2023.12.10 | Being Present with Peace
Being Present with Peace
Isaiah 40:1-11
Preached by
Rev. Dr. Marvin Lance Wiser
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, CA
10 December 2023
The backdrop for what we just heard read may be found in the previous chapter, 39 and verse 6, “Days are coming when all that is in your house, and that which your ancestors have stored up until this day, shall be carried to Babylon.” And so, for some, it came to pass.
Our passage this morning is structured as a prophetic commission. Much like the divine council’s commissioning in Isaiah 6, “Whom shall I send?” This, among many other factors, help us to separate Isaiah of Jerusalem or Second Isaiah, that is, the first 39 chapters of the prophetic corpus that is the Book of Isaiah from Isaiah of Babylon or Second Isaiah who is distinct from the former, and whose work comprises chapters 40-55, taking place a generation after First Isaiah.
In our passage, God exclaims comfort, and exhorts a messenger to speak to the heart of Jerusalem. Another voice from the divine council chimes in exuberantly, “In the wilderness clear a way for the LORD God.” And then another voice adds, “make a proclamation!” The intended recipient inquires, “What shall I proclaim?” But then a seemingly voice of pessimism interrupts and interjects that all flesh is fleeting. Uhm, hello? where’s the hope in that, right? Thankfully, their voice is not the last, and we hear another, “Yes, the grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of God, who just said “comfort,” endures forever.
So the messenger, Zion personified, is told to get up on a mountain top, and proclaim to the environs of Judah that God is coming, vis-à-vis the return of the exiles. Just as, according to the prophet Ezekiel, God had left with them to Babylon, God will return with them to Jerusalem, that is, according to the story as told by the exiles.
Now, those who attend our Texts & Contexts Bible Study, know that only about 10% of Judahites were forced into exile to Babylon. The other 90% of Judahites who became referred to as the People of the Land, and much to the decry of the later imperially-backed governors Ezra and Nehemiah, mixed with the other peoples of the land of Philistia and elsewhere, with those of the likes of Ruth.
Clearing a way in the wilderness summons up Exodus imagery, as the word for “wilderness,” מִדְבָּר is the the same word used in the Torah for the space between Egypt and Palestine, recall the wilderness journey. However, the space between Babylon and Jeruselm, as with the space between Egypt and the Judean hill country centuries prior, wasn’t entirely uninhabited. In our Bible study this fall, we studied these migrations, both going and returning, and how they affected group formation and other peoples already within the promised land.
Clearing a way is making ready for someone or something that will be en route. Adventus in the latin signifies an arrival. Something that is coming, but not here yet. As with Matthew, who re-attributes “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness” to John the Baptist, Jesus’ eccentric cousin, preparing the way for Jesus’ ministry of peace and presence of God among us. Advent can be a dark time, a time of waiting before the light breaks. Liturgically, we find ourselves just before dawn. This is where we are at in our passage, the message of future comfort is being ready to be proclaimed, but it has not yet happened, suffering is remembered and trauma abounds. The memory of the prophet Jeremiah’s words still resound:
They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,
saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. (Jer 6:14; cf. 8:11)
Peace, Shalom, Salaam, comes from the ancient Akkadian Shalamu and is saturated with meaning: it’s a state of well-being, welfare, the arrival to a destination whole, having good health, being safe from fear, experiencing the absence of war, prosperity, to become whole, a state of satiation, to simply have enough, not lacking and not overflowing. The road to peace is long, and riddled with justice, hope, equity, and love.
One of the voices from our passage shouts out, “Clear a way for the LORD, pave a road in the desert.” Why would a path of stones need to be laid for the revealing of the glory of God? After all, God’s glory was lifted up and flew from the temple to Babylon in Ezekiel’s vision. Verse 10 makes clear that God is returning with military might. You see, the returning exiles had the backing of the Persian empire, and its emperor Cyrus the Great, who Second Isaiah calls the messiah (Isa. 45:1). Those Judahites who remained on their land after the Babylonian siege and co-mingled with other peoples did not enjoy the same imperial support.
