Scripture: Isaiah 40:1-5; Luke 2:25-32
This is a sermon I didn’t intend to give. I wasn’t planning to preach a sermon about comfort. I had been planning to follow up the couple of sermons on Mary and the “magnificat” with a sermon on the passage known as the Benedictus, which comes just a paragraph or two later in the first chapter of Luke. They are words spoken by Zechariah, the husband of Elizabeth, Zechariah and Elizabeth being the parents of John the Baptist…but since I’m not preaching on these words, I won’t try to explain any more about them. Besides, I may likely come back to those words on Christmas Eve.
But earlier this week, as I was thinking about today’s service and the Christmas Eve service and putting together the materials for the bulletins, the word comfort just sort of appeared in front of me and said “preach on me”. Well, it didn’t actually say that out loud. Words don’t talk all by themselves. But it did look at me that way, as though to say, “well…here I am.” And actually I agreed to the idea fairly easily. Yes, I thought, I think that’s right. I think I’m supposed to preach on comfort this Sunday. I hope I didn’t think that because I haven’t been feeling well recently and the idea of comfort, simple physical comfort, was appealing to me at that point. I’d like to think there was something more mystical involved—or at least more spiritual. And I think there was.
Three weeks ago I began the Advent season here in church with a call to worship taken from the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, one of our readings for this morning. “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God,” Isaiah reads. “Comfort, O comfort my people, says God.” Like so many passages or verses from scripture, we can let these words slide right by us. And I had, when I read them a few weeks ago. I was wanting to get to the familiar words that come a few verses later: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low…” and so on.
So I read the words about comfort quickly and without much attention. But now, as I say, the word comfort comes back to me, and as I now pause to reflect on it and not just rush right by it, I realize that we actually began Advent with this image of God looking out over her people and wishing comfort for them. Of all the things God could have wished for his people, of all the things God could have prayed for for her people, of all the things God could have told the prophet to try to offer to the people on his behalf, comfort seemed to be what was on God’s heart most of all. What my people need, God seems to be saying, what my people need more than anything else is comfort.
I am drawn in by that image of God sort of brooding over us and having her heart go out to us wishing us comfort. I am also not entirely…well…comfortable with that image. I grew up in a time…that is, I grew up as a young adult and a young minister in the church at a time when any talk about civil rights or about the Vietnam war, any such talk in church was met by people who said that they came to church to find inner peace or a oneness with God, in other words to be comforted. They didn’t want, they said in so many words, to be all stirred up by the issues of the day. They wanted to leave church feeling good, feeling happy and contented, not all agitated and upset. I grew up, so far as the church is concerned, with the idea that worship and Christianity in general has the purpose of comforting our souls, with that idea being associated with a kind of head-in-the-sands mentality, a kind of religious escapism, an assumption that going to church amounted to entering a kind of alternate universe where we could pretend that racism and war did not exist. I grew up in the church associating comfortable and comforting Christianity with a desire to preserve the status quo.
I still do. I know that my whole approach to Christianity and religious faith assumes that comfort is not the goal here. It’s not what we’re about. Especially not at Sojourners, where our very name connotes a kind of movement and therefore a certain intentional lack of comfort in the spiritual life, an unwillingness to settle for conventional truths or to mouth the platitudes of faith but to constantly be seeking for deeper and more authentic truths. In this approach, which is my approach and I know is shared by many of you, questions are not only to be tolerated but encouraged, not seen as a challenge to faith but as a part of it.
For some people there is a comfort in having answers to our questions that are put forward as certainly and unshakably true. At Sojourners we tend to distrust answers that are put forward in that spirit. We tend rather to hold the idea that although we never give up on looking for answers, the answers that are to be ours will mostly be partial ones, will eventually be replaced by other insights, and therefore we need to learn to live with our questions, even though that is seldom, if ever, a comfortable place to be.
It wasn’t what Christ was about either—the idea of comfort. It would be hard to reflect on Christ’s teachings as we have been and will continue to do and think that his main concern was to make people comfortable. Most often it was exactly the opposite. His teachings tend to make us uncomfortable, make us dissatisfied with ourselves, put us at odds with the world as it is, draw us out of our comfort zones.
And beyond that, a certain discomfort is built into our faith. One reason even to have a season of Advent, maybe the only real reason, is not to tell us that we have entered into the season of Christmas but is to remind us that our lives remain unfulfilled, to bring to the very center of our spiritual consciousness the thought that our most holy and human dreams are so far from being realized, and that therefore we can’t be comfortable. It would be almost blasphemy to be comfortable. This is not a thought that is true only during Advent, of course. It is true all the time, but Advent is a time when we are reminded how central it is to our faith to live with an awareness of how incomplete our lives are and how far we have to go yet together in our journey toward wholeness. In that way Advent warns us against a too comfortable, a too full of good cheer approach to Christmas as well.
