O Beulah Land!

St. Mary’s Mohegan Lake, New York

 

O BEULAH LAND! [1]

 

Sermon by Fleming Rutledge                            Second Sunday after the Epiphany 2007

 

Text: Isaiah 62:1-5

 

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Almost forty years ago, I used to go regularly to a dry cleaner in Port Chester where an elderly woman from somewhere down South occasionally worked. One day I asked her what her name was. She cast her eyes down and said, “Beulah.” I was about to say, “That’s a wonderful name,” but she spoke first, saying in a low voice as if she were ashamed, “It’s an old country name.” She did not know what it meant, and I was not confident enough in my knowledge of the Old Testament to tell her. I have thought of her a hundred times, wishing that I could see her again and tell her that her name is glorious.

 

The main character in Hawthorne’s novel, The House of Seven Gables, is named Hepzibah Pyncheon. Those were the days, when everyone knew the Bible through and through and named their children from it. Anyone walking through a nineteenth century cemetery will see Obadiahs and Calebs and Tabithas by the score. These Americans read only one Bible, the King James Version; and their version of the 62^nd chapter of Isaiah said this:

 

Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married.

 

It’s really important to understand the context of these words. They were written by a prophet of Israel whose people were utterly downcast and despairing. The Israelites had been conquered, humiliated, and carried off captive by the Babylonians. They were hauled away to mighty Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) where the colossal Babylonian gods looked scornfully down on them as if to say, “Where is your God now?” That was a very difficult question to answer. The Hebrew captives asked it themselves, repeatedly. How long, O Lord, will you remain silent? We hear this despairing lament over and over in the later parts of the Old Testament. It is a question that every person in this place of worship has asked, or will some day ask. Where is God? Why doesn’t he do something?

 

When God finally did do something, moving the heart of the Persian king to let them go home, it seemed as though their prayers had been answered and the Lord’s Name vindicated. But what a devastating homecoming it was! The people lament:

 

Thy holy cities have become a wilderness, Zion has become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and beautiful [temple], where our fathers praised thee, has been burned by fire, and all our pleasant places have become ruins. [I can’t help thinking of New Orleans, a city that has given me more joy than any other American city. For those who made their homes in the drowned parts of town, all the pleasant places have become ruins.] Wilt thou restrain thyself at these things, O Lord?  Wilt thou keep silent, and afflict us sorely? (Isaiah 64:10-12)

 

A commentator puts it this way:

 

The country is inhabited. People live in the ruins of Jerusalem. Farmers and vine growers carry on their work…But it is a broken and oppressed community, burdened with rapacious rulers from beyond its borders and even more by its own consciousness of God’s hand resting heavily upon it in judgment. As time passed, the latter deepened into a despairing sense of Godforsakenness….[2]

 

So if we can put ourselves into the place of those who heard Isaiah’s prophecy, if we can imagine ourselves as those who have been lamenting for a long time that God is unresponsive, that we cannot reach him, that he does not show his face, that he is silent, then the words of the prophet are electrifying:

 

For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent…

 

This announcement is meant to strike our ears as though someone had sounded a bugle in the church. For your sake, for our sake—that’s what Zion means—for the sake of the people of God the prophet raises his voice in a clarion call. I will not keep silent! God has given me something to say!

 

Nothing in the Bible makes any religious sense unless we are people of faith who believe that God’s own self speaks to us in this living Word. Well, maybe there’s one exception and that’s the mournful book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes makes plenty of sense if there’s no word from God. It’s a very important book, Ecclesiastes. One of the most beautifully written portions of the Bible, it lays it all out before us, a world where one meaningless event follows another, where all is vanity and striving after wind, and there is nothing new under the sun. We are supposed to set Ecclesiastes beside the writings of the prophets. Isaiah is one who brings the astounding announcement:

 

Behold [says the Lord], I am doing a new thing.

 

For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent. That is the rallying cry of Christians over the centuries who have not kept the gospel to themselves. The good news is proclaimed: the Lord has turned to his people. No more will you be called Forsaken (Azubah), and your land shall no more be termed Desolate (Shemamah); but you shall be called My Delight is in Her (Hephzibah), and your land [shall be called] Married (Beulah); for the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married.

 

It might have been a bit difficult to explain to Beulah in the dry cleaners what her name was supposed to mean. She looked to me as if she’d seen a world of trouble, and maybe a bad marriage had been part of that. It takes a bit of effort for any one of us today   to understand why the name Beulah is wonderful. We need to know less about man (in both senses of that word) and more about God and his covenant with Israel. We need to know that God betrothed himself to his people in the wilderness, promising to be faithful to them and bless them forever. We need to recall the way that the children of Israel turned their backs on the covenant the way a husband walks out on a wife, or vice versa. We need to know about the prophet Hosea, who has his own book in the Old Testament. Hosea was told by God to go and redeem the woman whom he had married, a harlot who had abandoned him. Redeem—that’s a word with a world of meaning. To redeem something means to buy it back at a price. Hosea did that. Following the command of God, Hosea followed his wife into the sinkhole where she had gone and paid the price to her pimp.