This week Israel intensified its strikes as part of the second phase of its military campaign invading Gaza, targets and collateral damage calculated by Artificial Intelligence. On Friday BBC confirmed much of the Great Omari Mosque, Gaza’s oldest mosque dating to 1344, appears to be reduced to rubble. Legend has it that Samson is buried underneath
Since the October 7th barbaric killing of 1,200 Israelis and the kidnapping of 240, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 17,700 people have been killed and more than 48,780 wounded in Gaza, the majority women and children. In addition, settler violence is quickly escalating. 267 Palestinians have been killed and 3,365 wounded in the Occupied Palestinian Territory of the West Bank. One in four killed in the OPT West Bank were minors. An article in the Lancet Medical Journal has found no evidence of inflated rates of mortality. More UN aid workers have died in Gaza since October than in any other conflict in history, and there are now more casualties in this Israeli war than any previous one. North of the Gaza river, which essentially divides the strip, 1 out of 2 buildings are damaged. And approximately 1.9 of the 2.3 million Gaza population, of which half are children, are currently displaced, many staying in UN camps, some having only one toilet per every 730 people. Infection and disease are rife. We now find ourselves in unprecedented territory in terms of the Israel-Palestine conflict
The invasion is now taking place increasingly in southern Gaza, where in October and November, more than a million people evacuated from the north were told to flee. This past week the Israeli military dropped leaflets over the refugee camp of Khan Younis in the south with a Quranic verse in Arabic about the times of Noah: “The flood overtook them, while they persisted in wrongdoing.” Parents continue to write children’s family names on their limbs. Doctors work without essentials.
The U.N. Secretary General has stated that Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children and this past week invoked a rarely used power, Article 99, to warn the Security Council of an impending “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza. The last time Article 99 was invoked the Berlin Wall was still standing. Meanwhile, the United States this past Friday again vetoed a U.N. Security Council call for an immediate ceasefire
Let me pause here to be unequivocally clear: I am not and we are not to conflate Jews and Judaism with the State of Israel. Senator Bernie Sanders, a Jew whose Polish father lost much of his family in the holocaust, has stated that Israel’s right-wing government is extreme and racist and that he hopes that Israel votes out Benjamin Netanyahu. So, as with all religions, cultures, nationalities, there exists a spectrum. But we cannot simply call Israel’s government a racist or ethnicist government without also accepting that so too is the U.S. And I’m not just referring to our 45th president. They’re our bombs. The Biden administration asked Congress again on Friday to approve the sale of 45,000 more tank shells for Israel’s tanks for use in future ground offensives in Gaza. The U.S. is as complicit now as we were when Kissinger was carpet bombing Cambodia—only this time it’s not being done in secret. And it goes back even further, where did Adolf Hitler look to develop the Nuremberg race laws? These United States of America.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has posted on social media that “This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” And has stated to Israelis, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.” Of course, for those who have ears to hear, the rest of the verse being quoted in Deuteronomy is “you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.” 1 Samuel 15:3 states, “Go and attack Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,” what biblical scholar Susan Niditch terms the “ban,” in the Hebrew Bible, or total annihilation of the enemy, what today we would term genocide. In a similar vein, last month the Israeli Heritage Minister stated that a nuclear bomb in Gaza was not off the table and openly advocated for the return of Israeli settlements to Gaza
On Friday a survivor of the Guernica Massacre in Spain sounded the alarms of genocide. The sirens reverberated through the town that served as the inspiration for Pablo Picasso’s 1937 masterpiece, detailing the horrors of genocide masquerading as so-called collateral damage. It’s been showing on our screens. May the sirens be heard.
Twelve years ago, before my trip to Palestine-Israel, I was a participant in the World Council of Churches’ International Ecumenical Peace Convocation in Kingston, Jamaica. That year, the revision of the Just Peace Companion for churches world-over was finalized, which sought to theologize beyond the just war-pacifism binary. I was privileged to study there with Boston College Professor and Jesuit Priest Rev. Dr. Raymond Helmick, who spent decades peacemaking in Ireland, Lebanon, Iraq, the Balkans, and Israel-Palestine, and who negotiated directly with Hamas. Of the many things I learned from Father Helmick, is that peacemaking is much more than being nice to our neighbors. One cannot promote peace without justice, nor without loving one’s enemy. Both have to be present. Preparing the way then is cultivating practices of presence where love may abound and justice may be served, only then can equity and peace truly reign. Without this preparation, we will hear only echoes of Jeremiah’s “Peace, Peace, when there is no peace.
