The year: 540 BC; the place, Babylon; the people, descendants of those who had been carried off to exile from Jerusalem some 45 years earlier. The story of the disaster was known by heart by every boy and girl, every grown woman and man – how the mighty Babylonian Empire, after years of battles and warfare and siege, had overwhelmed all of Judah and its once-proud capital Jerusalem; how the victors had burnt the city, destroyed the holy temple, pulled down the walls, and then deported much of the population across the desert to Babylon. Now decades had passed, and while many must have adjusted as they could to life in this alien land, still there were those stories of life as it had been, before, and still there was the sense that this disaster was no accident – that because the community had strayed from the path that God had laid out for them, they had brought this on themselves. They had had their shot, and they had blown it, and aware of their limited numbers and the distance from their ancient homeland, they had no hope for a better future.

Enter the prophet we know of as Second Isaiah, a messenger not of doom and gloom, but of promise and hope….

Isaiah would feel right at home here, in these times, in this, as the old Christmas carol goes, “bleak midwinter.” The struggles we have, his community faced, in spades. And still, he brings to them a message of hope.

To a people in despair, Isaiah brings a message of hope, speaking a message of God’s comfort to a people in exile: “Comfort, O comfort my people.” In a culture which proclaims that “resistance is futile” and that salvation is but a pipe dream, Isaiah brings a reassurance of God’s steadfast love. The hope and the promise of the prophecy he brings is that of a return to a new Jerusalem, a homecoming to a restored city. God’s own “Big Dig” will make a highway straight across the desert back to Jerusalem. But wait, Isaiah proclaims, there’s more – it will be as if God, like a shepherd, will gather his flock into his arms and carry them in his bosom, not only delivering them safely to their longed-for destination, but being there with them each step of the way.

Isaiah is all about hope, hope not rooted in the people’s strength, or their wits, or their technological inventiveness, or their educational attainments, or their goodness, but in the faithfulness of God. God has not forgotten them, he tells them, and God will bring them home. And that, in fact, was what happened. Cyrus of Persia conquered the Babylonians, and then set the exiles free, permitting them to return home to Jerusalem, and then he funded the rebuilding of the ancient city and its temple. No sane person could have foreseen it, or imagined it, or through their labor and that of the exiled community brought it about – and yet this is the message of hope that Isaiah brought to them, and this is the promise made to them by their God, a promise fulfilled.

In Advent, in texts like this one from Isaiah, in the words of promise such as we heard last week from Jesus reminding us to remain awake, we remember that in our own bleak midwinter, in our time of economic challenge at home and war abroad, in the days in which we face personal loss and injury and anxiety, our salvation is not up to us, will not come from our work alone, will not come from Wall Street insiders or even a new family in the White House. We are not our only hope, and therefore, thank God, we have hope.

Because there is God. And God stands ready today, as God was in the time of exile long ago, as God was in the time of Elizabeth and Mary in occupied Palestine, as God has always been, to welcome us home, to gather us in protective arms, and to be both a comforting and an empowering presence in our lives and our community and our world. We have this strange and persistent and ever-surprising God, who has a penchant for making somebodies out of nobodies, for opening new doors when old ways no longer work, for making old new, for raising the dead. There is God, a light shining in the darkest night, a light that the world cannot extinguish. There is God, not distant and aloof, but deigning to come to us, offering the vision and the promise of abundance in a world which believes in scarcity, welcome to those who know only exclusion, security to the nations which cringe in fear, justice to the peoples too long oppressed by society’s “haves”, healing to those who believe that infirmity and disease and death will have the final word.

Friends, what shall we do with this gift of hope that has come to us unbidden and unearned, and yet which is worth so very much? Is it not our call, in our turn, in this, our time, to be messengers of hope in our own right? That was how it was for the exiles addressed by that messenger of hope named Isaiah, who no sooner gets done passing on God’s message of hope for them, than he urges the people to, in their turn, proclaim hope to the people of the countryside. “Lift up your voice with strength”, Isaiah tells them, “lift it up, do not fear, say to the cities of Judah, ‘Here is your God!’”

If this is indeed our call, then how might we be messengers of hope? How might we be messengers of hope to the mom going through a divorce who has not receive support from her church, but rather only judgment and condemnation, and who longs to hear of a God and a community which will hold her tenderly in these difficult days? How might we be messengers of hope to a homeless family here on Cape Cod, living in a motel, the minimum wage both parents earning insufficient to cover food and rent and clothes for the kids and themselves? How might we be messengers of hope to shut-in members of our congregation, who just cannot get out on Sunday mornings to worship with us? How might we be messengers of hope to the young parent desperately searching for a bone marrow donor, how might we be messengers of hope to the impoverished women and children in civil war-torn Sri Lanka, how might we be messengers of hope even to our brothers and sisters in the peaceful village of Etton, England? What might we offer by the way of hope, not just in our words, but also through our deeds?

The gospels tells us that on a midnight clear long ago, o’er a little town named Bethlehem, other messengers of hope bent towards earth, their great glad tidings to tell. As the carol we are about to sing affirms, those messengers sing still today that same message of hope, calling us to rest beside the weary road and hear them sing of peace and good will. Calling us also, in the seasons of our lives, to echo back that song, to be, all of us, messengers of hope.