Grace to you and peace from our loving God, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The crowd gathered around the old woman. Someone in the back asked, "To what would you compare the kingdom of God?" For a long time there was silence. Then the woman said: "The kingdom of God is like a sound. It is the most natural sound in the world. Its melody plays through the hollow places in trees and mountains and people's hearts.

"Jesus could hear this sound approaching. 'Listen,' he would say, 'the kingdom of God is at hand.' He heard this sound playing in children, among the outcasts, when friends gathered to share a meal. Jesus kept moving until he reached a place where he would find its rhythm; then he would sit down and listen.

"The kingdom of God is like a sound. It is the most delicate melody in the world. External noises drown it out; internal rumblings mask it. We hear it for a moment or a day, but then it is gone.

"No one of us can produce this mysterious sound on our own. But we can hunt out the places and people where it plays. We can search for the frequency of its transmission. When we find this sound, we have but to hum along."

After the woman finished speaking, the crowd remained silent for a long time, listening. (Whitehead, "Community of Faith," p. 74)

The book in which that story appears develops a strategy for forming more meaningful community within churches. It is an excellent reminder, as is this morning's word from Isaiah, that the word of God stands forever.

One of the more interesting ideas I have run across lately is illustrated by this story. The idea is that God's presence in the world is far from difficult to discern. In fact, so the theory goes, God's presence is all too obvious. We have become so accustomed to overlooking God's leadings of conscience and God's revealed glory in creation that we confuse these opportunities to know God more fully with merely natural phenomena or new ideas that we thought up on our own. It is, as with the constant motion of the earth, so much a part of daily existence, that our bodies have made the adjustments necessary so as not to be distracted or even to notice.

Our adaptations. Our explanations. Our self-centered arrangements of reality only alter the way we see and hear. They do not disrupt the constancy or the melody of the God that continually tunes life and heart and world. God's word and God's kingdom have not diminished one iota. It is only our ability to hear that has changed.

Let's turn to the text:

The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens—wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught. The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I did not turn backward.

The nation of Israel was utterly defeated, the temple desecrated, their great civilization laid waste, and they lived in exile. Hope was lost. There was not a speck of evidence that God would restore the people or the land, or even that God continued to be the God of this nation.

And yet, the prophet Isaiah stands and declares that he has heard the voice of the Lord in the land. A voice of love, of help, of restoration for the suffering servants of God.

The prophet is one among a nation whose ear has been awakened again to the sounds of God. Notice that the image implies that God's resounding word was always there. The prophet does not enter a trance or escape to some new place or dimension. The prophet wakens. The clear implication is that everyone else is asleep. It is not some amazing revelation unavailable to the multitudes. The sound of God among us is always and ever present. We need merely awaken from our culture- and self-induced sleep in order to hear, morning by morning. We need only hear and then refuse to be "rebellious" and "not turn backward."

In the first verse of this chapter 50, God asks rhetorically about where Israel's bill of divorce might be. Even this image of marriage emphasizes the point of the passage. It is much like a marriage in which the spouses take one another for granted. The spouse is always present, but there is little joy experienced, little gratitude given, little notice taken. It is as though there is no marriage. To revive the relationship, one merely needs the eyes to see and the ears to hear. One must only acknowledge and tend the relationship that has been ignored and allowed to lie fallow.

Back to the text:

I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting. The Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced; therefore I have set my face like flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame; the one who vindicates me is near.

Unexpectedly, the one who listens to God experiences derision. But then, how much anger has been brought to bear upon those who love the Lord over the centuries? How painful must it be for those without hope to hear from one whose heart has been opened again to God? It isn't so difficult to understand the reaction of the people. Those who are blind to God resent being reminded of their self-imposed lack of vision.

And so God's servant endures the pain, multiplied by the agony of knowing the irony that those inflicting it could so easily have their own suffering removed.

Such ways of looking at this text bring Jesus quickly to mind. Jesus, the one whose knowledge of God is so intimate that he refers to God as "Abba," Father. The one who sees the enslaved hearts and dormant imaginations that have forgotten how to know God. The one who endures our derision and abuse for the sake of the truth alone to which he is fully awake and aware. Jesus is the one who came with the message that the kingdom of God is at hand. Not far off, or nearly impossible to perceive, but at hand, within our grasp, in earshot.

The prophet stands firm.

Who will contend with me? Let us stand up together. Who are my adversaries? Let them confront me. It is the Lord God who helps me; who will declare me guilty?

Strengthened by the daily remembrance of God's voice, the sufferingservant of God remains convinced that this new sound is more than a new form of self-deception. The husband who finds the wisdom to wake anew to his marriage relationship is fortified by the memory of intimacy, encouraged at the sound of the once-familiar conversation, warmed by rediscovered intimacy.

The passage puts a peculiar slant on the place of Jesus in the lives of those for whom he came. His mission was not to bring something wholly new or earth-shatteringly different in type or substance from what was known before. He came to remind, to reconnect, to clear away blindness, to unstop ears that the nearness of God, the song of the spirit, and the peace of the heart might flourish. It was not a matter of bringing God presence to us, but of restoring our ability and willingness to experience the presence that was, is, and always shall be there for us.

As Isaiah declares: "It is the Lord God who helps me; who will declare me guilty? All of them will wear out like a garment; the moth will eat them up." No matter what befalls the servant of God, the knowledge of God is the one abiding truth. All others will wither and pass away with time.

It is in that conviction that the servant must stand, as he states in the verse following this morning's reading.

Who among you fears the Lord and obeys the voice of his servant, who walks in darkness and has no light, yet trusts in the name of the Lord and relies upon his God?

Only the one who has awakened to the sound of God's voice, as did Jesus, can walk in the light. Only such a one can trust in the name of the Lord and rely upon God.

The feel, the shape, the sound of Christian community, the place where the abiding word of God brings comfort for the suffering servants of the church, is available to us as it was to our Lord Jesus. It is, as the old woman tells in the parable, like a sound.

"No one of us can produce this mysterious sound on our own. But we can hunt out the places and people where it plays. We can search for the frequency of its transmission. When we find this sound, we have but to hum along."

The sound is not rare, but hearing it all-too-often is rare. The Lord God has opened our ears. The word of God resounds. Its sound, no matter how confused by the cacophony that would obscure it, will endure forever.

"The kingdom of God is like a sound. It is the most natural sound in the world. Its melody plays through the hollow places in trees and mountains and people's hearts." May God keep our ears attuned to the song. Amen.

May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep our hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord unto eternal life. Amen.