Thursday of the Second Week of Advent

My niece-in-law
@ Thanksgiving

I am the Lord, your God,
who grasp your right hand;
It is I who say to you, “Fear not,
I will help you.”
Fear not, O worm Jacob,
O maggot Israel;
I will help you, says the Lord;
your redeemer is the Holy One of Israel.

My brother is a wonderful father and uncle; and his nieces and nephews are crazy about him. At every family gathering he has long quarrels with the little ones as to whether they are gooberheads or not. They never seem to come to agreement as my brother insists they are gooberheads, but the children say, “No, you’re a gooberhead!”

In today’s reading from Isaiah I hear God teasing his frightened children. He will make us laugh at the names he calls us – worm and maggot – and finally laugh at our fears. We should not take ourselves too seriously. How can we be afraid when we know God is in charge?

The words also remind us how weak we are. In his poem Ash Wednesday the poet T.S. Eliot prays, “…suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood.” But we often mock ourselves with false notions of how powerful and dangerous we are. With our weaponry and economic strength and moral righteousness we can rule the world! And then a bomb fizzles in someone’s underpants and we’re cowering behind our quadraphonic 60 inch, 3D HDTV sets.

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Fear not, O worm Jacob,
O maggot Israel;
I will help you, says the Lord;
your redeemer is the Holy One of Israel.