HAVE YOU NOT SEEN? HAVE YOU NOT HEARD? February 5, 2006 Vespers Communion Service Richard Williams Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church Psalm 147:1–11 1 Corinthians 9:16–23 Isaiah 40:21–31 Confused, disoriented, wandering, awash in a mix of triumph and mourning, hope and fear. That was the situation for the original audience of these words. While the text doesn’t make the historical setting all that clear, most scholars see this chapter in Isaiah as reflecting an important shift. Earlier in Isaiah, we have heard of impending judgment, a judgment that stems from a persistent lack of awareness of God in Israel’s life, the closed eyes and ears of a people that need no God. But here in chapter 40, that judgment and the destruction that it brings have moved from a future warning to a past reality. Something has happened. Something major. It is as if we are emerging from one of those 1950s bomb shelters. The people are taking the first steps out, the first looks around on the morning after. These Israelites, confused, weary from years of exile within the Babylonian empire, come out, looking for a new way, a new understanding of God. Surely now the old has passed away; a new beginning will come. “We have received our punishment; we have suffered in exile for the wrongs of our past.” In the opening of this chapter, we have one of the most soothing and caring passages in all of scripture: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.” But quickly, only lines later, we come to our text this morning: “Have you not seen? Have you not heard?” What was it like for these people as they entered this new reality? They were adrift; they had no anchor. No temples or priests to depend on, no rulers to look to. And into this confusion, God spoke. “Have you not seen? Have you not heard?” Hardly our problem, really. Seeing? Hearing? We’ve got lots of it. At first glance, these biblical questions seem to just bounce off us. We live in the information age, remember? If we have any problems as a society, it is not from not seeing or hearing or feeling or knowing what is going on around us. I follow several web-logs online. These blogs, as they’re known, are places where people post their thoughts, experiences, rantings on just about everything. The only limit is whether anyone else wants to listen to you. But apparently we are listening. Technorati, an online site that tracks blogs, has a count of 27.1 million blogs online. That number doubles every five months. A new blog is created about every second, each second a window into someone’s life, passions, politics, perspectives. Through this we can know more about people living in Australia, Iraq, New Orleans, and, of course, here on the Magnificent Mile. One-hundred-and-forty-five blogs list the Magnificent Mile in their discussions. Curious about what the people in Iran are thinking these days? There are 700,000 bloggers in Iran; why not ask one of them? Have you not seen? Have you not heard? Sometimes it seems that rather than not seeing or hearing, we in fact have the very opposite problem. We have an overload of information, a glut of seeing and hearing about this world. If we are confused with the choice between two options—paper or plastic—where can you start with 145 blogs, or 700,000 ones, or 27 million? We have so many choices for news and current events, for commentary and pontification, we quickly reach our seeing and hearing saturation; we see and hear so much that we often have to squint our eyes or plug our ears at the onslaught of information. So what do we do? We live in a world surrounded by so much, yet maybe this passage is painfully accurate, pointedly asking us, “Have you not seen? Have you not heard?” You, the fully conscious, postmodern one, intellectually aware, up with people, down with the 411, you. Have you not seen? Have you not heard? Maybe we are more like the people of Israel when they first heard this passage than we would like to think—confused, unfettered to a fault, searching for a new reality in a land of uncertainty. Seeking life in a world of domination, prescription, empire, and control. Listen again to God’s word in this passage, in verses 25 and 26: To whom will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? The One who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name; the One who is great in strength, mighty in power, not one of them is missing. Lift up your eyes and see—that’s the only commandment, the only instruction or direction given in this whole passage. In this text that deals with so much of our situation as people on a long and uncertain journey in faith, this is the one thing that we are given to do. And in its wisdom, it may be all we can do. Lift up your eyes . . . In the psalm, we hear a similar voice, giving this command a human face, a personal expression of what we are called to do: “I lift up my eyes to the hills—from where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.” In the times of helpless struggle, paralyzing fear, stagnating apathy, the dark night of our soul, the psalmist points a way towards hope. That psalm was probably originally meant