The question then, is: are we collectively shedding tears for both sides? Israeli and Palestinian alike? Is all loss being seen as loss, or one’s loss another’s gain? Shedding tears for all is necessary for peace, as is caring for each other’s wounds. One community’s suffering should not negate another community’s suffering
Previous candidate for mayor of Jerusalem, Aziz Abu Sarah, states “It’s not Israelis versus Palestinians, that gets us to where we are. It needs to be those of us Israelis and Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs, Jews, and Christians who believe in peace and justice, and those who are not there yet. Our work is to convince as many people as we can that it’s not binary.”
One of my favorite history of religion scholars, Talmudist Daniel Boyarin, an Israeli-American professor at Cal, writes,“It has been said by many Christians that Christianity died at Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor. I fear — G-d forbid — that my Judaism may be dying at Nablus, Daheishe, Beteen (Beth El) and al-Khalil (Hebron). . . If we are not for ourselves, other Jews say to me, who will be for us? And I answer, but if we are for ourselves alone, what are we?
We have to be present before others for there to be any peace. And I would state this presence is what enables an advent for continued meaning in the form of our religions, so die they do not.
Two years prior to the revision of the Just Peace Companion the Kairos Palestine Document was published, which informed the former. The Kairos Document is the word of Palestinian Christians to the world about what is happening in Palestine. “Our word is a cry of hope, with love, prayer and faith in God. We address it first of all to ourselves and then to all the churches and Christians in the world, asking them to stand against injustice and apartheid, urging them to work for a just peace.
They address us still and wish us to know this during our Advent season
“Christmas celebrations are cancelled this year in Bethlehem. There will be no tree lighting, no street parades, and no festivals. It is not possible to celebrate or rejoice when our families and people in Gaza are being massacred and ethnically cleansed. This is a time of mourning. This is a time of lament. The Empire has crushed our lives, homes, hopes, and dreams,” writes Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, Pastor at Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem. The image on our screen is their nativity scene this year.
I invite you to take a deep breath. Advent, the dark before the light. The babe is born into darkness. But light shall shine through and darkness will not overcome it. Like this is real, not figurative; photons have an infinite life cycle. Light lasts — this is what Chanukah teaches — and it shines upon us all. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminds us that “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” And like light, our passage this morning stated that the appearance of God’s Glory is for all to see (Isa. 40:5). But as both Jonah and Jesus teach us, God is to come surprisingly not with might, but with mercy.
So, how can we be present with peace? Especially in the darkest times, just before dawn? First, we acknowledge the logs in our own eyes before attempting to take out the speck from others’. We listen. We listen without interjectory conjunctions. We care for the wounds of all. We grieve with each other. We love our enemies, we forgive those who sin against us. We feed the poor, we care for and protect the oppressed. We practice inclusion, not exclusion. And we listen some more. Critical presence is a paving the way for peace, whether in Ramla, Ramallah, or Russell City.
Pastor Arlene spoke about the already-and-not-yet last week. Prophecy is like that. It is an accomplishing word, not an accomplished word. It’s a word that endures forever. Prophecy is fulfilling, not fulfilled, always becoming. So, if the word of God endures forever, we too are perpetually preparing the way. But as the Gospels tell us, God among us, does not come with military might, but via the way of peace through a newborn babe. This parade of a different sort is always being birthed around us if we but look for it. First Isaiah writes, “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given (Isa. 9:6). Caregivers we are all to the Prince of Peace. May we be present, and let light shine. It’s the best gift we can give. Amen.
Benjamin Huynh, et al., “No evidence of inflated mortality reporting from the Gaza Ministry of Health” Dec 06, 2023 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)02713-7/fulltext
Daniel Boyarin, “Interrogate My Love” in Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, eds. (New York: Grove Press, 2003), 202-203.