Please note: The following sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.

I.  They had become too comfortable in Babylon!

They, the leaders of Hebrew society, had been dragged off to Babylon to exile.

The conquerors thought that if they got rid of the leadership class, the rest of the people would be easy enough to manage.

And it worked! Everything was so disrupted that there was no more thought of revolt or trouble.

What should they do, those who have been removed some hundreds of miles from their homes in Israel across the forbidding desert?

What many did was just settle down.

“We'll make the best of this situation, try to scrape together a few things, begin new families, and forget about the land of the forbears.”

They try to forget that they are in exile and declare this new place to be their home. 

“It is time to get as comfortable here as possible.  This is it.”

Implicit therein was also a forgetting of the God of Abraham and Sarah.  After all, this God had not prevented the exile.

But there are a few who do not forget either about the land or about their God.

A few who keep waiting, hoping, praying, and expecting God's action again.

They refuse to get comfortable in exile.

They do not relax and try to fit into the society around them, but instead maintain their cultural and religious differences.

Remember! and anticipate! are their key-words.

Isaiah is one of those...a stubborn one, who is not afraid to speak out about something that many don't want to hear.

“Oh, forget it, Isaiah,” we can imagine them saying, “All that stuff about going home again is just nonsense.

Here we are and here we are going to stay.

Babylon has won, and that is the end of it.”

II.  And then Isaiah comes out with this outlandish talk about the blind seeing and the deaf hearing, about water in the desert, and a straight highway in the trackless wastes between Babylon and Jerusalem.

Ridiculous, all of it, that there would be a healing of people and nation.

“The blind and the deaf will stay that way; water is found only in carefully tended oases, and everyone knows that the way to travel to Jerusalem from Babylon is to go up the river and then wind through the hills.

There is no way to go in a straight line from east to west.

You are a windbag, Isaiah.

Look at things realistically.”

III.  In the introduction to his Gospel, Luke tells us his purpose in writing it:

I write an orderly account for you, that you may know the truth  concerning the things about which you have been informed.

That is exactly right.

Luke is not a dispassionate historical reporter, following Jesus around with a tape-recorder, and keeping a diary for posterity.

His aim is different ad more important than that.

He is meaning to proclaim the truth of Jesus, not just some interesting incidents about him.

That is a far more complicated things than might have first been thought.

The truth about Jesus is not obvious to everyone.

Otherwise, everyone who heard him would have believed.

But they did not.

There were many who tagged along, just to see what would happen, the camp-followers of the day, without any thought other than the sensation of the moment.

Some turned away sorrowful after hearing him, their hearts still cold to his proclamation.

They heard the same words and saw the same deeds, yet they did not grasp their significance.

Luke wants to keep pointing out that this is not just a man, even a good man, but the Son of God.

He means to say that the whole purpose of God is tied up in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus.

IV.  One of the purposes of the Divine Drama Bible studies is to talk about the center of the Bible.

It is not to be found in pleasant thoughts or minor details.

There are two major events that shape all the rest of the scriptures, which indeed are the core of its meaning for all time.

In the Old Testament, it is the Exodus event, God bringing the people out of slavery in Egypt and settling them in the land of promise.

God is the one who...brought them out, saving them from the power of Egypt.

That is the truth of the matter.

Others may have seen only a ragtag bunch of refugees sneaking away, but the Bible proclaims this to be the action of God, his love for the descendants of Abraham.

For the New Testament, the event is the death and resurrection of Jesus.

He is not just strolling around the countryside, saying the cleverest things.

By what he says and does, he brings in the kingdom.

God is...the One who raised Jesus from death.

And that is the truth of the matter.

V.  The truth of the matter is not always the first or the easiest observation.

That is the case with the prophet Isaiah's situation.

He says, “You people look around and see only Babylon's power and your own misery.

I look at the same situation and see the weakness of Babylon, the many things that are seriously wrong with this place, and the hand of God who will yet turn everything upside down and restore us to the land of promise.

Don't get too comfortable in Babylon, for the God of the Exodus is still at work, and when he accomplishes his purpose for his people, it does mean healing and wholeness and a straight superhighway.

That is the truth of the matter, people,  even if it does sound crazy.”

VI  There are several possible ways to respond to this reading of the situation:

If one thinks that Isaiah is foolish, then one settles down in Babylon.

Many did this and are swallowed up in the eventual downfall of Babylon.

Some fall into despair, and we hear nothing more about them.

VII.  A few others refuse to get comfortable, maintain their remembrance of God's previous actions, and confidently look for him to continue his work, even with them.

In their view, the promise of God is not just something that applied to their ancestors, but gives meaning to their lives also.

We know that these few held onto the promise all the way to the coming of Jesus, preparing the way for him, whether they knew it or not.

Remember and anticipate are their key-words.

VIII. And the charge to us today is:

           don't get too comfortable in Babylon.

[Does it seem to you that we are almost consumed with worry about being comfortable?]

I'm talking about more than the concern if one's chair has enough padding and similar things.

Each of us has a “comfort zone”, a circle of objects and activities and persons with whom we have an easy rapport.

We have the friends with whom we can converse freely.

We have objects that we use, from kitchen implements  to cars and books, and many other things which make life easier and fuller.

We have tasks that we do in the company of the church, perhaps the same tasks that w have been doing for years, and they are comfortable.

The prophet's call, Paul's reminder, the evangelist's stated purpose, and our Lord's gift of the Holy Spirit that we have heard in the lessons this day are all pulling together to cajole us out of our comfortable corner in Babylon, to push us beyond our “comfort zone.”

How so?

I'm going to talk about my own situation for a moment.

One of my regular tasks is to proclaim Good News through Bible study.

So get me a good text and a few of our regular folks, and off we go.

That's straightforward.

But how can I say Good News to those whom I can't reach in a regular group?

How can I announce  to the internet generation that there is more to life than what they have thought?

And thus we have developed our short videos that are now on our website and on YouTube.

That was way beyond the comfort zone of anything I have ever done.

It is another way of saying that we have not arrived, we're still on the way, perhaps with some folks that we have never met before.

Here's another one for me.

The work of putting together the coalition of congregations for Family Promise has been hard for me.

It has meant meeting lots of new people, --listening carefully to their vastly different situations,

           --casting the vision of what is not yet,

           --remembering that hospitality is one of the things which is favored by Jesus

It would be much easier to be comfortable in Babylon and say...

           --we've never done it that way before,

           --it will take time and money

           --let someone else worry about it

           --God knows that Becky and I and the rest of the leaders are busy enough without doing this...

but Jesus is calling us to act out Good News in this manner,

and lots of it is far outside my comfort zone.

IX.  These are several of the things which have stirred me to get moving.

What is it for you?

Where is God saying to you “Don't get comfortable; you are still in Babylon, you haven't arrived yet?”

And so we gather here to acknowledge that we have messed things up again, that we need forgiveness and redirection, to become more than what we have been.

We praise God with faltering voices, and receive the blessed assurance of his  presence with us in Holy Communion.

As we stand at the end of this service, ready to leave,  we are sent out with a word to share, a vision to cast, people to assist in body and spirit.

We keep waiting, hoping, praying, and expecting God's action again.

We refuse to get comfortable in exile.

We do not relax and try to fit into the society around us, but instead maintain our cultural and religious difference.

Remember! and anticipate! are our key-words.

At the end, the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the poor will have good news preached to them, and the way shall no longer be crooked but straight all the way to our places at the final banquet table.

Don't get too comfortable in Babylon; there is yet so much for us all to hear and receive,  and to say and do.  Amen.

St. Mark's Lutheran Church

142 Market Street

Williamsport, Pennsylvania

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