Christmas, the Christian faith—it’s not all about comfort, not much about comfort at all. Everything I’ve said along those lines just now—I’m sticking with it. Everything I’ve said along those lines over the years—I’m sticking with that too. I don’t want to take anything back. Still…
There is this image in the 40th chapter of the book of Isaiah, an image of God bending over the earth somehow and saying, “Comfort, O comfort my people.” At least to me that is the image I get that goes with the words on the page. And those words and that image speak to me in spite of everything I said about how comfort is not the point of faith. They speak to me because I know of people who are in need of comfort, perhaps a bit more so this year than at other times, because of some particular situation they find themselves in.
I know of people who are in need of comfort because this will be the first Christmas without a loved one. I know of people who are in need of comfort because the Christmas season can just be hard because of the various reasons it is hard on some of us. I know there are people in need of comfort because of the economic crisis we are in the midst of, people who have lost jobs or savings and for whom life seems a lot less secure than it did a few months ago or a year ago. I know there are people in need of comfort because they have been affected in some direct, immediate, personal way by the violence of war—American people, Iraqi people, Afghan people, God’s people—or who have been affected by violence of other kinds, gun violence in the streets, domestic violence in the home.
For these and many other reasons, the image of God bending over the earth and speaking, wishing, hoping, pleading for comfort for the earth’s people, the image speaks to me. It is true. It does not contradict what I was saying before about faith not being all about comfort, but it does stand alongside of that as a different and separate truth.
God’s people are in need of comfort and that need of comfort does not fail to touch the heart of God. My picture of God saying, “comfort, O comfort my people” is a picture of God praying for us. You could read it differently. You could read it as God telling Isaiah to go comfort the people. “Comfort, go comfort my people”. But that’s not the way it reads to me. It’s more as though God were talking to himself. “Comfort, my people need comfort,” God seems to be saying to no one in particular.
Some time ago I wrote an invocation that I use every so often that prays something to the effect of: May this time we spend in worship be graced both by our prayers for each other and by God’s prayers for us. When I wrote that, I realized it sounded sort of funny, the idea of God praying for us. God is supposed to be the one we are praying to, not the one saying the prayers. But the phrase just sort of slipped out and I decided not to censor it, that there might be a certain truth there, that God does have certain hopes and dreams for us, that God does not engage with us as a heavenly string puller who makes happen whatever God wants to have happen whenever God wants it to happen, that there is something more mysterious in our relationship to God that involves God yearning for God’s dreams for us to come true. The idea that God declares or controls what happens in the world, in our lives, is actually not very comforting to me at all. It implies a God who is arbitrary and well, controlling—not loving. So maybe God is talking to God’s self. Or maybe God is talking into a void, which is the way prayers seem sometimes, the way they sometimes seem to me anyway. But we say them anyway, because there is comfort and healing in our prayers, for those who say them and for those who are being prayed for.
And maybe this where the idea of faith not being all about being comfortable but at the same time being about comfort for God’s people, maybe those are not only not contradictory but maybe not separate ideas at all. It all depends on what you think finally can bring real comfort, I suppose. If comfort is a matter of turning away from the harsher realities of our lives so that our spirits do not have to be much disturbed, then comfort is indeed not part of the life of faith. But if we gain comfort from knowing we are being prayed for, if we gain comfort from knowing of our need for prayer and world’s need for prayer, if comfort is not about turning away from the world or from people, but is precisely turning toward them in love, which might be a good definition of prayer, if comfort is all about that, then so is the Christian faith all about that, and so is God all about that. We do gain comfort from being prayed for, I believe, from our own praying, from knowing we are being prayed for, and even daring to imagine that we are being prayed for by God, by God who, this holiday tells us, is immersed lovingly in our lives that are so far from fulfilling God’s own dreams for us.
There is a Christmas carol, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, that is not in our hymnal and I decided not to print it out, though it would have seemed appropriate for this sermon. It ends, as you know, with the refrain, “O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy. O tidings of comfort and joy.” But let’s also remember the first line. God rest you merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay. There is much that might dismay us. But if we are able to face whatever that is in our personal lives or in the life of the world and not be dismayed but enter into it with prayer, with loving prayer, then there will be comfort for God’s people. In this sense may comfort be one of the gifts we receive this Christmas. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 21, 2008