L.D. 31, Isaiah 55 "The Only Word" Scott Hoezee

It is well-known that apes have the ability to communicate with one another through gestures as well as an array of modulated grunts and sounds that bear some resemblance to language. Since we already know apes have this ability, some scientists have wondered how much more language apes could acquire if someone taught them. As it turns out, monkeys can do pretty well. Given enough help and time, an ape can figure out that a certain symbol for a banana equals a real banana and so the ape will flash that symbol when he is hungry.

But here is a curious fact: as it turns out, after years of effort to teach apes a kind of language, even the best-trained ape pales in comparison to a human child. Already at the age of three, a human toddler has more language skills than any other creature on the planet. Children are, as all of us parents know, verbal sponges, soaking up new words and incorporating them into their vocabulary at an amazing rate. Not only can children memorize new words without even trying, their brains possess an intuitive grammatical structure as well as what linguists call "creativity" and "semanicity" by which the tykes can take the words they know and put them together in highly creative ways.

Children see patterns in language without anyone pointing them out. As parents, you realize this when you catch your child making a goof. As adults, we know that a proper way to report what you saw in Colorado would be to say, "On the Tuesday we were there we saw three moose in a meadow." But a toddler might say, "On Tuesday we see'd three mooses." The reason is obvious: even without being told, the child knows that ordinarily you form the past tense of a verb by adding an "-ed" and you form the plural of a noun by adding an "-s." Right now we walk. Yesterday we walked. There is one bird. Here are two birds. And so when the child wants the past tense of the verb "to see," why wouldn't it be see'd? And if there is more than one moose, why not make it "mooses"? That children make mistakes on the exceptions to the rules is vastly uninteresting compared to the fact that he or she internalized the grammatical patterns without ever being taught.

Language is central to who we are. We can be touched, moved, stirred, reduced to tears, or deeply angered through words alone. The invention of the telephone made this clear. You can be touched by words even if you can't see the person who is speaking them. We all know that you can be on the phone, unable to see the person on the other end of the line, and yet the words that come through the receiver can melt your heart.

It is said of the great eighteenth-century preacher George Whitfield that he had such a powerful speaking voice that he could make grown men weep and women faint dead away just from how he pronounced the word "Mesopotamia"! That may be an exaggeration, but we do know the power of words, don't we? We know that we can be mesmerized by speech. And we also know that we can be fundamentally changed by what we hear.

Nowhere is this semantic power of language more vividly on display than in the Catechism's highlighting of what is known as "the keys of the kingdom." How powerful is speech? It is so powerful that when the speech in question is gospel proclamation, how those words are received has an eternal significance. Those who find in preaching words of truth will also find the door to eternal life unlocked and so they may walk right through the doorway into a place of joy. Those who reject gospel speech may find that the door that leads to life is locked and that there is no other key in the universe to spring open that lock.

But, of course, the reason is not because of the skill of the preacher. When it comes to proclaiming the gospel, the punch of the sermon stems directly from the power of God's Word. All through history people have found the doorway to heaven unlocked for them because God's Word got through to them. And, thanks be to God, this has happened just as often, if not more often, through poorly delivered sermons as through sermons deemed to be masterpieces. Preachers who stutter have found people coming alive to God's truth just as often as preachers whose every utterance is smooth as silk.

It's all about God and his holy Word, and no passage in the Bible presents us this lyric and lilting truth better than Isaiah 55. Of course, at first glance, Isaiah seems to be having an out-of-control metaphor binge. First we have bread, wine, and milk. Next thing you know, we're pondering the earth and the sky. Next comes the meteorology section with rain and snow putting in an appearance. Before we're finished, we've got trees applauding, mountains crooning songs, and weeds getting replaced with more pleasing groundcover. The images are culinary, astrophysical, meteorological, and horticultural. It seems like metaphor overload, so much so that the unity of the chapter is threatened. But in the next little while we may find that this chapter is profoundly unified after all.

