The Glory of the Lord Shall be Revealed
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
March 31, 2002 – Easter Sunday

Reading: Isaiah 40: 1-11

Anthem: “And the Glory of the Lord” from Handel’s Messiah

	What are we to do with these beautiful uplifting words from Isaiah on this Easter morning when the world revealed to us seems to show not the Glory of the Lord but rather news from the Middle East of death and destruction and a downward spiral into violence?   I can’t claim to know the answer, but I wrestle with the text Handel chose this morning in the belief that if we understand it in its context we can find reason for hope, no matter what our own individual beliefs are about anything we might call God. 
	According to St. Thomas Aquinas, we know everything that we know through two faculties: reason and revelation. Reason is the God-given power to make meaning out of the information we take in through our senses.  Revelation is the information that God has decided to show or tell us directly, in classical Judaism and Christianity, through appearances and messages as related in the Bible.  The Enlightenment enthroned reason as superior to revelation, and this is the origin of our modern scientific world view, which says I won’t believe in anything I can’t prove.  Indeed a grossly simplified view of the struggle between the scientific world view and the various fundamentalisms of the world is fundamentalism’s insistence that revelation as contained in the Bible or the Qu’ran still trumps reason.  Religious liberals, on the other hand, have since the eighteenth century taken a critical approach to sacred texts, considering them as a human invention, not as the authoritative and immutable word of God.  Yet while we narrow the scope of biblical revelation, we expand the concept of revelation to include the book of nature as well as all of human experience, as I hope to show before I finish talking this morning.
	Let’s start with the text that Handel worked with in several sections of the Messiah, Isaiah 40, which I read a few moments ago.  Those of you who are familiar with the Messiah probably recognized several passages other than the one we sang.   So the first question we should ask is, if the Messiah is about Jesus, why does Handel use texts from the Hebrew Bible, which Christians refer to as the Old Testament?  The answer is that these particular passages from Isaiah are what we call proof texts – they are quoted by not one but all four writers of the accepted Gospels as proof that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.
Let me set out a timeline here: I’m going to be talking about three distinct periods. The first is the Exodus of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, which is described in the first five books of the Bible, which Jews refer to as the Torah.  The second period is the period in which Isaiah writes, which as we shall see is actually two periods in the eighth and sixth Centuries Before the Common Era.  And the third  will be the period which concerns the life and ministry  of Jesus at about 30 A.D. 
	Now, to get back to proof texts.  To evaluate the status as proof texts, we need to understand a little more about what Isaiah meant by saying  “then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.”  This may sound to modern ears like a rather grand but abstract notion.  To the readers of the Hebrew Bible, however, it had a very specific meaning.  The phrase “the glory of the Lord” refers to the physical appearance of Yahweh when he was leading the people of Israel through the Sinai desert in the Torah.  As I discussed a few weeks ago, the Torah describes how God had formed a covenant with the people of Israel.  The intimacy of the covenant is confirmed by Isaiah’s possessive pronouns at the beginning of the passage: “Comfort my people says your God.”	
	In the Torah, God is both the deity and the ruler of the Israelites.  Though no ordinary mortal could look upon God and live, he appeared to the people as an envelope of light which in the daytime was associated with a pillar of cloud and in the nighttime was associated with a pillar of fire.  This light envelope is referred to in the Book of Exodus as the glory of God.   It is what scholars refer to as a theophany, an appearance of God.
	The Torah was written several centuries before the major prophets such as Isaiah, but it is the background against which they wrote.  So when Isaiah says, “the Glory of the Lord shall be revealed,” he is saying that God will come amongst us and be visible as he was to our ancestors wandering in the desert of Sinai.
	In the major Prophets there are several theophanies – Ezekiel has a particularly grand an detailed one – and in each the theophany, is used to establish the authority of the prophet to speak in God’s name.  “For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”  This authority points up a central problem with the idea of revelation.  There were many false prophets in Biblical times, as there are now, and who is to say which of them is the authentic voice of God?  Who speaks for God and how do we know?
	This problem of authority confronted the early Christian church, which attempted to solve it by establishing a canon or set of texts which were authoritative and saying that revelation had been sealed in those texts.  This didn’t sit so well with everyone: there was a group in the Second Century called the Montanists who claimed to be still receiving revelations from God.  The Orthodox dealt with them by declaring them heretics.  Orthodox Christianity held that revelation is sealed in the authoritative texts, as did orthodox Islam four centuries later.  Those who claimed to have new revelations, such as Joan of Arc in France or Anne Hutchison in Puritan New England or  Joseph Smith in 1830s America had to do so outside of orthodoxy.  Joan was burned at the stake, Hutchison had to move to Rhode Island and Joseph Smith had to move all the way out to Utah to found the Mormon religion.
