Sermon

Isaiah 40:1-11

Scanning the Horizon

I have a friend from Uganda who likes to play different kinds of drums. They remind her, she tells me, of growing up in a Ugandan village, where the beat of the drum would call the people together.

The beat would start out low and slow, and if you weren’t listening for it you might miss it at first. Then, steadily, the beat would grow, gaining persistence and volume. If you didn’t hear it at first you would actually start to feel the steady beat somewhere . . . here, in the middle of your body, where the vibrations would begin to be felt. As the beat grew and grew, louder and more persistent, you would know, she tells me, exactly what the message of the drums was.

Sometimes they sang a message of celebration, of calling the people together to mark a special occasion. Sometimes they beat out important news. Sometimes the drums called out an alarm—that danger was on its way; and sometimes they announced the coming of something good. Whatever the occasion, the drums were the way the village was called together, and the first moment you heard the beat you might look up from whatever you were doing and feel your heart quicken in anticipation. Something was happening, that was for sure.

As a child, she tells me, she would first feel the beat of the drum, then hear it. Her busy hands would stop what they were doing, the attention of the children would be pulled away from whatever activity they were chasing. Their heads would go up, their ears open and listening—in anticipation—for whatever the big news was.

My friend from Uganda likes to hear the beat of the drum in her house in Landover because, when she does, she feels connected over miles and miles to her village in Uganda. Perhaps you do not feel a need to be connected to an African village, but we can’t deny that the beat of a drum reminds us of something basic and elemental about being human, something that stirs our hearts to beat that builds anticipation, that, like the prophet Isaiah called out, comforts us in the deepest part of who we are. If, in this cultured setting in this sophisticated city, you can’t seem to identify with a tribal beat, consider the impact of the rock beats of the fifties, sixties and seventies in your life. There’s something about a beat that touches the deepest part of who we are.

In the culture in which I grew up, in Hawaii, drums were made out of hollow, dried out gourds. And, if you are down here in the Penn Quarter most afternoons, well, you’ll even see a very talented percussionist playing assorted plastic garbage cans. It’s a physiological fact that rhythm is directly and intricately related to emotion, that hearing a beat sparks our attention and builds our anticipation. And, so, how appropriate it is to hear the beat of a drum on this Sunday when we are scanning the horizons of our lives, looking for the coming of God to this world, waiting for the advent of peace.

This morning the drums have played to call us back for just a moment to some basic form of comfort. The beat is building anticipation in your heart for the coming of the very thing that will heal us, will heal our world.

This anticipation for the coming of healing, peace, for the coming of God was the very basic human need described by the prophet Isaiah in this morning’s Old Testament passage. Israel had heard over and over from the prophets this thunderous message of doom and gloom, of repent or you’ll be sorry.

From his vantage point in this passage, however, Isaiah looked out over the people of Israel and saw a dejected, unhappy crowd, a people whose eyes were trained on the ground, whose wills were beaten into submission. They were a people in exile, living every day the consequences of their disobedience. They were unhappy, discontented; their surroundings were unfamiliar.

Perhaps this is why Isaiah begins this portion of his writings with what sounds . . . like the steady, comforting beat of a drum, the constant call to look to the horizon and notice the coming of a Savior.

A SERMONWRITER SUBSCRIBER SAYS: “You do good work for our Lord! I appreciate you, and would be struggling without your help!! may God continue to bless you and your ministry to frantic preachers like me. :-))”

Last Saturday night I had the opportunity to sit and hold Nancy and John Thayer’s precious new grandson, Charlie. He’s just over a month old and sweet as can be. There’s something about holding a little new life close to your heart like that that makes you intensely and inexplicably happy. But poor Charlie . . . as I held him, even little guy that he is, he could sense that something was not right, that the exact fit of baby to mommy, to source of comfort and food, just was not there. He certainly could not have explained it, but he knew. I could tell he knew, of course, because he would squirm around in my arms, trying desperately to get comfortable. Eventually, you know what happened . . . he let us all know that his discontent was unacceptable.

Unlike Nancy Renfrow, whose favorite thing ever is to visit the pediatric floor at Georgetown University Hospital and sit for hours holding babies, I am not so enamored with the idea in general. Sure, I love to smell their sweet skin and feel the promise of their little bodies asleep without any of the cares of human living you and I carry around. But there’s something about trying to comfort a baby who knows his mom is in the general vicinity; he just doesn’t seem to be satisfied with just anyone.