But to see that, let's begin not at the beginning but the middle in verses 8-9. God, speaking through Isaiah, highlights the fundamental difference between the divine and the human. God's thoughts are not our thoughts, his ways are not our ways. Too often we make the mistake of picturing God as being just like us but bigger. We know what strength is and we know that each of us has a measure of physical strength. So when it comes to God, we figure that his strength is similar to our own but magnified many times over. We know what love is as we feel it in our own hearts, and so we picture God's love as being a lot like ours but better, more intense.

We think of God analogically, by way of analogy to ourselves. But even the best analogy is only partly true. Even a very strong analogy claims that one thing is like another thing in some ways but not in all ways. And so a few weeks ago I likened the offer of salvation to all people to my saying some Sunday morning, "I have Krispy Kreme donuts for everyone." I went on to say that my claiming to have enough donuts for everyone would still be true even if some people never took a donut. That was my analogy for the Bible's saying salvation has come to all. But no sooner did I make that analogy and I had to warn you not to over-extend it. God's offer of salvation was like my donut analogy in some ways but not in all ways.

When it comes to pondering God, we have no choice but to relate to God through our own experience. We assume that God's love is analogous to our own love. But saying that does not mean that God's love is identical with our love. We have to assume that God's love has dimensions that go so far beyond our own conceptions as to be finally mind-blowing. God's love is not just human love written out in all bold-faced, capital letters.

In short, there is a basic divide, a kind of canyon, between God and us. We cannot know the full mind of God. What's more, as theologians have always said, unless God takes the initiative to tell us about himself, we are stuck on our side of the canyon. As C.S. Lewis said, if you want to pursue geology, then go out, find a stone, and study it. If you want to learn astronomy, grab a telescope and point it toward the night sky because the stars are there for the studying. But the knowledge of God is different: God isn't out there to be discovered like some stray boulder on a hillside or a star twinkling in the night sky. God has to reveal Godself before we can learn something about God.

But that's the good news of Isaiah 55: God has no interest in remaining aloof. This entire chapter bristles with the invitation to come and get what God has made available. And it's finally no surprise that God wants to communicate with us. We believe that from all eternity God has been a zestful community of three persons, locked in a joyful, exuberant, eternal dance of giving and receiving. In fact, some theologians have claimed that the entire act of creating this cosmos was a kind of effervescent overflow of the divine life.

It's almost as though Father, Son, and Holy Spirit said to one another, "We have such a wonderful thing going here among us three that we should share our love and our life with a whole universe of creatures!" Given God's nature as a triune community of love and life-sharing, it was just so like God, so typical of God, to create a world where something of his own life and love could be shared with so many more.

That's why it is also so like God to communicate with us once we were created. If a husband and wife decide to have a baby, wouldn't it be profoundly odd if they never talked to that child? You don't decide to have a child in order to ignore that child but to communicate. That's why one of the first things you say when you hold your child is, "Hello, precious one--I'm your Daddy." You make yourself know the first chance you get.

It's the same with God. That's why Isaiah 55 is loaded with invitations. Come to the waters! Come to the marketplace! Seek the Lord while he may be found! Come to the waters and drink. Come to the market and buy food. Look for the God who is not playing hide-and-seek with humanity but who wants to be found. God is beaming his truth and his message of love to the whole world. It's like the rain and the snow: it is constantly coming down all around us and sooner or later it will make a difference, it will sink in and generate new growth on the soil of human hearts. When that happens, joy happens, life happens.

And the life that comes from God's Word is not simply new life within the human heart--this is a life that extends to the entire creation. When the trees and fields, the mountains and the hills, respond with their own kind of celebration, it will be because these created wonders are also getting caught up in God's great project of cosmic restoration. At the end of this chapter, Isaiah is not simply going over the top with a rhetorical flourish of hyperbole, exaggerating things for dramatic effect. He really means that the trees of the field will be involved in celebrating the goodness of God.

God's restoring Word is for all creatures because in the beginning, it was that very same Word of God that gave birth to all that lives. The Bible's account of the creation is motored along by the simple yet majestic rhythm of "And God said . . .and it was." Why are we human beings such verbal creatures, beings that already at the age of three possess an entire galaxy's worth of verbal sophistication? Because we were created in the image of God. All life owes its existence to the Word of God, but as the creatures made directly in this God's image, we now have the ability to speak as well.

