasteland we find ourselves in.

That is hope.

HOPE ASSAILED

It isn’t only the popular culture that grinds our hope down.

It is the intellectual culture we live in that does it too.

We are told by the intelligentsia of the world that this so-called hope is all wishful thinking.

We are told there is no Story to History – there is no meta-narrative.

We are told there is nothing unique about humanity.

We are told that the rumors of God are just that – rumors.

I just finished a book by the acclaimed English novelist Julian Barnes.

The book is a memoir of sorts entitled Nothing to Be Frightened of.

The title is ironic, because the book is 244 pages of everything Julian Barnes is frightened of – and his greatest fear is a fear of death and dying.

Barnes sees himself as an agnostic realist.

He sees Christians as being naïve wishful thinkers.

This is what he thinks and writes:

Life has only one purpose: self-perpetuation.

We have only one source of identity: the activity of our brains.

When our brains stop, that is the end of us.

Not only will we all face our own personal end,

but one day the planet will face its end as well.

“One day our planet will drift in frozen silence,

the human species will have completely disappeared,

and will not be missed,

because there is nobody and nothing out there to miss us.”

According to Julian Barnes, this is what it means to grow up.

That is a favorite phrase of agnostics and atheists like

Julian Barnes, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens

to believers – just grow up.

They tell us, “Don’t you know that organized religion,

is just like Hollywood and Disney?

They are all dream factories,

all cranking out the same story-line:

tragedies with a happy ending”

“Grow Up,” they say,

Tragedy is tragedy. Period.

There is no happy ending!

What you see is what you get – this life is all there is.”

PUDDLEGLUM – DEFENDER OF HOPE

When I was in the second grade, my teacher was Miss Roest.

Miss Roest was a welcome change from my first grade teacher, who shall remain unnamed – let me simply say that she was referred to as “The Battle-Axe” in my family.

I remember Miss Roest fondly not simply because she was a kinder-gentler teacher, but because she spent a good part of the year reading to us.

One of the books she read was C.S. Lewis’ Narnian Chronicle, The Silver Chair.

Do you remember The Silver Chair?

Puddleglum, the Narnian Marsh-wiggle,

travels with the two earth children,

Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole,

down underground into the Underworld.

The Underworld is ruled by a Queen

who insists that the Underworld is the only world.

She insists that all Puddleglum, Eustace, and Jill’s talk about a world

with a bright sun, and blue skies, and green trees

is all wishful thinking – empty childish talk.

She is so clever with her words

and so rational with her logic,

that she almost has them convinced.

Then Puddleglum stubbornly says,

“Suppose we have only dreamed or made-up all these things:

Trees and grass, sun and moon, the stars and even Aslan himself.

Suppose we have.

Then all I can says is that

the made-up things seem a good deal more important

than the real ones.

Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world.

Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one.

If you are right, then we are just babies making up a game.

But babies playing a game can make a play-world

that licks your real world hollow.”

HIGHWAY 35 and HIGHWAY 40

In chapter 35, Isaiah is Puddleglum – he is a giver and defender of hope.

In spite of all the evidence to the contrary,

in spite of all the pain of his present world,

in spite of defeat, despair, and darkness,

Isaiah paints a picture

of all the places of desolation, becoming places of delight;

of all the people, wounded and limping,

suddenly becoming whole again and skipping;

of all sorrows and sighs ebbing from the world, so that joy and

gladness can come flooding into it.

This is a dream to live by.

For it is real.

It is true.

It is the future that awaits all God’s ransomed and redeemed people.

A future in which

I matter to God.

You matter to God.

The whole world, the whole cosmos matters to God.

So strengthen those weak hands.

Steady those feeble knees.

Steel that fearful heart.

God is coming

coming to save you

and his whole creation.

Last week, we preached on Isaiah 40.

We heard Isaiah proclaim the highway through the wilderness,

the highway upon which the King is coming on.

This week, in Isaiah 35, there is another highway.

This highway is for the ransomed and redeemed of the Lord.

Let’s call these Highway 35 and Highway 40.

On Highway 40,

the King

the Son of Righteousness

with healing in his wings

is travelling from the future to the present

to us, his church, his bride.

On Highway 35,

we the people of God

are travelling from the present

into the future – to the King

and to the fullness of his Kingdom

with the Holy Spirit as our GPS – guiding us each step of the way.

We long for the day when these two Highways meet.

We long for the these two Highways to meet

in the new Jerusalem,

in the new heavens and the new earth,

when and where all things will be made new,

so that we can safely swim in Plaster Creek without risking getting sick.

So that we can safely picnic in Fukushima without risking getting radiation poisoning.

So that we can hug citizens of Yemen without ever being afraid,

feast with Heartside neighbors without ever feeling guilty,

and laugh with others without ever feeling lonely.

CONCLUSION

Until then, we travel on,

looking down the road,

dreaming and working for the day

the words “terrorist” and “bully” drop from our vocabulary

the day no one is poor or hungry,

the day our planet no longer must groan under our misuse.

We travel on,

looking down the road,

dreaming and working for the day

when

justice rolls down like waters

and righteousness like a mighty stream

and all the deserts of the world become gardens of delight,

and every eye at last, at last,

sees the face of our King.

Until that day, we pray, Come Lord Jesus.

AMEN

PRAYER

Lord God, in this Advent season

Help us know, truly know, the hope to which you have called us,

a hope that cannot be taken away

not by circumstances, by suffering, not even by death.

A hope in your promised future

A hope made real by the resurrection of your Son.

A hope guaranteed by the presence of your Spirit.

A hope which we pray you will fan into flame within us.

This we pray in the name of our King, Jesus.

Amen