Past Sermon

Sermon Title: "Comfort At Christmas"
Date: December 4, 2005
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  Isaiah 40:1-11

If you remember watching The Waltons on television two decades ago, you might recall the Baldwin sisters, spinster sisters who lived nearby and had a family secret—“The Recipe”, a drink that they learned to make from “papa.”  The Baldwin sisters were very upright, church-going Christian ladies, but they didn’t mind sharing a nip of “The Recipe” on special occasions.

The Ensley family has a recipe too—for the Ensley Family Egg Nog.  I don’t know how long it’s been around, but when my mother married into the Ensleys in 1945, my grandmother Ensley was making it then, and I gather it was already an established Christmas tradition.  The problem with our recipe is that it was never written down.  I would watch my father make it on Christmas mornings—it was a staple of gift-opening.  (After a few cups, you didn’t care what you received!)  I watched Dad mix together the ingredients and, figuring this ritual would someday be passed on to me, I asked how much of each to add.  “Until it’s like batter,” he replied.  “Batter?  What kind of batter—thick or thin?” I queried.

My father died in 1978, the recipe still being unwritten.  It’s really a very simple mixture of eggs, milk, sugar and nutmeg, which I’ve tinkered with over the years until my version—which some of you look forward to tasting at our annual Christmas open house—tastes very much like my Dad’s.  The secret ingredient in the Ensley family egg nog is what you would expect from an English family that emigrated to the South.  Our egg nog is made not with rum or brandy, but with that exclusively southern drink:  bourbon.

The first Christmas that followed my father’s death, my sisters out here sought to replicate the recipe.  I lived in New York, and they called me on Christmas morning to report that the egg nog was too sweet.  It seems that instead of bourbon, they used another southern specialty, Southern Comfort.  I cannot imagine how sweet it was!

Southern Comfort conjures all sorts of images of easy living, sitting back on the porch in a rocker, sipping on a relaxing drink.  It is a very different image than what the prophet Isaiah had in mind when he proclaimed:  “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God; speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, her penalty is paid.”  The long years of exile in Babylon, from 587 to 539 B.C. are coming to an end.  God is going to do a new thing; he will return to Zion gloriously, in person, coming to feed his flock like a shepherd, to gather the lambs in his arms, and gently lead the mother sheep.  And when we read this passage through the lens of the gospel of Jesus Christ, particularly in this Advent season, we are bound to notice that the comfort of the gospel, in both Old and New Testaments, is rather different from the comfort which is frequently offered in our world today.

Let me state the issue directly.  Which is more comforting:  to say ‘What has just happened doesn’t really matter; it isn’t as bad as you think it is,’ or to say ‘Yes, it is bad; appalling, in fact; and yet there is hope shining through from the other side’?  Now of course it depends on what you’re comforting someone about.  If a child falls off his bike and skins his knee, the sudden pain may make him scream and run to his mother; but she may realize it’s only a scratch, and she can give him a kiss, clean it up, put a band-aid on, and send him off to play again.  It wasn’t as bad as he’d thought.  But if he falls over and breaks his leg, you can’t deal with the problem, or with the pain, by kissing it better.  You have to take it seriously.  That means recognizing that the child has good reason to cry.  You can reassure him that it will get better; but you don’t achieve anything by pretending it isn’t serious.

The Bible offers solid comfort because it takes serious things seriously.  It doesn’t dress them up and pretend they don’t really matter, that it’s all a fuss about nothing.

The man who wrote today’s lesson is one of the most human, warm and compassionate authors in the whole Bible.  In fact, it just may be that he is the kindest author of all the Biblical writers in the whole Bible.  We call him Second Isaiah, and he wrote chapters 40-55 of the book of Isaiah.  These fifteen chapters have been called “The Little Book of Comfort” because the author writes so consolingly, so compassionately, so kindly.  A reader can feel the poetry of his comfort.  His is the only book in the whole Old Testament where you hear those three little words from the lips of God, “I love you.”  In Isaiah 43:4 and following, Second Isaiah writes, “Because you are precious in my eyes, I love you.  I will be with you.”  This author also writes, “Do not be afraid for I will strengthen you and I will hold you up with my right hand.  I have redeemed you.  I know you by name.  I know everyone of your names.  Can a mother forget a suckling child?  Yes, But I the Lord God will not forget you.  Is my arm too short that I, sitting up in heaven, cannot reach down and lift your life up?  Of course not, says the Lord God.  I am like a shepherd who gathers my lambs in my arms, and I will gently lead the mothers of young sheep.”