for someone looking to the hills for help in a battle, but it sure seems like it is meaningful for us today. We live in the push of a twenty-four-hour news cycle and the pull of instant analysis, spontaneous reaction. In the middle of all of our over-information, our oversaturation with images, stories, headlines, our overseeing and hearing the drumbeats and marching orders of our culture around us, we are called to lift our eyes, to look up, to find where our help comes from. In the middle of our technological confidence, our amazing interconnectedness, our anonymous sharing, we are to stop, lift up our eyes, look around, look with eyes to see who has created this, us, all. It is interesting that this commandment, and all that goes along with it in this passage—they aren’t rebukes or chidings. Just as in the situation with the original Israelites, God’s commandment to look up, seek God above all else, is not a redirection. In fact, it is a reminder of what has been most important in the past, of what they, we, have known from birth and what the ancient Israelites had carried with them through the hard years of exile. Look to the roots, to the foundations of the earth, look to what you believe when you feel like you have stopped believing. There you will find the faithfulness of the one who created you. And it may be that looking up is all we can do. In the end, after all of the news stories have been read, all of the blogs scanned, every podcast downloaded, maybe all we can do is look up, look past ourselves, look to God. We are not called to find or understand or explain. We are not called to interrupt, to control, to mediate, to define. Only to look up, lift our eyes up, and see. So this is our call: to look at this world with eyes to see God’s stirring Spirit at work in all of this world. In the midst of all that we experience, all we see and hear and touch in this media-drenched world, we are looking only for God. The one who creates, saves, and sustains each of us. Lift your eyes up and see. This is where we can see the folly of measuring our world by the numbers of blogs, of using Google as our reference point to reality, of seeing e-mail as a vehicle of our interconnections. Make no mistake: I don’t think these things are all bad. I use them everyday. But I do think we make a large mistake when we confuse our technology-centered world with the reality that God would call us to. We are called to point to the One beyond ourselves, not to have every answer. We are called to point towards God’s restoration, not to conjure it on our own. Wholeness, connection, peace, strength to walk on while we are weary—these come only from God, no matter where else we seek them. This passage gives us hints at how we can see God. Look at this earth around us, at the heavens stretched out before us. The passage says, “The Lord is the Creator of the ends of the earth.” Every mountain peak, every dragonfly’s wing. Look with eyes to see. Our passage also says, “The Lord stretches out the heavens like a curtain.” A few weeks ago a satellite returned to earth bringing with it comet dust. Comet dust is literally star dust, the result of the creation and destruction and re-creation of ancient stars. It is what we are created of. It is what we look up to see when we gaze at the heavens. And it is God’s hands at work in this world. But in all of its glory, the heavens and the earth are not all that we can see of God’s Spirit in this world. For that, I think those among us who are unsighted, having either lost their vision slowly or never had sight at all, they show us that eyes to see God are not physical eyes, not a sight that can be lost or dimmed. Looking for God in this world is a reaching out with all of our senses, opening up our preconceived ideas, shedding the blinders of hatred, arrogance, judgment, animosity. Can we accept that in this age of information, the connection that we truly need, the key to the puzzle of this life, the peace that passes all understanding, lies not in us but in looking up, looking to the God of Israel, the God of yesterday and the God of tomorrow? Finding God’s presence in this world is less a matter of eyes and ears and much more a matter of our heart. How much are we willing to risk our heart’s openness, its vulnerability to this world? Are will open to finding God’s surprising Spirit at work where we least expect it? Are we willing to have all that we see and hear and know of this world put under the loving judgment of the One who created it, stretched out its corners, who works within it? In the end, this passage is not about lifting your head, looking up, craning your neck to force yourself to finding something hidden. It is about an opening, a looking again at long-stuck relationships or finding new energy to reapproach insurmountable divisions. It is about seeking strength to run this race not on our own terms, but in God’s hands. It is about finding in our weary lives the small cracks where the Spirit can begin its work, begin its transformation, its re-creation. Lift your eyes on high and see. . . . Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not be faint.