 

Why did Hosea do that?

 

It was an image of God. The Holy One of Israel, as Isaiah calls him, would not give up on his people. His heart yearned after them. He would not let them go. God would pay the price for them. Then he would marry them and be their God for ever, Listen to Isaiah again, speaking to God’s people:

 

For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.

 

The image of marriage is one that God has chosen for himself and his people. All through the prophetic literature of the Old Testament we hear the imagery of God as the husband of his people. This takes a wondrous new form in the New Testament where the Church is called the Bride of Christ, and our Lord calls himself the Bridegroom. In the midst of irrevocable dissolution, in a situation of Godforsakenness, in the miasma of depression and despair, at the extremity of loneliness and hopelessness, the word comes: I love you. I am coming to you. I am going to restore everything that you have lost.

 

But now wait a minute. How does this announcement change anything? The world still looks a whole lot more like the world of Ecclesiastes than it does like the promised Kingdom of God. The oppressed are not free, the poor are not rich, and the dead are not raised.

 

I have been working for a year on a chapter about evil and suffering. In a sense I have been working on it all my life. If there is one thing that I can say for certain it is this: no one understands the mystery of evil and suffering. Moreover, no one can explain why God—if there is a God—allows the things he allows. No one can explain why God seems to be silent when we most need to hear from him. In fact, the best stance to take in the time of extreme suffering is “rage against explanation.” I didn’t make up that phrase; it comes from a book by a Christian theologian who wrote a book about the mystery of suffering and the apparent silence of God.[3] In such situations, “rage against explanation” is the right posture to take, and people who offer explanations to sufferers would be more helpful if they, like God, would remain silent. We read in the book of Job that after calamity came to Job, his friends came to comfort him:

 

And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great. (Job 2:13)

 

This has come down in the Jewish tradition as Sitting Shiva, “sitting seven.” The silence of Job’s friends was helpful to him; the trouble began when they started to talk and find explanations. Job’s rage against explanation is, in a perverse way, a sort of model.

 

And what finally comforted Job?

 

The voice of God. But God does not say anything we would have wanted to have him say. He says nothing at all about Job’s suffering. He says, basically, “Job, behold the hippopotamus (Behold now Behemoth—Job 40:15). Can you make anything like that?” and Job says, “I won’t say another word, because I have met God.”

 

God is God. He is not us. As Isaiah says, his thoughts are not our thoughts and his ways are not our ways. But once you have grasped even a tiny bit of the greatness and majesty and otherness of God, then the news from God is all the more staggering and awesome:

 

As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.

 

These are intimately personal terms. Like a young man passionately in love, God loves us and rejoices in us. The prophetic books abound in this personal imagery: God is the father of the fatherless (Hosea 3:14—KJV), he calls Israel his darling child (Jeremiah 31:20), he has written us on the palms of his hands (Isaiah 49:16), he lifts up his children and carries them like a mother (Isaiah 63:9). And our Old Testament ends with the promise that the coming God will turn the hearts of the children to the parents and the hearts of the parents to the children. O Beulah Land!

 

In the final analysis, in this world there is nothing to sustain any of this except faith and hope. The prophet Elisha brought the son of the Shunammite woman back to life from the dead (II Kings 4:8-37). There do not seem to be any Elishas among us today. There is no human explanation for these matters.

 

But the story does not end here.

 

The story comes to its appointed consummation with a Redemption greater by far, a price paid that is infinitely higher than that paid for Hosea’s wife. This time it is not one wife who is bought back, but the whole world. The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.(Mark 10:49). God gave his only-begotten Son (John 3:28). I am the Resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he who believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live...and I will raise him up at the last day.

 

To those here today who have even a small seed of faith in the Son of God:

 

As the Lord spoke through his prophet Isaiah, pledging gifts of eternal love to his people, so he speaks and acts still, through those who draw near to him. Your smallest action might be life itself for someone. I read an article the other day about a prominent man in desperate financial trouble. All his friends had abandoned him. He had not heard from a single one. His words were poignant: “If only there had been even one call,” he said, “just one message at midnight, wishing me the best. I would have been so happy.”

 

You, too, can be the messenger at midnight. That is the way God works. The silence of God is broken by human speech.

 

For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent...

You shall no more be termed Forsaken (Azubah), and your land shall no more be termed Desolate (Shemamah); but you shall be called My Delight is in Her (Hephzibah), and your land Married (Beulah); for the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married.

For...as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.

 

AMEN.