The Strength of Softness
The Strength of Softness
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – May 16, 2021
The Strength of Softness – Isaiah 40: 21-31
I don’t know about you but I’ve been feeling pretty soft lately. At least that’s the way I’ve been describing my biking muscles. In the pandemic, working from home and doing most visits by phone, my usual opportunities to go places in town by bike have dried up. Now vaccinated, I’m biking to more places, and I’ve found my sore muscles telling the story of a rather sedentary year.
We humans build physical muscle strength by resistance training. By using them over and over soft muscles become denser, harder. When it comes to our physical wellness, those dense, hard muscles are related to strength; however, when it comes to our emotional and spiritual wellness, many doctors, therapists, researchers, and spiritual leaders agree, softness is our strength.
In Isaiah 40, the second prophet who wrote under the name Isaiah tells the ancient Israelites in Babylonian exile about the strength of God. Isaiah 40 compares God’s strength to the strength of the gold idol gods of Babylon. Their hard cast figures, the prophet proclaims, are no match for the strength of the God who created everything in existence, “who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent to live in.” Those brittle ideas of holy power that their overlords hold cannot compare to the one who in Genesis bore creation into being from the murky softness of God’s own body with an utterance of holy word and breath.
I think there are plenty of ways I personally have made an idol of hardness, thinking it was the only way to be strong. There are plenty of stories out there that tell us that hardness is strength. That to show emotion, kindness, or love is soft and weak. What’s strong is to suppress our feelings, especially uncomfortable ones like anger, shame, or fear. There are plenty of stories that tell us it’s strong to never admit our weaknesses or our mistakes. We’re often told strength equals perfection. It means always having as shiny and flawless a sheen as an idol cast in gold.
Sometimes, it’s the softest things that are the strongest. It was the soft, wet water of the Colorado River that carved the Grand Canyon.
Massively tall skyscrapers are strong because they’re flexible and can bend in the wind.
This spring I have been enjoying backyard birdfeeder visits from a pair of red-bellied woodpeckers. In my backyard they enjoy the fruit and nuts from the feeder without needing to use their massive bills. But I have also seen them tapping at tree bark looking for yummy bugs. I learned one time that scientists are still learning about woodpeckers and how they can do such intense hammering with their beaks without damaging their brains. One theory is that the
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – May 16, 2021 – The Strength of Softness – Isaiah 40: 21-31
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birds have extra space inside their skulls where they can coil up their long tongues that serve as cushions for their brains.
When I see the woodpeckers now, I often think about softening up my life. How can I find a cushion in the schedule of my days, so that the intensity of my life won’t lead me to damage? How can I bring softness to my internal story about myself? How can I soften the lens with which I view people around me?
Isaiah 40: 21 asks hearers and readers, “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?”
This whole chapter of Isaiah is meant to be a balm. It is meant to remind the people that the comfort we find in God goes deep. It goes to the foundations of the earth. The presence of the Creator is in the DNA of creation.
We can find the courage to soften. We can find the cushion to absorb intensity. We can survive and thrive even through hard blows, because we are held up by the one whose presence goes to the foundations of the earth, moves through the molecules of every creeping creature, and extends far beyond the stars we can see in the sky.
When our hearts are hard and brittle toward each other, everything is an offense. Everything is a threat. When we soften, we can forgive ourselves and others. We don’t need to be doormats. Nor do we need to lash out in violence. Softness gives us the space to be flexible, to grow, and to love others while they grow too, despite any flaws or shortcomings.
When we can be soft, we can be generous. We can be the kind of strong that doesn’t feel the need to return missile fire with more missile fire. When we lean into the gift of softness, we can find ways to de-escalate conflict and stand up for justice by standing strong in our own inherent worth and in the inherent worth of every single one of us.
The strength of God in Isaiah 40 comes from God’s infinite ability to endure long after earthly rulers have passed away and from God’s ability to number the heavenly host. God calls each and every one by name and because of God’s great strength “not one is missing.” If God can number and name and find not one missing in the infinite, sparkling sky, how much more named, numbered, and found are each one of us on earth? That care for each one does not diminish God’s power. On the contrary, that tenderness is the very evidence of God’s strength.
“Comfort, O comfort my people,” this chapter of Isaiah begins. It is the voice of God calling out to the prophet. They have been lost. They have been far from home, exiled from the land they love.
Many of us have been stuck at home or separated from people we love. As we emerge into a new way of being, we might find moments of tension, discomfort, anger, shame, or fear. We don’t have to get it right right away. We don’t have to harden ourselves or pretend things aren’t
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squishy and uncertain. We can lean into the strength of softness and accepting our limitations as they are. There is reason to believe that good things lie ahead for each one of us as the pandemic eases here and we transition to whatever comes next.
The pandemic still rages though in many parts of the world. Violence is still a reality the world over, tragedy happens all the time, and many of the problems that persisted before the pandemic have only been further revealed since it began. Trusting in God will not save us from heartache or trouble. It can however, help us to weather difficulty and to find a soul-deep peace that helps us stay soft, strong, and loving, no matter what comes our way. I think that’s what the prophet means by those oft quoted words, “but they who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength, they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not be weary, they will walk and not faint.”
Waiting upon the Lord or trusting in God who loves each one of us does not mean we will be perfect or limitless or without suffering. It means we can find a safety beyond suffering that allows us to do hard things and to find hope, healing, and wholeness even still.
Many of you will know the story of the hymn we sing next. Horatio Spafford wrote the words to this song after losing his four year old son in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 along with his Chicago-based financial prospects. He wrote the words to this song after he put his wife and four surviving daughters on a boat to England ahead of him while he stayed behind to sort the further fall of his business ventures in the economic downturn of 1873. The boat the women of his family were on collided with another while crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Only his wife survived. All four daughters were lost at sea. The story goes that Spafford was inspired to write the words to this hymn while crossing the Atlantic Ocean to meet his grieving wife. He wrote the words, “It is well with my soul” not because he did not grieve but because even in his grief he found comfort in the soft, loving strength of God that goes to the foundations of the earth and lifts us up on eagles wings.
Whatever you are going through. Whatever sorrow or joy comes your way. Whatever the past year has brought for you in trial or silver lining, may you find yourself upheld in the soft strength of holy eagles’ wings.
May it be so. Amen.
