Page 1 - Comfort My People

Tsothóhrha – The time of coldness
Second Sunday of Advent – December 6, 2020

Comfort My People

Isaiah 40:1-11
2 Peter 3:8-15a

In a year filled with overwhelming sorrow and suffering, we come to December 6 – It is St Nicholas
Day – it is the anniversary of the Polytechnique Massacre … and for so many, grief is still raw …

We who are in mourning find ourselves within a season of anticipation. In this beginning of a new
church year, the Creator grants us the mercy to gather in hope and expectation: God will come among
us. And we tell each other, one day, Creator will bring us into a new home, a new creation.

Do you hear echoes between this passage in Second Peter – “But, in accordance with his promise, we
wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home” – and a passage in Revelation
21 which is often used at funeral services. It opens with: “...I saw a new heaven and a new earth...”
and then we come to the words that speak peace to our hearts: “God will be with them; [God] will
wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no
more, for the first things have passed away.”

God will be with them – see how it resonates with the passage from Isaiah where God instructs Isaiah
to speak: “...Say to the cities … “Here is your God!””
and in that society of shepherds, God offers the people an image of great tenderness and intimacy:
“...God will feed God’s flock like a shepherd; Creator will gather the lambs in loving arms, and carry
them in God’s bosom, and gently lead those with young.”

This passage touches my heart as I think of cradling my little cat in my arms. My own experience helps
me understand the nearness, the tenderness of God’s love.

When God tells Isaiah to speak words of comfort, they are words that will give hope in a time of great
political and economic distress. And we realize that whatever our circumstances, it is always the
Creator’s desire to be close to us and bring blessing.

Peter reminds us that God’s sense of time is not like our experience of time – what might feel like
absence or neglect to some of us is seen by Peter as divine patience, a waiting for all creation to come
to repentance before the return of the Sovereign Christ.

The language is dramatic: the loud noise, the fire that dissolves this wounded, broken creation so that
the new creation can come into being. I wonder if the writer had been inspired by an awareness of
forests being transformed by devastating fire, an event which paradoxically accelerates the growth of
new vegetation, new life.

It is the natural world after all that speaks so eloquently if silently about resurrection.