Based on Isaiah 9:1-4, 1Corinthians 1:10-18, Matthew 4:12, 17-23
We are about half-way through the church season known as “Epiphany Ordinary Time”. It is the church time between when the Wise Men find and worship Jesus and the beginning of Lent (this year on February 18th). The word “epiphany” means “to show forth” or “to shine forth” – as in God showing up on earth to fulfill God’s promised hope of a Messiah. The gospel stories, epistles and 1st Testament readings of this season highlight the divinity of Jesus and how He is the fulfillment of the countless people who put their hope in God.
All of these stories begin to fill in the picture of the fullness of who Jesus is. The reality is, however, that all of the stories about Jesus, all of the miracles, the healings, the teachings – all of it – is really about building our trust in a God who keeps promises. For you see, the coming of Jesus into the world is the fulfillment of all that God had promised. The coming of Jesus into our lives is the culmination of all the prayers and hope in God of countless faithful people over many thousands of years. The coming of Jesus into the world shone a light into the darkness some 2000 years ago – a light that has never gone out, a light that we are to emulate in our day and time.
Developing hope in God is what our scripture readings are about today. Early in Isaiah the prophet is telling those who are living in the chaos and despair of worthless human kings that they should hope in God instead of humans. In the verses before our reading today the prophet teaches, “…When someone tells you to consult mediums and spiritists, who whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living? Consult God’s instruction and the testimony of warning….” The prophet reminds Israel that God had already humbled the proud of Zebulun and Naphtali – but will honor Galilee…” Instead of walking around in human-induced darkness, they will receive a divine light which will relieve their oppression.
Paul’s letter to the believers in Corinth begins to address the divisions in that body. Paul has been notified that some are saying that they follow him, while others say they follow the Christ or Peter or Apollos. Paul reprimands them for this and reminds them that they are called to follow only Jesus and to do so in a unified manner. Paul teaches them once again that their hope needs to be placed in our Almighty God who brought salvation through the Cross – who broke the power of sin and death by the miracle of resurrection.
In the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus is fresh off his 40-day temptation by the Adversary in the wilderness following his baptism. Jesus left Nazareth and went to the region of the Galilee – to Naphtali and Zebulun so that Isaiah’s prophesy would be fulfilled. There he began his public ministry preaching boldly, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near”. Jesus called his first four disciples, two pairs of brothers who were fishermen, to follow him – and they did. We’re told that Jesus was in active ministry in the Galilee teaching, preaching good news and healing the people, bringing a light to the people who had lived in darkness for a very long time – reminding his people of their hope in God.
What does your hope in God look like? Professor Paul K. Hooker writes about our reading from Isaiah and how to find our hope in God in dark times. He writes, “…Isaiah…was trying to bring the resources of his faith - his hope, his confidence in God’s grace toward the house of David, his certainty of God’s presence among the people of Judah - to bear on their current [that] crisis. He was not predicting events that lay some seven centuries in the future…Isaiah’s words form a kind of lens through which we [I] can see the meaning of Jesus more clearly, and by which we [I] see dimensions of the incarnation that are otherwise indistinct….” When we read about Jesus fulfilling what had been prophesied and promised about the Messiah of God, it serves to renew our hope in God. Our hope that the God we meet in our day will remain faithful to us and will, in God’s way and time, fulfill the final promise of Jesus’ return and the completion of the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.
That is our hope in God – isn’t it? That God will complete what God began some 2000 years ago when Jesus was born of Mary in Bethlehem. It is hard to keep up hope in God in our age when powerful humans and evil activities seem to be in charge of all things here on earth. However, the Bible narrative reinforces our ability to hope in God.
Pastor Edwin Searcy has this to say about the narrative from the Gospel according to Matthew which, “…tells us that the gospel of God’s kingdom come begins when Jesus survives the wilderness temptations and travels to the land of deep darkness (Isa. 9:2; Matt. 3:16). This must be good news to those [preachers and congregations] who find themselves in the dark these days, for Jesus is close at hand. Admitting that we’re in the dark is a truth-telling turn that enables us to glimpse the nearness of the kingdom of heaven. We’ve been imagining that it is up to us to fix everything, to develop the right programs, to turn things around, to make a success of the religion business. We’ve pretended that we know what needs to be done and said. We’ve covered up our fear of the foreboding future with tips from the latest book or seminar. We find it hard to tell the truth, to give honest testimony, to say that we live in a land of deep darkness. And yet, it is truth-telling that turns preacher and congregation away from a preoccupation with saving the church and towards Jesus.
In the darkest places, the gospel comes first among the last and least. To our continuing surprise, the kingdom of heaven is closest to those who face the fact that they are not capable of lighting the darkness. Jesus does not begin his ministry with a church that is confident in its capabilities but with a people who know that they are in trouble….”
Jesus made his church out of the least, the last, the lost and those left behind. Pastor and writer Frederick Buechner, in a sermon entitled, “The Church”, speaks about the flawed humanity of those first disciples writing, “…the reason for their bad press is that they never seem to have gotten any of Jesus’ [his] points very well, or if and when they did get them, never seem to have lived by them very well, which makes them people very much like you, if I may say so, and also, if I may say so, very much like me. That is to say, they were human beings. Jesus made his church out of human beings with more or less the same mixture in them of cowardice and guts, of intelligence and stupidity, of selfishness and generosity, of openness of heart and sheer cussedness as you would be apt to find in any of us. The reason he made his church out of human beings is that human beings were all there was to make it out of. In fact, as far as I know, human beings are all there is to make it out if still. It’s a point worth remembering….”
It's not only a point worth remembering for its truth-telling, but also a point worth remembering for developing our hope in God. For God has worked with human beings from the point that God breathed life into those first two blobs of dirt. God has overcome human cussedness and hard-heartedness, cowardice, stupidity, selfishness, arrogance, greediness, et cetera, with unconditional love and persistence in working towards God’s preferred future. Over the millennia, no matter how far afield humans have wandered, God’s hope in us always helped humans find their way back to God.
We fervently hope that it will be the same in our time. Taking the lessons contained in the Bible to heart and applying them to our lives will renew our hope in the best of humanity and in the Almighty power of God’s love to transform flawed humans into disciples of the Christ. Placing our hope in God to lead us to use our gifts for the common good will in fact make a positive difference in our lives and our world. When we follow Jesus, then we live into our light – into our epiphany, and we discover that our hope in God grows until it is fulfilled. Thanks be to our God who strengthens and renews our hope, amen!