July 12, 2026 - Isaiah 55:10-13 - Proper 10

One of the features of home ownership that you may or may not appreciate is maintaining the outside. In an apartment or condo, the outside isn’t usually under your control. You can’t change it, but you also don’t have to manage it. With a house, you can’t just ignore the yard, landscaping, and all of that. At some point the city will come after you, assuming angry neighbors don’t come first.

Along with yards and landscaping comes weeds. For whatever reason, the weeds have no trouble at all growing anywhere, even if you don’t want them. The grass, flowers, shrubs, and trees that you actually want to grow end up dying unless you’re out there babying them and coaxing them along. You’re out there in the heat, mowing, pulling weeds, pruning, lopping off vines and trees that seem to pop up overnight. All through spring, all through summer, and on into fall it becomes a weekly process. As long as there’s rain, there’s work to be done outside dealing with weeds. As long as it’s dry, there’s work to be done caring for the plants you actually want. It gets exhausting and it never really ends.

When God speaks through Isaiah here, he uses the analogy of rain watering the earth and making it sprout and grow. Seed for the sower and bread for the eater. Looking around my yard, I don’t really see it. There are plenty of things growing, but the things I planted? Those only grow because I’m out there taking care of them myself. They don’t just spring up on their own. The analogy feels like it falls a bit flat.

Still, I know how God usually works. Sometimes he is talking about creation, plants, animals, and those kinds of things. God begins this proclamation back at the beginning of chapter 55. He says, ““Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live; and I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.” You don’t need to work for good things. God will give them to you freely. People work for fleeting and transitory pleasures where God gives lasting ones for free.

Alright. I understand what you’re saying, God, but that doesn’t seem to work. It’s the bad stuff that pops up everywhere. The good stuff takes work, lots of work, assuming it grows at all. Just look at my yard! I know we aren’t really talking about plants, but the point is still the same. Evil, pain, misery, that’s the stuff you can find everywhere. Just look at how hatred has become commonplace in our society. Once upon a time we could disagree with one another about things, important and fundamental things. Even with those disagreements we could still be cordial with one another, perhaps even friends.

Nowadays we have some pretty sharply divided lines running through our society. With June past, another Pride month has come and gone. It’s another month where deluded people and destructive lifestyles are held up as enviable and sought after. Anything opposed to the LGBT crowd is reviled and hated, the church and God chief among them. It’s true that it seems like the fervor on that side has waned a bit, but then other weeds spring up to take its place.

You don’t see happy little communities spring up like that. A nice little neighborhood where kids can play outside without fear, where you don’t have to worry about being mugged if you’re out late, where people will stop and lend a hand when your car won’t start, that kind of thing. Where are those? Why is it always the bad things that spontaneously spring up and flourish and not the good? Good things, good people, good ideas, that all takes work. It takes a lot of work.

I can look a little closer to home too. Stress? Anxiety? Frustration? Even disaster? That sort of stuff crops up all the time. Sometimes it feels like you can’t get a break from it for even a day or two. If I want a little peace, if I want a little joy, if I want a little time to relax, I have to work for it. I have to work hard and even that doesn’t always work. Sometimes there is just no way to dig out from under it. God’s statement here brings cold comfort. Maybe that works for some people, but I don’t think it works for me. I’m not sure anything around me is getting watered except the weeds.

As always, taking God’s statements out of context is a sure way to get yourself into trouble. Here, in chapter 55, things all sound pretty positive. It sounds like God’s telling everyone, “Don’t worry, be happy!” That’s a little simplistic, but it also misses the bigger point. You can’t truly understand chapter 55 without an understanding of what has come before it. Isaiah arrives on the scene when the threat of Babylon is looming on the horizon. Nebuchadnezzar will be coming soon, even though most of the Israelites think they’re safe from any and all threats. No, the plan is already in motion. God’s patience has run dry. King Josiah staved off disaster briefly by being a good and righteous king, but even he was told it was just a temporary reprieve. His actions alone couldn’t steer the nation of Judah back on course.

No, Judah has major problems. They were going the same way as their northern brothers and sisters who had been invaded and scattered far and wide long before this. It should have been a pretty serious warning to them, but they were determined to be completely oblivious. “Those people in the northern kingdom were all bad anyway. We aren’t like that. We’re good. That kind of thing won’t happen to us.” Except it will. In the very near future, bad things will be coming for the people of Judah.

