Sermon for 5th Sunday after Epiphany – Isaiah 40:21-31 & Mark 1:29-39

Are you a “big picture” kind of person, or do you obsess over details like me? At my job, I have to do a lot of strategic planning for the products we make. What’s important, what’s not important, how much can we get done this quarter without killing ourselves. But I also have this reputation for digging into a problem and trying to analyze every little thing in painful detail. My colleagues like to joke about it, but what I’ve probably done is train them to not read my e-mails. Except the problem is that then I don’t get much done, and I really lose track of what I’m doing. I get lost and discouraged. It’s a horrible feeling.

What happens when we miss the big picture. That’s the theme of our Old Testament reading today. It’s after when Babylon conquers Jerusalem and drags off thousands of Israelites into exile for decades. Here, Isaiah’s preaching to the exiles, and trying to build their hopes. But they’ve been in Babylon too long. They’ve lost faith in God’s promises. So Isaiah says, “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning?” He’s trying to remind them that this is the God of all creation. Babylon may be strong, but God’s stronger. Isaiah says, “He sits above the circle of the earth and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers.” What are we compared to God? Specks. God reduces even the fiercest armies and rulers of the earth to nothing.

But folks are skeptical. Exile feels like hell. Think about your own disasters. Nothing feels safe anymore because you can lose everything in a hot minute. It reminds me of when I was once robbed. Feeling violated is one thing. But it made me wonder why we even bother with locks if folks can just break in. So Isaiah’s preaching to folks who figure there’s just going to be another exile. There’s always a stronger enemy just waiting to strike. So Isaiah says, “Scarcely are they planted when he blows upon them. They wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble.” He means maybe so, but even exile comes to an end.

But why should they trust this God who abandoned them for decades? Can’t we relate? Waiting and praying for a word from above that never seems to come. Isaiah knows that pain. So he says, “Lift up your eyes on high and see. He brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name. Not one is missing.” He’s saying how could you think that the Creator doesn’t intimiately know every crack and crevice of the creation. This is the God who surely knows and calls each of us by name, for we were fearfully and wonderfully made in our mother’s womb by God’s own power.

But they’re thinking if God cares that much, then why this punishment? Why exile? It’s not fair! God was supposed to favor us! They’ve got a point. If God was just trying to teach them a lesson, all it gave them was a faith crisis. So Isaiah says, “Why do you say, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God’?” Isaiah knows that if you’ve always been taught you’re favored by God, you might just feel a little entitled. He says, “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. His understanding is unsearchable.” In other words, who would be so arrogant as to question God’s hidden will? God doesn’t owe us anything, let alone any explanations.

Basically, Isaiah’s preaching that Israel needs a heavy duty attitude adjustment. They’re caught up in painful details and missing the big picture. At the end of the day, God is our soverign creator. Whether or not we think things are fair matters very little. Maybe Isaiah could have softened the edges a little, but it’s still a hard message to preach to folks who feel like everything and the kitchen sink have been thrown at them. And how do we relate to some infinite creator up in the sky pulling strings? It makes you wonder what God really thinks of us.

So, something Isaiah said really caught me. “He sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers.” Hard to say what the Israelites pictured. They weren’t astronomers like us. They didn’t have space photos. But it reminds me of interviews with astronauts about that feeling when they actually see earth for the first time from outer space. Of course, that far out you can’t see huge cities, let alone grasshoppers. You can’t see the buzzing of activity swarming the earth. But when astronauts see that, it does something to them. They’re not the same anymore. They have a name for it – the “overview effect.” When they fling you so far away from Earth that you’re overwhelmed by the fragility and unity of life. The uncanny sense of understanding the “big picture.”

One NASA astronaut put it like this. “It was like time stood still, and I was flooded with emotion and awareness. I looked down at the Earth — this stunning, fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us, that protects all life from the harshness of space — but a sadness came over me, and it hit me in the gut with a sobering contradiction. All this overwhelming beauty. Yet, such inequity exists within this paradise we’ve been given. I couldn’t help thinking of the nearly one billion people who don’t have clean water to drink, the countless number who go to bed hungry every night, the social injustice, conflicts, and poverty that remain pervasive across the planet.” That hits me in the gut. What if that’s all that God sees? What does the God of creation think of us? Who could say that disaster and exile and even death aren’t perfectly fair?

Well, the good news is that we know exactly what God thinks of us. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” God sent us Jesus, who willingly took all of our painful details and sin upon his own body on the cross, and it killed him. But he refused to condemn us. After three days he was risen, so that we might rise with him in the glory of his resurrection. So that the whole world might be saved through him. That’s our big picture and Jesus won’t let us forget it. Isaiah said, “He brings out their host and numbers then, calling them all by name. Not one is missing.” God always gets what God wants. Not by might or violence but by the power of love borne in Jesus’ unconditional forgiveness of us as we really are. It’s not fair, because we don’t deserve it. But thanks be to God that nothing about God is fair.

And Jesus also gives us his own Spirit, because he knows we need something to keep us going when we run out. When we don’t think we can go any farther. We forget the Spirit is that powerful. So we get today’s gospel reading. Simon’s mother-in-law is in bed with a fever, which cuts a little close to home with the covid pandemic. Because this wasn’t just some cold. This was a severe illness that left her so wiped out that I wonder if she even knew Jesus was in the room. But he no more than takes her by the hand, that she finds herself arising to do what she feels called to do. Now, the danger of this story is that it’s easy to get sidetracked with endless painful details about faith healing, or we can just give thanks that the power of faith has infinite capacity to surprise us.

That matters, because faith does another thing. It hits us with that “overview effect” that I mentioned earlier. You don’t need to be an astronaut to see all the social injustice, the hunger, the poverty that’s an epidemic. Faith confronts us with all those painful details. So what do we do? Whatever we can. Even if we don’t know what we’re doing. It’ll feel overwheming. Isaiah said, “the young will fall exhausted.” Look at Jesus – it drove him to a deserted place to pray. Maybe that’s all we can manage right now. But even then, we hang everything on what Isaiah said – “The Lord is the everlasting God who does not faint or grow weary.” That’s the big picture. May it be so for you and me in Jesus our Lord.