Messengers of Hope
Advent 2, Year B ~ Isaiah 40:1-11
Kenwood UMC ~ December 7, 2008
I just signed up for Twitter this week. Twitter is a free service that links people through text messaging on their cell phones…I am thinking that I may regret telling you all I signed up, now that I think about this….but at any rate, you “tweet” or write short messages to people who follow you answering one simple question: “What are you doing?” For instance I might twitter right now, “leading worship at Kenwood.” Twitter is a messenger that helps people keep up with one another.
Messengers come in many different shapes and sizes. The come in the form of the postal
worker who puts mail in your mailbox. They come in the form of the employer who calls you into the office to tell you about a policy change. They come in the form of the person who sends you an instant message or a text message. I could go on and on….
But messengers are not always messengers of hope, are they? Sometimes they are messengers of doom and gloom. So how do we recognize the messengers of hope among us? The words of the prophet Isaiah this morning give us some clues.
This passage from Isaiah contains words spoken to the Israelite people when they are in exile. Their homeland has been destroyed, they have been separated from all they know, they are in financial and emotional ruin. It is not too farfetched to make the leap from those people to people today, feeling in exile because of financial uncertainty, job loss, deployment to remote parts of the world, and many other reasons. What kind of message does Isaiah offer to the exiles?
A message of comfort and a message that looks toward the future. Let’s take comfort, first. Isaiah acknowledges the suffering of his people, the long term of exile they have endured. And he speaks tenderly to them, offering a word of comfort. When people are in exile we begin with comfort. We don’t begin with blame, we don’t begin by telling them to snap out of it. We begin with comfort. We acknowledge their pain and tell them we know they are hurting.
And from comfort Isaiah moves toward painting a picture of the future. A voice is crying in the wilderness with a message of hope. And the word shall is the important word in that message. Every valley shall be lifted up, uneven ground shall become level, the glory of the Lord shall be revealed. Messengers of hope know that their job is to paint a picture of a new future, a new reality. And that picture shows what shall happen—not what might happen, or what could happen, but what shall happen.
There’s a certainty in that shall, a certainty that the future will happen, a certainty that implies that we can trust this messenger. And that is what people in exile need to know—not just that hope might be present, but that hope is present, that a new day is coming.
We have a challenge this morning. It would be easy for us to say we need to look for messengers of hope. It would be easy for me to lift up some messengers of hope in our world today. What is more difficult, and more important, is not to look for messengers of hope, but to become messengers of hope. If we believe that Christ is coming and brings a new future, a new kingdom, then we can become messengers of hope. If we believe that the baby who was born in Bethlehem makes a difference, and ushers in a new era of hope and salvation, then we can share that message of hope. We can be the ones who speak to those who are in exile in our community and our world. We can be the messengers who say to ShyAnne Shane and her family, the day is coming when you shall feel better and your dad will be able to go back to work. We can be the messengers who say to the one who is out of work, the day is coming when you shall have a new job. We can be the messengers who say to those who are afraid, the day is coming when you shall be secure.
In this Advent season, as you prepare for the celebration of Christ’s birth, let your heart be changed by becoming a messenger of hope. Proclaim hope on Twitter or Facebook, in your Christmas cards, in your phone conversations or over coffee or lunch. Proclaim the promise of a new future, and I can promise you that the more you proclaim it, the deeper you will believe it, and the easier it will be to live into it.
