Lectionary reading from the Blue Book: Read full passage here Isaiah 25:1-9
Guest Blogger- Worship Arts Pastor, Don Coppo
Today’s scripture reading out of “A Guide To Prayer” takes us to the prophet Isaiah, chapter 25. In this year of COVID, we can already really relate to this week’s chapter of “From Death to Life.” On this day, it starts out – “O Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you, I will praise your name; for you have done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure.” And so we are ready to stop there and say, “ yes Lord, amen, that’s all I needed to hear.”
But that’s not all there is… as much as we are ready to move on to the wonderful things – it goes on; “For you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin; the palace of the aliens is a city no more, it will never be rebuilt.” I won’t put the whole scripture here, but I encourage you to read all of Isaiah 25:1-9. Because many of us are still feeling that we are sitting upon a heap of a city that once was; things that seemed to hold up everything has disintegrated and will never be rebuilt. There are dreams that we have lost, there are ways that we have “always done things” that we have lost, there are places that gave us stability that we have lost, and for some of us there are people that we mourn the loss of on this earth. It is important to mourn these losses. In mourning and the significant changes, we discover the things that will no longer be a part of our lives or the things that no longer serve us well. We will begin to see the way business is done, school is done, even the way church is done that will look much different as we pass from this “death to life” that has been living with COVID-19.
But what a collective loss should do is show us the things that we have been holding on too tightly to, and the people that we have not been caring enough about. Because God is, and we in turn should be, “a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress, a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat.” We truly enter “into Life’ when we celebrate along with God and all people “a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines… God will swallow up death forever… then the Lord will wipe away all the tears from all faces.” While we are here we are called to live together, and to remove suffering from our brothers and sisters as we are able. In case we may have forgotten, “This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in God’s salvation.”