Second Isaiah—we call him that because he wrote 100-200 years after the Isaiah who wrote the first 39 chapters—must have been a truly compassionate and tender human being.  We don’t have a biography of this particular author.  His personal life remains anonymous, but this author must have known what it meant to comfort his mother and father.  He must have known what it meant to comfort his children.  He must have known what it meant to be comforted by a friend or to comfort his wife.  And so out of his own personal experience of comfort, he then wrote this little book of comfort for the Jews.

The people of God were down and out.  They were tired out.  They were worn out.  They were washed out.  They were exhausted.  There was no energy and purpose to their lives as a result of those forty long years in Babylonian captivity.  God wanted to build these people up again.  They had been punished long enough for their sins against God.  God wanted to lift them up, to pull them out of their tiredness and their exhaustion.  So God sent them the prophet, Second Isaiah, who spoke to the tired and exhausted people saying, “Comfort, comfort my people.  Is my arm too short that I cannot lift you up?”

How do these words apply to you and me today?  How do these words of the prophet Isaiah, “Comfort, comfort my people,” touch your life and mine, especially in this season which is charged with so many emotional highs and lows?

My cousin’s fifty-year-old wife died last Saturday.  What will this Christmas be like for him and their eleven-year-old son?  My sister said they both seemed to be doing well at Friday’s funeral, but what about on Christmas Day?

There are plenty of others who have suffered the deaths of loved ones this year, for which this will be the first Christmas they don’t put up the lights or decorate the tree or go shopping or wrap the presents, the first Christmas their seat will be empty at the table.

The airwaves are filled with lovely love songs about Christmas, stirring up all sorts of cozy and comfort-filled images of home and hearth.  But what about the family who has a sick member this year?  What about the family that had an emotional and wrenching split this year?  What about the families in Mississippi and Louisiana who won’t be celebrating in their homes this year because they have no homes left?

Our God is a God who comforts.  Our God is a God who stretches his hand from heaven to pull us up when we are down.  God comes to us when we are down and out, washed out, tired out, worn out.  God comes down to us and comforts us just by listening to us.  Just by listening to the crying of our aching hearts.

Every morning, noon and night, God is a comforter who listens to our prayers, our aches, our pains, our complaints.  Maybe you save yours for the shower or for the bath.  Yours may be said as you are driving to work.  Or yours may be said as you lie awake at night.  Someone else’s may be said as you sit there alone in your room, listening to the stereo.  But every person here in this sanctuary comes to God with our aches and pains, our trauma and terrible things we are dealing with at the moment.  Aching to God about our kids and problems.  Aching about the death of our mother, our father, our child, our friend.  Aching about our loneliness, the feeling that nobody really loves me or cares about me enough to share my grief.  Aching that I cannot find the right person to date, let alone marry!  Aching that I can’t love my wife or my husband.  Aching about my job.  Aching about not finding work.  Aching about my disease or my loved one’s disease.  Everybody comes crying with their aches to God.  Everyone needs comforting.  And God listens.  God listens to so many aches and pains of the whole world.  God gives no answers.  God has no neat little solutions.  God does not handwrite on the wall what we should do.  God has no magic wand to drive all our problems away and no simple explanations.  But God listens.  How God listens.  God comforts us in our despair by truly listening to the aching cries of our inner hearts.

It is especially meaningful that Jesus named the Holy Spirit, the Comforter.  Jesus said, “I will leave you and when I leave you, I will send the Holy Spirit, the Comforter.”  Jesus gives the name of the living Presence of God, the Comforter.  The Presence of God who is with us now is called the Comforter.  The Greek word for comforter is “paraclatos” and it means to “come to the side of.”  The result of that person coming to your side is to strengthen you.  If you are sick and in your bed, you will call somebody to be at the side of your bed to give you a glass of water and strength.  So the name of God reveals who is he and what he does.  God’s name is Comforter.  He stands beside us, strengthens us, and listens to us.

“Comfort, O comfort my people,” says the Lord God.  We are all in need of God’s miracle of comfort.  God’s very name is Comforter and his very name reveals his purpose, God’s inner desire to comfort and strengthen his children as a mother comforts and strengthens her child.  That is what the prophet Isaiah said:  “God comforts us as a mother comforts her child.”  So are we to be and do for one another.  “Comfort, O comfort, my people,” says the Lord God.  May God’s comfort come to you this Christmas, and every day in which you need it, or can offer it to another.

Resources:

Edward F. Markquart, “The Miracle of Comfort,” Grace Lutheran Church, Des Moines, Washington.

N. T. Wright, “True and False Comfort,” Westminster Abbey, London, England.