	That such questions of the source and authority of revelation are very much alive today is demonstrated by a controversy I have become involved in.  I joined a protest demonstration in Alabama earlier this month against a crassly homophobic opinion written by that state’s Chief Justice in February.  But it was only later, when I read the opinion, that I realized how scary Judge Roy Moore really is, not just because of his obvious homophobia, but because of his willingness to explicitly cite divine revelation as a basis for judicial decision in a n American state.  Here are a couple of choice paragraphs:
“Natural law forms the basis of the common law.  Natural law is the law of nature and of nature's God as understood by men through reason, but aided by direct revelation found in the Holy Scriptures:
"The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law, and they are to be found only in the Holy Scriptures. These precepts, when revealed, are found upon comparison to be really a part of the original law of nature, as they tend in all their consequences to man's felicity.”
He then goes on to cite the tired old passage from Leviticus which has been used to condemn same-sex relations among males for generations.   If I could say something to him,  I would want to say this: Judge Moore, besides the obvious profound violation of the First Amendment represented by this opinion, revelation is indeed a tricky business.  Let’s take this passage from Isaiah that we have been considering here this morning.  Isaiah talks about the glory of the Lord and thus is trying to establish his authority to prophesy, to establish that the God who is talking to him is the same God who led the Israelites through the desert in a pillar of cloud and fire.  The Gospel writers, in turn, use Isaiah to show that John the Baptist, living in the year 30 of the common era, was foretold by the Hebrew prophet living 5 or 600 years before.  
	But what happens, Judge Moore, if we apply our God-given reason to this revelation?   We find that Biblical scholars have concluded that the passage the Gospel writers cite didn’t apply to a Messiah at all, but to the end of the period we call the Babylonian captivity.  
	Bear with me for a little history here. In 597 BC,  King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon carried off most of the nobility and artisans of Israel and in 586 he destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon, which had been the focus of Jewish ritual and was considered the place where God lived.  This Babylonian Captivity one of the pivotal epochs in the history of the Jewish people, only came to an end when Babylon fell to the forces of Cyrus of Persia on October 29, 539 B.C.E., and the Jews were allowed to return to Palestine, though many of them went elsewhere, beginning the Jewish diaspora. 
	The book we call Isaiah, the scholars tell us, is at least two books written in very different times two centuries apart.  The prophet called Isaiah lived from 742 to 701 B.C.E.  His writings occupy Chapters 1-39 of the Book of Isaiah.  The writing starting at chapter 40 is the work of at least one and possibly two other different writers.  The passage we study today, which the Gospel writers and Handel pick out as proof texts for Jesus’ Messiahship, begins this so-called Second Isaiah.
	A key difference between First Isaiah and Second Isaiah is that the former was written before the Babylonian Captivity and the second was written just as it is about to come to an end. 
	Thus the events described in Isaaiah 40 are a second Exodus, a second freeing of the children of Israel from foreign servitude, and it is no wonder that Second Isaiah uses the imagery of the first Exodus to describe it.  The glory of the Lord shall be revealed. He makes quite explicit at the end of Chapter 44 that he is talking about the liberation of Israel by Cyrus, for he has God say of Cyrus by name“ he is my shepherd and he shall carry out my purposes.”
	In other words, it is clear in historical context that the passage we are studying here in Isaiah 40 does not look forward to deliverance by a Messiah five centuries in the future, but to deliverance by a foreign monarch which has just happened.  Thus the Gospel writers wrench the text completely out of context when they cite Isaiah as proof for the Messiahship of Jesus.  Such a misuse of precedent would get any lawyer thrown out of court, maybe even Judge Moore’s.
	But to say that Biblical passages can be misused to attempt to prove Jesus’s divinity or the supposed evils of homosexuality is not to say that they have no worth as records of the divine acting among us.  The trick is what we learn from them.  And what we learn from them depends on how open we are to learning from them, to hearing the voice of the divine, how open our eyes are to seeing the divine image.
	In doing so, we don’t put aside our reason, and we now know that our reason includes our emotions.   As we weep for the escalation of violence, the words of this passage speak to our hearts: Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.  Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her, that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.  
	Revelation happens all the time if you are ready to find it.  It happens even to militant atheists, agnostics, humanists, mystic naturalists.  Emerson wrote
“The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul.  In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve.  Man is a stream whose source is hidden.  Our being is descending into us from we know not whence.... I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.”
	Each of us has many sources which made us who we are today.  It is not necessary to call any of them God, but it is possible to do so.  We get our DNA from our parents, as well as a lot of our psychological orientation to the world.  We get our voices, our language,  culture and ideas from all the influences we had growing up and still have.  On a chemical level, the atoms in our bodies came from the stars.  We are connected to an unbelievably delicate and intricate web of all being stretching outward and upward in space and backward and forward in time.  One definition of revelation is the mindfulness of these connections.
