1. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The message from God’s Word for this 13th Sunday after Pentecost is taken from Isaiah 51:1-6. It’s entitled “God Seeks Us,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. “Ready or not, here I come!” And so begins the great game of hide-and-seek. It’s one of those classic childhood games. The suspense and the drama. The looking . . . the not finding . . . the seeking . . . looking and seeking. Meanwhile, those being sought are carefully and cautiously silent. Hiding. The fun is in not being found, stealing an occasional glance to watch the seeker go here and there puzzled. Not so with our God. Today, God calls out to those who are looking: “Listen to me, pursuers of righteousness!” God’s delight is not in seeing us confused, frustrated, aimless. Not in hiding. Instead, God seeks us and makes us His redeemed children.
3. Rather than hide from us, God calls out, “You who pursue righteousness, you who seek Yahweh!” (Isaiah 51:1). Are there any pursuers of righteousness in Isaiah? That’s not their record. For many chapters, Isaiah has described how salvation escapes God’s people because of their idolatry, their worship of false gods. God has been hidden from them. They seek him and can’t find him. They experience desperation and despair. These are the people who are lost. We are looking, but not finding. These are ones who say, “Ready or not . . .” and look and look and look . . . until they are ready to give up.
4. Remember that Martin Luther teaches us in his explanation to the First Commandment, that a god is anything we fear, love, or trust more than the true God Himself. With the First Commandment, God plainly teaches us that we should have no gods other than Him, the only true God. As Christians, we may think that it will be easy to keep this commandment. But as we study this commandment, we will see that we often break this commandment by honoring other gods. We often place more importance on something or someone other than God, making that something or someone our god. We need God’s strong reminder to fear, love, and trust the true God above all things.
5. Fear. Love. Trust. Those three words summarize Luther’s explanation of the First Commandment. We fear God above all things when we are afraid of his punishment because of our sins and when we are filled with such awe and respect that we don’t want to sin. We love him above all things when his promise of salvation through Jesus is our most valuable treasure and the focus of our hearts. We trust him above all things when we bring all of our challenges and needs to him in prayer, believing he can help us. We demonstrate that trust especially when we look to him to help us with our greatest problem—our sin—and believe his promise that he has forgiven us through Jesus.
6. Without having any idea where to look, people do seek God. Augustine, an early Church Father, famously wrote, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” The Lord’s people are longing for him. This is the image contained in Isaiah’s language of “the wilderness” (Isaiah 51:3). These are the times in life when we feel like a barren desert, when God seems far off. We feel alone, as if we don’t belong.
7. Left on our own, we could never find God. The Small Catechism’s explanation of the Third Article captures the irony: “I believe that I cannot, by my own reason or strength, believe.” This could be a tragic reality except that . . . To us in our aimlessness, the Lord calls out, “Look to Abraham and Sarah” (Isaiah 51:2). God points us to Abraham and Sarah with a lifeless image: a rock (Isaiah 51:1b).
8. Like a rock, they were as good as dead—old and barren. They surely weren’t kids who could play and win at seeking God if he hid himself. So, God called them without their seeking or asking. God’s people are hewn from dead rocks like that.
9. Like Isaiah’s people, we were dead in our sins. We couldn’t win at seeking a hiding God. So, God takes the dead and makes us alive. That’s the reason for Christ himself dying—and then becoming alive again. By Baptism, Christ’s death and resurrection is ours. We are buried and raised to life. God doesn’t wait to be found. God finds us.
10. Whether it’s Bear Grylls or Survivorman, there’s something appealing about a survival show. Watching someone succeed and showing all these great techniques can be absolutely fascinating. Who, after all, doesn’t want to watch someone eat bugs? These shows can provide a safe form of entertainment and maybe a little laughter, being glad someone else is eating bugs and not us.
11. Is 51:3 gives us an image that piles on words for wilderness and waste places. It’s one thing to watch a survival show for entertainment purposes or even educational ones. It’s still another to experience what it means to be in the waste places. Isaiah’s imagery is vivid transformation. The people have experienced the loss of everything. Desolation isn’t theoretical but real. There’s nothing entertaining about loss. Wilderness and waste places are the images of marginalized suffering. We’ve walked through our own wildernesses, and it’s not as entertaining as Survivorman. But Isaiah gives an image not just of wilderness, but of wilderness transformed into Eden that points us to the final restoration we’ll experience when Christ comes again.
12. God continues to call out to us through his Word: “Torah will go out from me” (Isaiah 51:4). We usually translate “Torah” as “law,” but it’s better to understand this Hebrew word as referring to God’s entire revelation. Is 2:2–5 looked to a coming day in which all the nations would stream to Zion for Torah. That day has come when God reaches out in the Word that became flesh and continues to reach out through the Word and Sacraments.
13. “Look to Abraham and Sarah!” No more a dead rock, a barren wilderness! God brings renewal in a new creation; the wilderness is transformed into Eden (Isaiah 51:3). Isaiah’s hearers remembered stories of Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness. The wilderness was a place of marginalization and difficulty. But God carried his people through the wilderness into the Promised Land. The wilderness here in our text anticipates God bringing his people back home after the exile. That salvation will come. But even when it does, life in the postexilic period will be marginalization within the massive Persian empire.
14. God had in mind something much greater: “the wilderness” utterly transformed. We are now living in the wilderness between our Baptism and the Last Day. God bursts in to comfort us. “Comfort” here means “restoration.” Just as God spoke and Eden happened, God speaks and we are restored. God carries us until he comes again to restore creation to the Garden of Eden 2.0. The image is that of utter transformation and renewal.
15. The suspense builds. “Ready or not . . . !” Some are good at hiding, but if you’ve ever played hide-and-seek with a young child, it goes a little bit differently. “Ready or not” and the suspense is more than a four-year-old can handle. “Here I am”—and giggles abound. You who seek, these are the ones to whom God speaks today. The seeking is not the point, instead, we have a God who makes himself found, who reaches out to those who are dead in sin and makes them alive in Christ, who even brings them to be with him forever. Amen. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus until life everlasting. Amen.
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