And that brings us back to preaching. If ever there were a form of speech that can create life, proclaiming the gospel would have to be it. I speak something on the order of 2,500 words per sermon. None of you remembers very many of those words specifically. But that's OK because the goal is to make those many words the carrier for the one Word of God: the Word that tells us we are loved, we have been saved, a way to a eternal life has been opened. Each of my words is just something on which the one Word of God hitches a ride, piggyback-style, so as to enter each one of your hearts.

It is in that sense alone that the preacher can say of his or her sermon, "Thus saith the Lord." I may not always get every little detail right in a given sermon, and I've even discovered later that I misquoted something. But the preaching remains true so long as what gets lodged into your heart as a result is something that is alive, something electric with the current of the Holy Spirit flowing through it.

When the apostle John called Jesus "the Word made flesh," he knew exactly what he was doing. John was tapping into a deep vein of theological thinking that goes literally all the way back to the dawn of creation. I said earlier that God created the world in a way similar to how parents treat a child: because he wanted to share his life and because he wanted to make himself known to those children. But if your goal is to communicate, nothing says it better than your own living presence among the people you want to reach. What Isaiah did not know was how far God would finally go to get that Word across.

Some while back on a TV show, the producers arranged a surprise for the mother of a soldier who had been in Iraq. Without her knowing it, her son had returned home. So to set up the surprise and make it really dramatic, they had the soldier call his mother on a cellphone. She was so very happy to hear from him, of course, and assumed he was in Baghdad even as they chatted on the phone. But, of course, he was standing in the driveway and so finally the dramatic moment came when, still talking with his mother on the phone, he walked right into the kitchen. The mother dropped the receiver, gasped, and then lunged at her son. It had been so good to hear from him on the phone, but to have him really there, to hug him and kiss him and feel the warmth of his cheek pressed against her face . . . well, to state the merely obvious: it was way better than a voice on the phone.

From the beginning God had beamed his message of love to the world. And it was received. People heard it, they understood it, they believed it. But once Jesus showed up in person and we could feel the warmth of his true human flesh and hear his voice articulating the love of the one he called "My Father," only then did we realize that all along the message of God's love had been a voice on the telephone compared to the real Son of God right here with us and as one of us. That's why to this day it is Jesus whom we preach.

If there is any joy to be had in this sad world, it is the joy of knowing we are forgiven because God is love. If we find it possible to be led forth in peace in this war-torn and violent world, it is because the Prince of Peace has breathed shalom into our hearts. If we really have the hope that the day will come when trees will applaud and mountains will sing; if we can envision a creation that won't keep getting whittled away by pollution, extinction, and decay but that will be overspread by fullness and beauty: if we can believe in such a future, then it is not because of anything we've seen or heard in this world. It is because we've heard a Word from another world and we've come to believe what we heard.

This world is filled with so much talk, so much chatter. Day and night the talking heads on television pour forth speech. The pundits tell us how to think. The prognosticators tell us how we will think ten years from now. The scientists tell us the universe is finite and that it will end, that the day will come when the sun will no longer rise, the moon will no longer wax or wane. So much talk. The last thing this world needs is more words.

Yet we keep on proclaiming God's Word, we keep on preaching, we keep on telling the old, old story because we believe this is the one Word, the only Word, that does not merely describe life but gives it. This is the one Word that does not merely discuss life but provides it. This is the one Word that spoke in the beginning and it is the same Word that will have the final say at the end of all things. It is the Word of love, of grace, of hope--the one Word that conveys God's enthusiasm for our lives.

And so we will keep speaking this Word. We will keep letting this Word unlock the door that leads to a New Creation, to a whole new world. We will keep on proclaiming God's Word in the ardent hope that the new life we've found in Christ can come to all in this dying world. Come, you who are thirsty; come, you who are hungry, come and feast on the one Word that alone will satisfy you to the core. Come to God's gospel Word of grace and then be led forth in joy and peace. Because when this Word sets your feet to dancing, you will turn around to discover the whole universe is doing a jig along with you. Come to the Word of life, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.