“On Eagle’s Wings”: Isaiah 40:21-31
Pastor Deb Troester, STHPC, January 21, 2024
The lyrics to the anthem the choir just sang were written by Langston Hughes, a well-known 20th century African American poet:
“I dream a world…
Where love will bless the earth and peace its paths adorn.
I dream a world where all will know sweet freedom’s way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white, whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth and every[one] is free,
…Of such I dream, my world!”
Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we celebrated this past week, also had a dream – of a world where racism, poverty, and war would no longer exist. Yet our world is far from these peaceful, beautiful dreams. We are discouraged by war, violence, and hunger, by the inhumane treatment of refugees, and asylum-seekers. We are discouraged by seemingly intractable divides between people of opposing political beliefs; the persistent and growing gap between rich and poor; not to mention alcohol- and drug-addiction, overdoses, homelessness, gun violence, and an ever-growing epidemic of loneliness. Our reality is far from the world of which the poet dreamed.
It must have seemed that way as well to the ancient Israelites for whom Isaiah wrote. Ripped from their homeland, force-marched as prisoners of war to Babylon, where they lived in exile, their temple, the center of their worship, destroyed, and the walls of Jerusalem reduced to rubble. Where was this God who had promised so much to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Moses, the Great I Am who had freed their ancestors from slavery? Where was this God now?
This passage is about remembrance. We have forgotten who we are. We have forgotten who God is. Isaiah’s words are a call to a broken people to remember who they are and who God is, and in that remembrance to find hope. And finally to know that when we are weakest is when God can really work in our lives.
Who are we, then? Isaiah says we are like sheep, and God is our shepherd. In words memorialized in Handel’s Messiah, Isaiah writes, “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms and carry them in his bosom and gently lead the mother sheep.”
Yes, Isaiah also says that our lives are fragile and fleeting, like the grass underfoot or the flowers of the field; we are like tiny grasshoppers, jumping to and fro in our busyness and confusion, and our leaders are like stubble that the winds sweep away. Yet, as the Psalmist says, we are the people of God’s pasture and the sheep of his hand. In Psalm 23 David reminds us that we are the ones God leads by the still waters and makes to lie down in green pastures, we are the ones protected by God’s loving guidance, even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. We are the ones for whom God prepares a feast, in the presence of our enemies, and we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. In Genesis, after creating the entire cosmos, God pronounced creation “good,” but after creating humanity, God pronounced it “very good.” We are the ones God made a covenant with after the great flood, setting the rainbow in the sky as a reminder of God’s eternal love and faithfulness. We are the ones for whom God sent his Son, Jesus Christ, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
In times of uncertainty, suffering, and crisis; when our hopes and dreams have been trampled in the dust, it is good to remember who we are: God’s beloved creation.
And we need to remember who God is: the One who has measured the waters of the sea in the hollow of his hand…and weighed the mountains in scales…who stretches out the heavens like a curtain…who has numbered the stars and called them all by name.” Isaiah asks,
“Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint
and strengthens the powerless.
Throughout the Bible the prophets constantly remind the people to remember what God has done: how God brought them out of slavery in Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey; how God gave the law to Moses to guide them in their relations with God and each other; how God provided leaders such as Joshua, Deborah, Gideon, and David; how God protected them from their enemies; how, when they strayed from obeying God and repented, God accepted them back again and again and forgave them. The whole of scripture can be viewed as a record of God’s loving faithfulness to humankind, as expressed by those who experienced it firsthand and were moved by the Holy Spirit to write them down so that future generations would remember God’s lovingkindness.
Remembrance brings hope. Remembrance brings faith. I have a friend whose Facebook profile includes the words: “God has taken care of you every day of your life. What makes you think He picked today to quit?” This particular friend has had a really hard life, and her husband was recently diagnosed with dementia, but she knows who she is – a beloved child of God; and she knows who God is – our loving, heavenly parent. Remembering the good things God has done for us in the past strengthens our faith and gives us hope.
