Sunday, January 19, 2025
/2 Epiphany
Isaiah 62:1-5; Psalm 36:5-10; 1 Corinthians 12: 1-11; John 2:1-11
The Rev. James M.L. Grace
In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN.
It is rather ominous, that opening scene of James Cameron’s 1992 film Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The introductory film credits roll as the city of Los Angeles burns in the background, the result of military artificial intelligence becoming sentient and destroying major cities in a nuclear holocaust. In the opening scenes, we see everything burning – buildings, homes, playgrounds. Over thirty years after the film’s release we again are seeing images of Los Angeles burning. These images of Los Angeles (both from the film and in real life) are unsettling and frightening. At the same time, there is nothing really new about them.
Scenes of fiery destruction and the resulting devastation have been the focus of stories, history, and art for millennia. The Bible is riddled with such stories, beginning in the first book of the Bible, Genesis, where not one, but two cities (Sodom and Gomorrah) are incinerated. Elsewhere in the Bible, in the book of 2 Kings, we learn of the prophet Elijah’s ability to call down fire from heaven to incinerate his enemies, something he does twice. (you can read about that in 2 Kings 2).
Today, we have another story of fiery destruction in today’s reading from Isaiah. Isaiah is a long book in the Old Testament containing sixty-six chapters. Today’s reading is toward the end of Isaiah (chapter 62) and it is important to understand some context about the book for two primary reasons. The first is that Isaiah was not all written during the same time period. The earliest parts of the book were written around 740 BCE and the latest parts around 520-525 BCE. That means the book of Isaiah was written over a period of over two hundred years. Which brings me to my second point regarding context – Isaiah was not written by one author (obviously) but by several.
Scholars today divide Isaiah into three sections: First Isaiah (written around 740 BCE – chapters 1-39), Second Isaiah (written between 597 – 539 BCE, chapters 40-55), and Third Isaiah (written around 520 BCE, chapters 56-66). Our reading today comes from this third section of Isaiah and is addressed to a people who have lived through fire and devastation and must once again rebuild. These are people who have resettled back into the land of Judah, an area which surrounds the great city of Jerusalem – or at least what remained of it.
About sixty years prior to their resettlement in Judah, the city of Jerusalem burned to the ground and was destroyed by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar II. King Nebuchadnezzar II burned Jerusalem to the ground and destroyed its temple because Judah’s king at the time, Zedekiah, sought out an alliance with Egypt rather than Babylon – a choice which brought disastrous consequences to Jerusalem. (You can read more about this in 2 Kings 25).
After the city’s destruction, Jerusalem’s people were forced into exile in Babylon, where they remained for almost fifty years. When Persia, under the rule of Cyrus the Great, conquered the Babylonians, he permitted the exiles from Jerusalem to return to their homeland. And that is where we meet the people of Judah, now returned to their homeland, today in Isaiah. When the people look around at what remained of Jerusalem and see only rubble and rock, the prophet Isaiah speaks the word of God to them, saying “you shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord . . . you shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate.
In other words, when the people of God return to what seems a destroyed and forsaken land, Isaiah proclaims to them that the city of Jerusalem would be rebuilt and that it would be a place of refuge, a place where “people take refuge under the shadow of God’s wings” as the author of today’s psalm writes.
The point is this – out of devastation, God will always forge refuge and peace. It is not always easy to see, nor does God do this work on our timeline. That is Isaiah’s message for us today.
Tomorrow is both Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as well as Inauguration Day. As we recognize this nation’s most well-known civil rights leader and as a new presidential administration begins its term, we would do well to remind ourselves that whatever humans destroy or deconstruct – whether buildings, relationships, trust, or accountability – God can always reconstruct. In God’s time, nothing ever breaks. In God’s economy, destruction is merely an illusion – it is not even real. What is most real to God is refuge. AMEN.