Recall

Text: Isaiah 40:10-31

It is self-evident that God created the universe. Even to those who do not believe in God.

The modern western understanding is that the universe is complete in itself and more or less consistent. It is of one piece of seamless cloth. It has room for mind-boggling complexities, ineffable mysteries, and anomalous miracles. But it is not arbitrary or inconsistent at its foundation. When the prophet Isaiah talks about God the creator, when he says “Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,” he is arguing for one God, one universe. Gods of sun and moon and stars and thunder and water are not the creator. Their power is imaginary. The idols that people worship are created things. They are made by woodworkers and goldsmiths, Isaiah says. The universe is of one whole pattern, and the faithful ascribe its existence to God.

Yet, Isaiah writes, Israel has forgotten this. The passage we just heard comes from chapter 40 of the Book of Isaiah. It is the opening chapter in what people call “Second Isaiah.” The consensus is that Isaiah was written over a period of more than two hundred years, and that this second part, from chapter 40 to chapter 55, was written to the Israelites in Babylon, near the end of their period of exile there. They were beginning to forget about God, the God of their ancestors, the creator of all things. They were being seduced by the multiple gods of Babylon.

Isaiah writes to refresh their memories. First, this is the God who created the world. Who was here at the beginning. He reminds them of the creation stories in Genesis and Psalm 104. Second, this is the God who is good. The God who freed them from slavery. Who was with them as they became a nation. And third, this is their God. The one who made a deal with them: I will be your God and you will be my people. Who has promised to be with them forever. “The God of forever,” it says. Do you not remember this God? Has it not been told to you from the beginning? Isaiah asks them: Why do you say, O Israel, my way is hidden from the Lord and my right is disregarded by my God?

But we know why. When times are rough, we wonder: where is God? The Israelites are in exile because their nation has been conquered and the leaders taken away. God was in the land, Jerusalem was God’s home, the Temple there God’s house. Yet now the the land is occupied, and the Temple is rubble. Where is God now?

What can the exiles have thought? They do not complain that God does not exist. They do not complain that God is wicked or intends to punish them. Instead, they conclude that God does not see them. That they are hidden from God. That God is not attending to them. That God is disregarding their suffering. The power of God seems diminished to them, and they—like many people who suffer—have begun to accept the power of their captors. Under constant leveraged persuasion, and being disadvantaged, they grant power to people, structures, systems—laws and markets and politics—that are not God. Our faith is built on memories—that’s why we tell each other these stories—and the Israelites are forgetting.

The God of Israel is powerful, Isaiah reminds them. God stretched out the heavens, measured the waters of the seas, constructed the mountains. God is more powerful than all the temporal things of the earth. All the nations—including (and especially, in this case) Babylon—are as nothing. They are, Isaiah says earlier, like a drop from a bucket. Dust. Less than nothing. The rulers are lightweights—like chaff in the wind. Time is long, but the times of nations and their rulers are so short as to be meaningless.

Yet this same powerful and timeless God, Isaiah reminds us, is close to us, to humans. Like a shepherd who feeds his flock, he says, who cares for them and leads them. God supports the weary, and gives strength to the powerless. What are humans, the Bible asks repeatedly, that God is mindful of us? And what is God, that God is mindful of us?

We should not be harsh on Israelites. It is easy to understand how they might have forgotten. Circumstances can be difficult, preoccupying. Hardships can make us crazy. Sorrow and pain are mind-numbing. It is hard to think beyond the moment; the future seems cloudy at best, or impossible. Our imaginations become diminished. Where is God? Things other than God—idols, Isaiah would say—become seductive solutions.

It is we who disregard God. Which leads us in turn to rely on ourselves. Which leads us—being not very reliable—which leads us in turn to panic. We need, as the Israelites needed, to be re-called. To be repeatedly called back to God. We need to hear in Isaiah a call to us, who are not in exile like the Israelites, but can be just as afraid, just as short on hope, just as attracted wishfully to other gods.

God is big and timeless, says Isaiah in so many words, and we are small and quick. Does it comfort you to know that God created the universe and is mindful of us? That we are just one part of God’s great creation? Or is it distressing, that we are as dust and our history and institutions come and go in a second? Or does it matter?

Is the fate of the present and the future in our hands alone? Is this our job? We humans are not quite up to the long-distance trek of history, nor to the complexity of events and circumstance. It is hard to take comfort in or be hopeful about a universe in which we are careening about and in which our existence is merely a collateral consequence. Once we have forgotten about God, to whom do we turn?

We tell ourselves the story of God’s history for the same reason Isaiah spoke to the Israelites. Because it reminds us that God’s universe is part of that story, that the universe has a trajectory. And that God cares about us—is mindful of us. And that what has gone before leads us to be be hopeful of what will happen in the future, and that God’s promises are reliable. And that though God is universal and beyond comprehension, God is also particular, and is a companion, and a shepherd. God is here.