This past Friday I attended the second of four training sessions at a local hopsice. The training is for churches to better offer care to individuals and families as they journey through illness, the end of life, and grief.
The ice-breaker question that began our session was this prompt: “Before I die, I . . . ____________ [fill in the blank.]
We all wrote our answers on sticky notes and posted them for all to see. There were things I expected like – crossing off bucket list items, leaving the world a better place, making amends. But one theme kept popping out again and again on the white board covered in sticky notes.
People simply wanted just to have the chance to tell those they cared about how much they love them.
Most of the sticky notes included nothing practical, no lists to check off, or grand gestures. Just the hope that before they died, they would be able to simply tell their beloveds, one more time, how much they loved them.
The voice from Isaiah 62 brims with love. “For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,” it booms, “and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until her righteousness shines out like the dawn, and her salvation blazes like a torch.”
It’s not immediately clear whether this voice is God’s voice… announcing to a people that has been through the Assyrian onslaught, the Babylonian exile and now life having returned to a shattered land. Or is voice the voice of God’s anointed one? A special prophet attuned the persistent call of love, a sentinel who stands upon the city wall, knowing full well the haunted history that those walls have borne, a voice who still dares to joyfully declare what God is still doing here.
Whether the voice is the Divine or Divinely-Inspired I hope that we hear with clarity how much God delights in God’s people.
The passage uses feminine language for Jerusalem, Zion, as a city. We’re told that Jerusalem used to be called “Forsaken” and “Desolate.”
Earlier in Isaiah the devastation that the people of God have endured is described vividly, with words we that evoke the terror of fires in Southern California and the Gaza peninsula laid to rubble by bombs:
“Your country is deserted, your cities burned with fire; Your land – strangers are devouring it in plain sight. It’s a wasteland, as when foreigners raid. Daughter Zion is left like a small shelter in a vineyard, like a hut in a cucumber field, like a city besieged.” (Isaiah 1:7-8)
In contrast to this destruction, in Isaiah 62 – the Land of Zion, the City of Jerusalem is being married to God’s self. And being bestowed with a new name in a ceremony of joy. In contrast to the forsakenness it had known when armies pillaged and fire raged, God will speak over her a new name – “My Delight is in Her.” In contrast to the Desolation where apathy and greed reigned, her new name will be “Married.”
Of course – the language of marriage can be thorny.
Sometimes by portraying God in masculine language and the land and the people as feminine – the potential for abuse is written into the text and we as readers find it all too easy to normalize the unhealthy power imbalances of our own lives. Yet what this text returns to is joy, delight, and love as the reason for God’s unending commitment and fidelity to God’s people.
“For the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married… and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.”
The heart of a marriage ceremony are those fragile words of love, spoken or quietly croaked out with emotion, where two people voice their love and fidelity for each other. They publicly proclaim their delight. And then the whole community can witness and rejoice and share in the gift of this love together.
What matters in the end – is that the word of love is spoken and heard. You are beloved. My delight is in you, says our God.
In our gospel story from John 2 – we get no mention of who is actually getting married or what commitments are being made – all the action comes at the extended wedding party.
The words that I want us to pay attention to are those that Mary, mother of Jesus, speaks. She is the prophet at this wedding banquet, the one who “will not keep silent,” but is always raising her voice to announce to others, the reality of need and presence of God’s abundant love. By reminding Jesus who he is, the whole wedding party and us reading later, get to experience the abundance of God’s love in Christ.
First she notices a need and does something about it. Jesus, she says, “They don’t have any wine.” What she says is a prayer, a prophetic utterance, noticing and lifting up the social shame of this hospitality faux paux, so that the party might continue.
When Jesus distances himself from her – she persists and tells the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” She knows, or at least has a hunch, about who Jesus is as the Incarnate Word of God, and so she opens her mouth, interjecting that the best anyone could do in this situation is to pay attention and follow her son, God’s son. She would not keep silent and she would not rest until she saw Jesus reveal God’s salvation to all, that day at the wedding party.
Everyone got to experience the first sign of God’s grace in Jesus – a grace that tastes likes wine, hundreds of bottles worth of the very best wine, so that the party could keep going and no one left embarrassed.
Where have you experienced something of the love and delight of God that you can’t help but speak up about? What great need or unspoken social ache have you noticed that you must say something about? What are those places that only seem to be called by the names Desolate or Forsaken or Violent or Not Worth It? What is the new name of love and delight and unbreaking commitment that God is calling you to speak over those places?
In Isaiah and in John – there is no fear of scarcity, there is no corrosive looking over the shoulder of comparison, there is only the delight of love, only the sounds of rejoicing at what God has done, is doing and will do.
This love sounds like families filling and rebuilding homes that had once been ransacked and bombed. This love sounds like the murmurs of communities strategizing resilience in a climate-changed world. This love sounds like the splash of another glass of wine and people talking just a little bit too loudly with the glow of a love that has finally been spoken out loud.
Each of you has some story of God’s love that I hope you will dare to share so we all might rejoice with you. Each of you has noticed some need, simple or profound, that I hope you will never be silent about.
God rejoices and delights in each of us, in all of us, and I pray that we will not keep silent.