They’re going to have a bad time. Life is going to be pretty rough for a while. A whole generation and more is going to come and go before they get to come back to the land in any significant number. The “Don’t worry, be happy” mindset that God seems to be referring to isn’t what they end up getting. “For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace,” he says. Hardly. No, it’s during this time that those who fear God write the book of Lamentations, songs that mourn what has been lost. This is about to be a time of sadness for the people, not the joy and peace that God declares here.

The mistake the Israelites make and that we continue to make is when we’re thinking purely in external terms. We look at the problems around us, the evil that arises and appears to go unanswered. We look at the conflict and strife in society. We look at the difficulties, grief, and pain in our own lives. In each of the cases, we assume God is talking about stuff going on around us, but that isn’t really what he’s after. The problems don’t start out there. They start in here and sometimes, many times, I even contribute to those problems going on around me.

The Israelites went into exile, not because evil was springing up all over like weeds, but because God was taking drastic action to bring them back on course. He had made a promise to the world and to Abraham that the messiah would come through him. God would not go back on that promise. That meant salvaging the disaster the Israelites had made of their lives and everything around them. He had to make clear they were the ones who were causing the damage. They were the ones who were bringing the evil. Until they saw that and owned up to it, nothing would ever change. The goal was joy and peace, but first God had to deal with the evil, not the evil out there, but the evil right here.

Here we are, in church. It’s what we do on Sunday. But, why do you come here? If you’re like the Israelites and you go through the motions because that’s what you have to do so you can think of yourself as good and righteous, then the same kinds of disasters are going to arise in your life. Every time they do, you’ll be left wondering why God allows them to happen to such a good and righteous person like you. The hope is that your here because you’ve heard the message. You’ve seen the warnings. God gave warnings to people like the Israelites in the past, trying to bring them back before it was too late. If you’re trying to avoid that fate, if you’ve seen the evil that you do, then hopefully you’re here because you want to be in the presence of the one person who can do something about it.

God’s word has tremendous power. God speaks and sets down the irrevocable rules of creation. Imperfection must go. Sin must go. Evil must go. God made creation perfect and he will not tolerate anything imperfect, nothing evil, nothing sinful, nothing that will bring hurt or grief or sadness and certainly not anything bringing death. You and I bring all of those things. God speaks his law, his measure for what constitutes perfection and we do not measure up. We are all slated for exile. It will not be an exile we will come back from. The Israelites have already been that object lesson. God has already given a warning through them.

When Jesus comes into the world, his primary goal isn’t to deal with the evil popping up all over. He comes to deal with you. Jesus sheds his blood. The punishment is given to him. Because of Jesus and his love for you, the Father now speaks another word, a different word. Now he says, “I forgive you.” He forgives you and your debt is wiped away. The sin you commit is put behind you. Now there is no exile to fear. More than just forgiveness, God continues to work within you to help you not be like all of the evil and pagan people that live all around us. Where once you were a thorn or a brier, now you are a cypress or a myrtle. No longer a weed to be plucked and thrown away, you are now a beautiful tree to be cultivated and cared for. Sometimes that cultivation requires pruning. Sometimes God has to remind us not to go back to being a rebellious weed. Sometimes those reminders can be painful. But, God’s word will accomplish the task he sets for it. He speaks and creation listens and responds. We are forgiven because he declares it to be so because of what Jesus did for us. That means the joy and peace he declares will also result because they must.

He calls on us to remember this as we face all of the events of our lives, both the good and the bad. He has declared you to be a new person. He has declared you righteous, and so you are. Not because of what you have done, but because of what Jesus has done. Jesus did it and that was enough.

That isn’t to say God has forgotten about all of the evil around us either. The rules still apply. The evil, the sin, the death, it all still has to go. Jesus will return and he’ll be like Nebuchadnezzar, taking all of the unbelievers into exile. While it will be an unfortunate outcome for them, God has given and continues to give many warnings. His Law continues to point out the flaws in the world and in all of us.

One day we won’t have to wonder why happy little communities don’t spring up, because they will. In God’s good and perfect creation, the world that will spring up again when the evil is taken away, people will live like they were meant to. Peace and joy will be the order of the day and all of God’s people will share in it.

Take heart, for God is addressing you and shining a light, a rather uncomfortable light, on your sin so that it can be confessed and forgiven. He is making you into a righteous person, someone who has a place in his creation, someone who will have the privilege of singing for joy and clapping your hands with all of creation around you.