Weekly Devotion for July 26, 2015

Scripture reading: Isaiah 25: 6-9 (Appointed for July 29)

Today was again one of those moments when, in the process of trying to put together my weekly devotion, the Holy Spirit came and gave me a nice “whack upside the head.” A text too perfect and too appropriate for the moment to be ignored.

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear.

The passage from Isaiah 25 is one of the appointed texts for our funeral service. Fitting given that there has been a death in the Canadochly family just this morning and also that the shadow of death is cast long over both congregations that I serve in these times. Both church families are dealing with people with difficult cancer diagnosis. Both church families have lost prominent members to death in recent weeks and months. Death and its terrible power seems a constant presence in our lives right now.

It is very easy for us humans, who deal so easily and so fully with what is tangible, to believe that death’s power is limitless and unstoppable. We speak of it in hushed tones, as if we can somehow superstitiously summon its attention if we speak of it too openly or loudly. It frightens us and we would do anything to avoid its gaze.

But we Christians worship a God of limitless power and limitless compassion. A God who has promised to his people that death does not have the last word; that death’s power does have its limits. It could not stop Jesus Christ, though he was dead and buried three days, he still rose again on that first Easter. And through his resurrection, Christ promises that the same will be true for us. That the grave will not hold us or those we love long, that as it did with him, it surrender us back to life once more.

Isaiah’s prophecy is a vision of that day when the grave will surrender at last all those it has claimed: You, me, those that we love, generations long past, and generations as yet unborn in our time. That great moment on the last day when life triumphs at last. It is hard to cling to that hope when death’s shadow seems so immediate, but that’s the nature of hope: believing in what is not easily seen. 

But the promise is real. Time and again throughout the Scriptures, God repeats the promise and gives vision to what we cannot see: the Day of Triumph that awaits us all. It may not seem that way, but that feast that Isaiah envisions is more real than death. Cling to that. Hold on to it and draw strength and hope from its truth. Amen.