Third Sunday in Advent (12/16/07): “The Ransomed of the Lord”

Isaiah 35.1-10

This morning I would like to take as my text the 35th chapter of Isaiah. It is a wonderful text for Advent. Indeed, many of our Advent and Christmas texts come from the prophet Isaiah, that great preacher of comfort and joy who saw the Messiah on the horizon and proclaimed his coming to the weary and defeated Israelites.

I would like to call your attention especially to the last verse: “And the ransomed of the Lord shall return to Zion, with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sadness shall flee away.” Let’s ask the good Lutheran question: What does this mean for us?

We might say first that Isaiah speaks about a homecoming. The historical situation is this: the Jews have been conquered by Babylon and carried off into exile. They are an early example of what in modern parlance we call “displaced persons”—those who have been forced from their homeland by forces and powers beyond their control. The Israelites had, in fact, been in that situation for almost a generation. There was little hope left that they would ever return. God appeared to have abandoned them to their enemies. Life no longer seemed worth living.

Many years ago a group of explorers were lost in the Arctic. They had minimal provisions, which they stretched as far as they could, but eventually even that little food was gone. When they were finally rescued, they had been lost for eight months. They were asked whether the pangs of hunger had not been overwhelming. “No,” their leader replied, “our hunger was lost in the sense of abandonment, in the feeling that our countrymen had forgotten us and were not coming to the rescue. It was not until we were rescued and looked in human faces that we felt how hungry we were.”

That is so often the way it is with us. When we are in the place of feeling abandoned, helpless, without any ray of hope, nothing else really matters. And many of us have been in that place at one time or another. Perhaps you are there today.

But the promise given by Isaiah is that we will be rescued, and that we will be brought home. Perhaps it is only when we hear those words that we understand our own present loneliness, which we try so hard to mask with busy-ness and work, or perhaps with alcohol or other more destructive elements in our lives. We will be rescued! Suddenly the word of hope reveals the present pain in starker contrast—but only to lift us again to think not about the present pain but the promise: We will be rescued! We will be brought home!

In his wonderful Confessions, St. Augustine put it this way: “Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee.” In hearing these words of Isaiah, can we recognize that we, too, are in exile, far from home, lonely, troubled, restless? Can we admit that these are not unusual things, but part of our human condition? But God’s promise this Advent is that there is a home for us, a place that is safe, a place that is filled with contentment and satisfaction. That place is his heart. When we find our home there, we are at peace.

Then the text also reminds us of how we get to that place of peace. We are brought there. It is not something that we accomplish, or earn, or discover on our own. To talk about being ransomed or redeemed is to admit our own helplessness and imprisonment, and to accept that we need to receive this great gift of God. We cannot do it on our own.

Sometimes we talk about this season as a time of giving, and about how it is more blessed to give than to receive. Some years ago, when one of my children was a kindergartner at Bell Hill School, I was on the campus one December day when an energetic young boy, dressed in colorful winter hat and mittens, came galloping across the campus. As he passed me, he halted in his tracks and wheeled around to look at me. “Hey mister,” he called out, “know what? Christmas isn’t about getting, it’s about giving!” Those are fine sentiments, of course, and one hesitates to criticize them. And yet one of the reasons that the church prefaces Christmas with Advent is to help us understand that in a deeper sense, Christmas is precisely about receiving! It is about admitting that nothing I can do is enough to earn God’s love or favor, but that God’s love is given to me only as a gift. That is the theme of this Isaiah text: “You shall obtain joy and gladness,” he promises—but they shall be given freely, without price, simply because God loves you.

Then there is one more wonderful thing about this text. It calls Israel—and it calls us—”the ransomed of the Lord.” That is a word that has mostly negative implications to us today. A ransom is an unfair, even criminal demand. The Biblical view is more positive. It doesn’t represent capitulation to blackmail, but it suggests powerful love. A person ransoms another because of great love and care. It is like Luther tells us in the Catechism: “At great cost he has saved and redeemed me, a lost and condemned person. He has freed me from sin, death and the power of the devil—not with silver or gold, but with his holy and precious blood and his innocent suffering and death. All this he has done that I may be his own.” To call us “the ransomed of the Lord” is very simply to say how precious we are to God. When we sit in exile, when we sit in despair, when are hearts are filled with pain or loneliness or hopelessness, that can be a very strong word indeed.

But there is one step more. Norman Vincent Peale told about one of his most memorable Christmas lessons. He was twelve years old, and he and his father were doing some late Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve. “He had me loaded down with packages,” Peale recounted, “and I was tired and cross. I was thinking how good it would be to get home when a beggar—a bleary-eyed, unshaven, dirty old man—came up to me, touched my arm with a hand like a claw and asked for money. He was so repulsive that instinctively I recoiled.

“Softly my father said, ‘Norman, it’s Christmas Eve. You shouldn’t treat a man that way.’

“I was unrepentant. ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘he’s nothing but a bum.’

“My father stopped. ‘Maybe he hasn’t made much of himself, but he’s still a child of God.’ He then handed me a dollar—a lot of money for those days. . . ‘I want you to take this and give it to that man,’ he said. ‘Speak to him respectfully. Tell him you are giving it to him in Christ’s name.’

“‘Oh, Dad,’ I protested, ‘I can’t do anything like that.’

“My father’s voice was firm. ‘Go and do as I tell you.’“ So reluctant and resisting, I ran after the old man and said, ‘Excuse me, sir. I give you this money in the name of Christ.’ He stared at the dollar bill, then looked at me in utter amazement. A wonderful smile came to his face, a smile so full of life and beauty that I forgot that he was dirty and unshaven. I forgot that he was ragged and old. With a gesture that was almost courtly, he took off his hat. Graciously he said, ‘And I thank you, young sir, in the name of Christ.’”

Peale concluded, “All my irritation, all my annoyance faded away. The street, the houses, everything around me suddenly seemed beautiful because I had been part of a miracle. . . –the transformation that comes over people when you think of them as children of God, when you offer them love in the name of a Baby born two thousand years ago . . .” [Norman Vincent Peale, in The New Guideposts Christmas Treasury (Augsburg, 1989)

To be part of a miracle. Could it be that this is one key to this wonderful text? Could it be that when we hear the good news that we are precious to God, then we have the wonderful gift of seeing other people as also precious? And that when we learn to see each other as precious to God, then the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose? Now? Our desert? Like a rose?

Dear friends in Christ: You are most precious, the ransomed of the Lord! In that knowledge, rejoice and sing. Proclaim that wonderful love of God to all by understanding and living the truth that every person is also precious to him. “Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped . . . and they shall see the glory of the Lord!”