sermon excerpts: "A Promise of Strength"

The following story actually took place in a midwestern American home: one night, the channel on the baby monitor got switched so the receiver wasn’t picking up noises from the baby’s room. This event wasn’t discovered until one of the parents, happened to walk past the stairs and heard the baby screaming and wailing. They ran up to get her, to comfort and console her. The older brother comes toddling in, awakened by the commotion, and sweetly joins in the comfort huddle. He gently strokes her hair and calmly repeats, “It’s OK, you just had some hotus. It’s OK, it was only hotus.”

The father, rather perplexed, asked, “What is hotus?”

To which he replied, very matter-of-factly, “it’s when you’re alone and crying and no one comes to pick you up.”

That is hotus. And while it’s amazingly heartbreaking to think that a toddler has the capacity to put such a concept into his vocabulary, it puts the Israelite experience of exile into perspective. Isaiah speaks to the people in a difficult time of conquest, exile and uncertainty. The Israelite faithful have felt abandoned while the Babylonians ran roughshod over their lands and homes and separated their families.

They are crying and alone and no one is there to pick them up. But what the Israelite people and to figure out, and what our young theologian has yet to learn, is that a life of faith does not grant immunity or escape from the terrors and trials of the world. Life is big, and beyond us, and that can be frightening to think of all the forces of nature, politics and economy sweeping along with, or without us.

Even as Isaiah offers poetic words of reminder that God’s power is above all of ours, that the middling efforts of humanity will fade and vanish, we find also the promise of strength – to overcome, persist and endure. We will find renewal and energy and hope, we will not faint nor grow weary, mounted as if on eagle’s wings.

In baptism, in our faith, we commit our life to a wider family, recognizing the work of God’s hand in those that are around us: family, friends, community. These bonds transcend the distances of geography and history, that as members of God's family, we join the story of this congregation and it becomes a part of us as much as we become a part of it.

But we belong to something bigger and greater than even life – God’s care and promise for us that justice will be done, the powerless will grow strong and that we are known and cherished. Hotus will be vanquished, our understanding and sense that we are alone and forgotten will be proven wrong. We are not alone. We live in God’s world. Thanks be to God.