Sermon on Isaiah 40, 1-11
By Rolf Scheider[This sermon presented on June 22, 2014 in the Berlin cathedral is translated from the German on the Internet, www.academia.edu. Rolf Scheider is a pastor and theologian.]
Linguist researchers tell us the Indo-Germanic root of the words “Trost” (comfort) and “Treue” (faithfulness) is the same. The English word trust reminds us of this. Whoever hasn’t completely lost trust trusts in the meaning of his/her life… Our intelligence and our reason rest on a basic feeling. The Berlin theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher called this feeling the “sense of simple dependence.” We know we depend on others. No one created himself. We go to an uncertain future with confident courage. No one knows what diagnosis threatens at our next doctor’s visit. We design the future hopefully. Psychologists speak of a “primal trust” as a prerequisite for a healthy psychosocial development.
Persons who suffer under depressions know how hard life is when trust is lost.
Encouragement from outside only deepens the isolation. Well-meaning attempts at comfort can only be interpreted as empty promises. A life without reliable relations is desolate. The social ideal of the self-confident venturous and independent contradicts the fact that people are relational beings. We flourish when people are around us whom we can trust or rely – and we atrophy in isolation. In Woody Allen’s famous film “Manhattan.” Young Tracy admonishes the paranoid-hypochondriac-desperate Isaac played by Allen himself in his inimitable way: “You have to have a little faith in people!”
Soccer fans these days show their needs of dependence and membership in an unconcealed way. The greater the human band surrounding the fan, the greater the feeling of being lifted up. The community always has comforting effects whether one’s team loses or wins. Fear narrows us physically and depresses us; comfort expands and relieves. We can make this experience in community with others. There are also comforters who can generate this physical feeling…
Comfort is a staple or necessity of life like water and bread. Whoever doesn’t have water dies of thirst. Whoever doesn’t have bread dies of hunger. Whoever has no comfort despairs. The need for comfort is huge – and the danger of only being put-off is high. Thus the question is pressing: How do we experience comfort? Can we find an answer in our sermon text?
“Comfort, comfort my people!” But how? Comfort is now dispensed like a medicine… Only someone whom we trust can comfort. Trust is earned and can be lost…
Theologians are quick to defend God against the complaints of suffering persons… The psalms are full of complaints and accusations of God. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus on the cross spoke this verse from the 22nd Psalm…
Comfort lies in the relation to God. What I suffer is part of God’s action, an unintelligible, worrying and dark action, the action of a hidden God – but still the action of God and not a blind fate.
Comfort my people! says your God. The theme of the covenant between God and a person sounds powerful, a relation in which God – contrary to all appearance – is faithful to his people. A relation with God is not a harmless relation! God is a faithful God – and also a hidden God who veils his face.
Because God is a God in relation, he depends on our entering in relation with him… God often encounters persons in the wilderness. This is an experience that pervades Holy Scripture. We find God in the deserts and wildernesses of our life, not in the temple –under certain prerequisites. In the deserts and wildernesses of our life, one can also meet the horror vacuii of our ruthless, unscrupulous narcissism. One must prepare for the God-encounter. Obstacles must be removed. The question is important: What are the mountains, cliffs and deep valleys in my life that stand in the way of an encounter with God? What blocks my view of the splendor of his glory?
Mountains of self-satisfied arrogance and deep valleys of desolation can make us blind that God under all circumstances wants to be a God in relation – and a Comforter. The Holy Spirit is called the Paraclite and Comforter in the Christian tradition. The Holy Spirit is that dimension of the divine Trinity that is interwoven most closely with the human spirit and human history. The Holy Spirit works in, with and among people. The Holy Spirit inspires and enthuses us.
It was not an accident that Martin Luther King at the end of his 1963 legendary “I have a dream” address emphasized verses 2 and 3 from the 40th chapter of Isaiah. He said: “I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted and every hill and mountain shall be brought low.” He also quoted the third verse and continued: “The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.” “This is our hoper… With this faith we will be able to work together, pray together, struggle together, go to jail together and stand up for freedom together, knowing we will be free one day.” That was a consoling speech with an absolutely revolutionary effect, a powerful encouragement to stand up together for the vision of a world pleasing to God.
