In her sermon last Sunday, Linda+ quoted Anne Lamott: Expectations are resentments waiting to happen – which is quite a statement to make in Advent – the season of expectations. She went on to describe the context into which Trito-Isaiah – or to use the language from Game of Thrones – Isaiah, the third of this name -prophesied to the Jews returning from exile in Babylon in 539 BC.

The book of Isaiah comprises 66 chapters spanning over three centuries – a timespan greatly exceeding the lifetime of the man we know as Proto-Isaiah – whose prophecies populate only the first 39 chapters dated to between 742 and 701 BC. This is a period of considerable political turmoil for Judah – esp. heightened after the catastrophe of the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians in 721. Proto-Isaiah sounds the voice of God’s warning in the face of Hezekiah’s increasingly reckless political calculations as Judah jockeys for position on the faultline between the competing Egyptian and Assyrian empires.

Are expectations simply resentments waiting to happen? Maybe. The story of Israel is a story in which the experience of hope and expectation flowing from deliverance are never enough to avert the next hubristic miscalculation. In 587 BC, the armies of Babylon – the successor to the Assyrian Empire – besieged and sacked Jerusalem, destroying the temple, plundering its gold and silver ornaments, creaming off the royal court and intelligentsia into captivity in Babylon – leaving the peasantry to scratch out livelihoods amidst the ruins. This is the period covered by the prophecies of Deutero-Isaiah – the second of this name in chapters 40-55. It’s his voice we hear on the second Sunday in Advent.

Deutero-Isaiah addressing the exiles proclaims: “Comfort, O comfort my people”, says your God. “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins”.

It is this Isaiah – the second of this name – who gives us the heart-wrenching poetry of the four servant songs telling of God’s hope-filled expectation in sending his chosen servant to the nations, only to be horribly abused – a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. The early Christians read the servant songs as prophecies referring to Christ – and these poems are intimately familiar to us as the mainstay texts of the libretto for Handel’s Messiah.

Linda+, last week noted that it’s estimated that fewer than 50,000 of the exiles returned after Cyrus’ emancipation edict in 538 BC. Many remained in Babylon, only trickling back over the next century or so. Even so, not everyone went home – to which the modern-day Jewish communities of Iraq and Iran bear testimony.

You’ve heard me say time and again that human beings are storied creatures. As individuals, communities, and nations, we construct stories to explain ourselves to ourselves and the world around us. But the intriguing question is what comes first? Do our stories merely articulate an already formed identity, or is our identity constructed by the stories, and in particular, the way we tell these stories about ourselves? Even if you think that identity precedes the story that articulates it, our identity continually evolves as we explore different ways to tell our story.

A key feature of identity stories concerns their vision of home. The Babylonian Exile lasted for 60+ years and as Linda+ noted last week – that’s two generations. …a lot can happen in two generations, including a transformation in the perception of what someone calls home. 

In these days our anxiety grows concerning the potential for the wars in Ukraine and the Holy Land to escalate into regional conflagrations from which we will not escape unscathed. February 22^nd, 2022, and October 7^th, this year, have changed the trajectory of the international order. We are already feeling these changes esp. as the US becomes further implicated in aiding and abetting Israeli genocide in Gaza. Aiding and abetting is a legal definition encompassed by the international human rights law on genocide. Our government seems to be willing to squander the moral high ground it achieved by our unstinting support for Ukraine, for war crime complicity in Gaza.

The wars in Ukraine and the Holy Land are conflicts that center on cherished stories of identity rooted in a contested homeland. Each side to the conflict has a story of ethnic origins and national identity that justifies their claim to a contested homeland. What really matters however is – is there a capacity by each for the telling of an old story in new ways to accommodate the challenges of a changing context?

Palestinians and Israelis recite their national stories to justify their historical claim to a contested homeland. It seems that no degree of Palestinian resistance punctuated by sporadic terrorist outbursts – no amount of Israeli military backed force of occupation attempting to deny the very existence of Palestinians can move the needle of history separating two peoples with a shared claim to a contested homeland. There can be no future that is not a painful repetition of the past until the futility of the status quo is recognized by both sides – opening the way to a retelling of each national story not as a maximalist demand but as a minimalist statement – laying out the minimum fundamentals that each community requires to move forward together.

History does show that expectations are resentments waiting to happen. National stories of identity and homeland promise dreams of liberation while imposing dilemmas of ensnarement. The potential for becoming ensnared by our identity stories is great when we refuse to recognize the facts on the ground. The facts on the ground are that our foundational stories are never fixed, static, immutable, but always shifting, developing, going astray, and capable of redemption (Bernard Lonergan[1]). Our stories of identity and homeland are always in a dance with changing contexts. Our foundational stories need to be capable of evolving in response to the challenge posed by changing contexts – that is – the changing facts on the ground.

It’s not important to know that there are three Isaiah’s of that name. It is important to notice how the book records an evolution in Jewish understanding of identity and the location of home. The essence of Israel’s foundation story as a people formed and shaped by a revelation and ongoing encounter with the living God does not change.  What we can see in the book of Isaiah is an evolution in the struggle to rewrite Israel’s identity story in response to the challenges of a changing context – even when the changed context results in a loss of a key component of identity – a homeland. The message of the book of Isaiah is that things change and the story of national identity needs to change to accommodate new facts on the ground. 721, nor 587, nor 539 BC; neither AD 70 is the last word fixing Israel’s story at a certain stage of history. Neither can 1948, nor 1967, be allowed to offer the last word – ensnaring the the identity stories for Palestinians and Israelis in an endless cycle of mortal conflict.

Open the book of Isaiah anywhere in the first 39 chapters and you will find a story of national hubris and political miscalculation. Open it between chapters 40 and 55 and you will find a profound articulation of repentance as the fruit of national suffering and humiliation resulting from loss of homeland. In chapters 55 -66 the element of repentance that had entered to national story during the exile – flowers in an increasingly inclusive and universalist message of salvation, a salvation now no longer exclusive to Israel but with implications for all of humanity.

It’s dangerous as well as painful when nations become ensnared in stories of identity that no longer serve them – that are no longer capable of responding to changing context – that is, the facts on the ground. Ensnarement ensures a future of intercommunal violence as the only sure trajectory. It is with considerable humility that we dare speak about other nations ensnarement in identity stories that no longer serve them at a time when America is struggling with a similar dilemma.

I read a byline on the BBC’s webpage of an organization called Road to Recovery. It is an organization of Israelis who transport mostly children from the occupied West Bank through the many checkpoints separating the two peoples so that the children can receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals. Yael Noy, one of the founders of this organization and a woman originating from the area of Southern Israel attacked by Hamas on October 7th moved me when she said: I’m fighting to stay moral when both sides are in such terrible pain. I’m fighting to be the same person as I was before. On October 7^th I could hardly breath, my heart was broken, and I said I’ll never help people in Gaza again. But after a few days I realized I couldn’t let the atrocities change me.

The power in our stories of identity and homeland lie in our capacity to imagine them taking us into a future different from our past – and like Yael Noy to retell our stories accordingly. Expectations will always involve the possibility of disappointment. But the pain of disappointment won’t kill us whereas anger of resentment just might.

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[1] Quoted by Lagita Ryliskyte in Why the Cross, page17