	I was made aware of this earlier this week.  My wife Jacqueline learned to play piano from her grandmother, a classical pianist in Pittsburgh, and she inherited her grandmother’s Steinway baby grand, but it was in bad shape when it arrived from Pittsburgh four years ago.  She committed it to the tender mercies of a fine piano rebuilder on Martha’s Vineyard, and earlier this week we visited the renewed instrument.  As she sat down at the keyboard, she had to choke back tears thinking of her grandmother, her death, and all the difficulties of her childhood.  As she began to play the sound was pure velvet; it was better than any piano I had ever heard and I realized that she was connecting to her past on many levels, was connecting to who she had been, who her grandmother had been and through her to all the piano students and teachers through the generations.  But she was also connecting to the present and to the future, to the pianist she could be with this beautifully renovated instrument.
	This was an Easter omen for me, an example of resurrection which stitched together the dead and the living, the past and the present and the future, which rolled the stone away from a heart entombed and revealed the living spirit singing as never before.
	My friends, as Samuel Longfellow’s great hymn says, revelation is not sealed.  We may reject Isaiah’s great words as proof that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, the Anointed One, the Messiah, and still recognize in them a divinely inspired celebration of release from bondage.  The phrase “The glory of the Lord” is the ancient equivalent of the special effects in today’s films – it makes you sit up and take notice, and remember.  
	Moreover, even the illogical misuse of the Isaiah text may be seen as divinely inspired. For it may be that if the Gospel writers had not strained so to convince their first-century readers that Jesus was the prophesied Messiah, his life and ministry may have simply been another ancient religious sect that died out.  We hear little today of the Zoroastrians, the Essenes, the cult of Isis, the classic Greek and Roman Pantheons.  Christianity, for all its ills and corruptions, at least has lasted over the centuries as a vehicle whereby we can attempt to discern the true revelations of Jesus.
	I am inclined to look for those revelations not in Jesus’ death or resurrection, not in any atonement this act may have worked for sins I have committed or am going to commit two millennia later, but in his life and his teachings.  And what I find in the life of Jesus, the glory of the Lord that is there revealed, is a radical acceptance of all people, and a willingness to put this principle above all self-interest.  What I see most fundamentally revealed is a love for humanity.
	It is a revelation directly counter to the homophobic revelation that Judge Moore reads.  It is a revelation which counters the hostility of terrorists, but commands us to learn the sources of that hostility. It is a revelation which demands a love for our worst enemies, for the terrorists, the sexual molesters, the serial murderers, and closer to home, our parents, children, spouses and friends from whom we are estranged. It is a revelation which counsels a radical love for the earth and concern for its future.  
	The revelation I see is a revelation of a future which can be, which is based on an international rule of law, with our country acting not as the world’s bully or the world’s cop, but as one of a number of cooperating nations determined to settle disputes with peace and justice.  But this revelation, which all flesh can see together, is not based on the authority of any particular view of God, but on our realization of our common humanity.   It is this revelation which  can lead us out of the Babylonian captivity into a new era of peace, though that era seems at the moment as out of reach as it must have for the Israelites in 550 B.C.E.
	God, or the ground of our being, or the fount of our blessings, the source, is revealed to us anew at every turning in the road.   The revelations of the Bible are valid for their place and their time, but we must consider the outlook and the histories of the humans who recorded them.  It will not do to consider them frozen for all times and all places, for indeed the most unchanging aspect fo the world is change.
	God herself is not eternal and unchanging, but is the very force which ever generates  novelty, which stands beside us to help us turn the possibilities of this moment into the actuality of the next.  We stand perpetually on the cusp of a breaking wave and in the headlong rush of one instant into another it is God who anchors us in the determinations of the past and yet clears the options for the transformations of the future.  
	Revelations are not always accompanied by special effects.  We do not always see an envelope of light emanating from a pillar of fire or of cloud. Sometimes the glory of the lord is the refraction of the sun through ice dripping off a pine-tree.  Sometimes the glory of the lord is a field of new-fallen snow.  Sometimes it is the sound of a peeper or the sight of a crocus pushing through the soil.  Sometimes it is a friend weeping on your shoulder.  
	Revelation is not all sweetness and light either.  Revelation is sometimes looking into the worst that life has to offer.  Revelation is to be found in the reality of death, of loneliness, of pain, of separation, in the dark nights of the soul. It is to be found in acts of war and destruction, for in most conflicts the actors have to realize the futility of violence before they can turn towards peace.
	Revelation did not stop with Moses, it did not stop with Isaiah, it did not stop with John the Baptist or with Jesus of Nazareth or with the apocalyptos, which we know as the Book of Revelation.  The glory of the Lord has been revealed in all these places, but God did not shut up 2000 years ago.  I have faith, my friends,  that the Glory of the Lord, whoever the Lord may be for you, is being revealed now and will continue to be revealed in the future.  As Jesus said, Let those who have eyes see, and those who have ears hear.  
Amen.