Little as they are, they know the arms of their mothers, and Charlie, while I am sure he had great respect for my rocking and soothing experience, he really, REALLY just wanted his Mom, Carrie. When she saw his distress Carrie began to move across the room, calling out comfort to little Charlie. Sure enough, as soon as he heard her voice and was deposited in Carrie’s arms, the furrow in his brow smoothed, his body relaxed and that mouth that was just moments before screaming in protest suddenly relaxed into that age-old rhythm of sucking in contentment.

Just observing baby Charlie the other night reminded me that hearing a rhythm may arguably be our first awareness of the sense of hearing, one that we experience in the womb as we learn to listen and be comforted by the beating of our mother’s heart. The sounds of the drums might remind us of the basic need each of us has to reconnect with the source of our very life—Isaiah would say, with God, our comforter, our hope . . . our peace.

It was Isaiah’s strategy in the passage we read this morning to call the Israelites’ collective memory back to wandering and deserts, to winding paths and far-off horizons. As he spoke about highways in the desert, they could immediately picture a ragtag group of nomads, making their way through miles of unfamiliar territory, led by the beat of the tribal drum and the ring of Miriam’s tambourine.

Upon hearing the words of Isaiah, “Make a level highway in the desert for our God” (v. 3), of course, their minds would immediately return to stories of the whole people of Israel wandering for 40 years over a course of only about 300 miles, unable to find any path that was even close to straight and instead wandering around and around, this way and that, in and out of trouble, unable to see any straight path or notice anything hopeful up ahead on the horizon. They were inconsolable, unable to look up from the trudging, conflict-filled lives they lived, unable to recognize their comforter, their peace . . . just up ahead, appearing very soon on the horizon.

Discontented, disgruntled people of Israel . . . a people whose brows were furrowed with trouble, who could not see much more than what was right around them, right in front of them . . . well, Isaiah told them, look up! Your comforter is on the way! Isaiah seemed to be saying that they needed only look up, to scan the horizon of their lives, to recognize the drumbeat of anticipation within and to listen to their hunger to see the coming of God.

Isaiah was saying that underneath all the trappings of Hebrew identity, underneath the need for sovereignty and political power, for position and things, for respect and credibility, there lay in the lives of the Israelites the very essential, basic need for God, the one who can be the truest comforter. Perhaps Isaiah would notice some similarities between the Israelites, a people overburdened with grief, hopelessness and conflict, and ourselves. In this world filled with pain and conflict, in our world where it seems from time to time that we cannot raise our eyes to the horizon to scan the far-off vista in anticipation of the coming of God, Isaiah would call us to first feel the beat of the drum, then hear it; to answer its call to anticipation by lifting our eyes to the horizon and taking note of all the signs that God is on the way.

Like the longing of a child for a mother, there is something deep inside you and me that longs for the coming of God to this world, to our lives. We long for release from the conflicts and anxiety of our human living; we long for a peace we cannot understand or manufacture, yet in the deepest part of our bones we desperately need. We long for God to appear on the horizon of our lives, to be born in us just one more time, to appear as Isaiah promised, to be the shepherd of our war-torn humanity, to gather us close, like a soothing mother, and to heal our wounds.

Yes, if you listen closely, you’ll hear the desperation in Isaiah’s plea to the people of Israel—to us—on this cold morning of Advent waiting: “Go up to a high mountain . . . look ahead, herald good tidings, Behold, your God!”

Can you feel the anticipation? Do you know that despite the circumstances around you, that God is on the way? Sit for a moment and listen for the faint drum beat right beneath your rib cage. Scan the horizon of your life for a puff of dust, for a hint of the future, for just the faintest beat, beat, beat, the very first suggestion that something you have been waiting for your whole life, something that has the power to heal you and make you whole, well, it is on the way.

This week, in the crazy chaos of our human life, we may be tempted to trudge through existence, one step at a time, never looking toward what is ahead. Listen this morning to the beat of the drum; listen to the message of the prophet. Scan the horizon in anticipation; God is on the way. Can you hear it?

Scripture quotations from the World English Bible.