The alternative to such a moving and encouraging relation with God is the Stoic acceptance of radical relationlessness in death. The third part of our sermon text discusses this. It begins with “A voice says: Preach!” And the skeptical question is “What should be preached? That God will punish twice as hard? That the suffering in this world cries to heaven? That we are like dust in the cosmos – transitory, powerless and meaningless – like grass. What should one say given this fact? That grass will grow over the history of every one of us? That our social and cultural achievements will not make any difference? How can a person avoid becoming cynical?
What should be proclaimed? What are the glad tidings? The answer of the prophet Isaiah is: “The Word of our God is everlasting!” The word God means hope that human life is not only a chain of accidents and cruelties. The prophet believes God’s word created the world as a good world. He encourages us to rise up against lovelessness and injustice in God’s name and not simply accept them. Do not fear believing in a better world and championing a better world. That is the lived gospel, the lived glad tidings.
Not despairing is not simple given the desolation of this world. Doing more than living to die is not simple. Not accepting relationlessness is not simple. Not taking as much as possible from this life and then saying “After me, the flood” is not simple.
One’s life must be set in an eternity dimension to escape this cynicism… The infinite can appear in the finite. God’s philanthropy is also revealed in all friendliness between people; the actions of the Savior are hidden in every loving, helpful gesture.
Whoever understands one’s own life as a moment of God’s eternity is shocked on one side by the greatness and seriousness of this relation and on the other side can master everyday challenges much more composed and unagitated. The faith that we are not lost but raised up in God’s eternity gives us a long breath. Life in a God-relation is imminent, not the radical relationlessness of death. The fear of relationlessness melts away in view of the God beholding us, a God whom Isaiah comparers with a good shepherd.
Many communities today celebrate the birth of John the Baptist. So the Sunday after the shortest night of the year becomes a little Advent feast in the middle of the summer. But we expect more for our life and for this world tan the recurring becoming and passing away, as the endless coming and going of mid-summer nights and Christmas evenings. We are not put off with the cheap comfort of a faith in the powers of nature. We believe in a God who has a very special relation and history with e very individual and with his people, a God enamored of people so they can be permanently comforted. That is the gospel of the holy scriptures of Jews and Christians.
Blessed be God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. May the Father of mercy and the God of all comfort be our comfort in all our distress (2 Cor 1,3f). Amen
Sermon on Romans 8, 14-17
By Rolf Schieder[This sermon presented on August 28, 2010 in the Berlin cathedral is translated abridged from the German on the Internet, www.academia.edu.]
Grace be with you and peace from him who is, who was and who will be. Amen/
There is a cult around the child, not only in Christian proclamation… As beautiful as it is to be a little prince or a little princess for a while, children must gradually learn they are
not the center of the world in the long run and cannot expect an all-round c are from others.
The childhood emphasized in our sermon text has nothing to do with a cult around the child. Romantic ideas of childhood are not encouraged. Being God’s child cannot be gained in a natural-biological way. Everyone is not God’s child. “Whoever is led by God’s Spirit is God’s child!” Those who are not led by God’s Spirit cannot call themselves God’s children… We first become God’s children in the sense of the Apostle Paul as we understand ourselves as brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, the first Son of God and imitate his way of life.
As Adam’s ancestors, we are God’s creatures but rebel against being God’s children. We are God’s creatures who like Adam and Eve want to be like God out of our strength, creators of our own life and our own happiness, autonomous and neither accountable nor giving thanks to anyone…
The spirit of human children today is marked by anxiety and dependence. God’s children are defined by freedom and hope. The English translation contrasts the “spirit of adoption” to the “spirit of dependence,” not the child and the slave. We are God’s children in that God adopts us; he accepts us and liberates us from false dependence and captivity…
The term adoption calls attention to an important characteristic of God’s children; we are not God’s children from birth… Whoever is baptized becomes Jesus Christ’s sister or brother and part of God’s family…
Baptism is both an offer and a task... Every baptized German has a double citizenship. Through birth or naturalization, we are citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany; as baptized, we are citizens of God’s reign. Baptism is something like a passport; it opens up new creative spaces and gives me a feeling of being sheltered. In case of conflict, the biblical rule is that we have to obey God more than man. The demand of some political commentators that the German Basic Law is the standard of all religious rules is clearly unbiblical.
While from God’s side, the relation to his children is stable and permanent, we persons are much less reliable toward God… When God’s Spirit lifts us, we feel God’s presence..
The last verse of our sermon text emphasizes that being God’s child has little to do with a romantic picture of being a child. We are not only God’s children; we are God’s heirs.