Some people keep a prayer journal so that they will remember prayers that God has answered. Others write down things they are thankful for on slips of paper and keep them in a jar or box, to take out and look at when they need encouragement. However you remember what God has done is your life, it’s a good thing to do. Isaiah concludes his words to the Babylonian exiles with this well-known passage:
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted,
but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint.
To “wait for the Lord” is to have confidence, or faith, in the sense of committing oneself to God in hopeful expectation. The word “wait” in the phrase “those who wait for the Lord” means “expect” – expecting that God will show up – it is waiting with anticipation to see what God will do - the God who creates something out of nothing, who works for good in even the worst of situations; the God who makes a way where there is no way.
Pastor and theologian Roger Gench, writing in Presbyterian Outlook, says, “stand-alone self-sufficiency is an illusion. Moments of vulnerability help us recognize the deep interdependency we have with one another and with God. The God who hung the stars and the moon…is also One who comes close to give life to the weary and exhausted.” The good news here is that we can’t do it alone. We need God. And we can expect that God will show up – maybe in an unexpected way – and God will give us strength to go on. Gench continues: “Indeed, the central paradox of our faith is that life emerges from the vulnerability of fear and isolation – from the cross-shaped places of our lives – for the divine creator who has named and sustains the stars in the sky is also the God of history and of our present moment, who seeks us out in the midst” of suffering and disappointment. It is “only when we feel weak and helpless that we are we vulnerable enough to experience the power and grace of God.” This passage is reminiscent of the Apostle Paul’s words to the Corinthians: “I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and difficulties for Christ's sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” Paul suffered from what he called “a thorn in the flesh” – perhaps a physical ailment of some sort. He writes, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’”
Christianity is full of paradoxes, and this is one of them: when we are at our weakest, humanly speaking, that is when God is most able to work in our lives. When all is going well, we tend to rely on our own strength, but when disaster strikes: an illness, the loss of a job, the death of a loved one, that is when we sense our need of God the most, and when we are most likely to turn to God. I think sometimes God allows these things to happen in order to draw us closer to him, if we are willing to let God work in our lives.
I’ve been reading Zero at the Bone by poet Christian Wiman. Raised in a charismatic evangelical home in the Texas Bible Belt, Wiman couldn’t wait to get out of Dodge, so to speak. He went to university in Virginia and decided to give up on God. He studied business, then switched to his real love – literature, especially poetry.
He met his wife while editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago. She was a believer and their conversations gradually brought him back to God. But it wasn’t until he was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma at age 39 that his faith deepened and matured. Wiman is now a professor at Yale Divinity School, teaching seminary students the relationships between theology, literature, philosophy, and poetry, and most of all, connecting with young people in their faith struggles. Because he has been through so much, he is able to draw from the wisdom gleaned through difficult experiences and pass it on to these future pastors. Wiman is one who knows what it is to “wait for the Lord.” In a recent article in the New Yorker, he quotes from German theologian H. J. Iwand: “Our faith begins at the point where atheists supposed that it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation, and doubt about everything that exists!” When we come to the end of our rope and let go, God will catch us. When we have no strength of our own, God will give us wings as eagles; we shall run and not be weary. We shall walk and not faint.
Let us pray: God of life, God of hope, God of all, Lift us on your love like eagle's wings. Sustain us, Guide us, Heal us. Then send us forth into the world, That we may love as you love. Amen.
Sources:
Carl, William J. III. “Fifth Sunday After the Epiphany, Isaiah 40:21-31, “Homiletical Perspective,” pp. 315-319, Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 1, David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, Eds., Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008.
Cep, Casey. “Close to the Bone: The Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith.” The New Yorker, Dec. 11, 2023, pp. 2026.
Gench, Roger. “Looking into the Lectionary: Fifth Sunday After the Epiphany,” Presbyterian Outlook, Feb. 1, 2021.
Hughes, Langston. “I Dream a World,” (Music by André J. Thomas), Heritage Music Press, 2002.
Terri. “Prayer for Healing: On Eagles’ Wings” [retrieved Jan. 20, 2024]
https://re-worship.blogspot.com/2015/02/prayer-for-healing-on-eagles-wings.html; posted on http://revgalblogpals.blogspot.ca/
©Deborah Troester 2024